However fully aware one fallen under the spell of great art may be of the “superstitions” which, Croce insists, ¹ attend “the cult of the genius,” it is difficult, if not impossible wholly to avoid entertaining some of that cult’s beliefs.  How, indeed, escape the notion that the descending cadences of the second movement of Mozart’s Concerto No. 21 in C, the Falstaff who “lards the lean earth,” and the ugliness of those Hell Hounds who

Moreover, it is in precisely this realm of human freedom that the crucial issue concerning the classification of the aesthetic arts emerges.  I doubt that many would take umbrage at Croce’s second dictum ² — "all books dealing with

The critics and poets of the eighteenth century were, fortunately, well aware that the fundamental problems of genius and of judgment inhere in freedom, for from them we may get our bearings in a complex maze.  Alexander Pope ³ sees clearly that artist and critic are closely related:

And his Essay on Criticism arrives, as well, at the central problem: ⁴ “Some beauties yet no Precepts can declare,” since

A century rebelling against a traditional interpretation of Aristotelian poetics which ignored the meaning for art of Aristotle’s own theory of free choice ⁵ and failed to assess at its true worth Aristotle’s bow ⁶ to poetry as an art of enthusiasm, set as the mark of its attack “rules… made but to promote their end.”  Young ⁷ maintained that there are in poetry “mysteries not to be explained but admired” and urged that “a genius differs from a good understanding as a magician from a good architect; that raises his structure by means invisible, this by the skilful use of common tools.”  Its poets and critics centered attention upon rules, methods, means and ends in a search for the original.  “The first and leading quality of genius,” wrote Gerard, ⁸ is “invention.”  The poets and critics asked, in effect, how could what is “original” emerge if it were explicable wholly in terms of rational τέχνη and could, in more modern phrase, on the side of wholly rational criticism, be “subdued to the intellect.”  They had clear vision concerning the nature of the problem and unerringly took their own cue to the alliance of freedom and genius from the fountainhead of speculation on the subject. ⁹  Plato

had written that “not by wisdom do poets write poetry but by a sort of genius and inspiration” and so had sought to emancipate the artist he himself had condemned to the servitude of serving as mirror of the world by means of the mimesis which so admirably fits the rational doctrine of Ideas. ¹⁰  In Ion Plato delivers ¹¹ the artist from that bondage to the freedom of inspiration.  It is notable that one so raised need have no “knowledge of a whole art” nor can he ¹² “make right judgments of the sayings and doings of that art.”  Plato is the source of the eighteenth century’s notions concerning genius, but Longinus, in that great work of ancient literary criticism, de Sublimitate, fixes the image of the great man and of great art.  And, indeed, Longinus stresses ¹³ the crucial issue, namely that there are profoundly moving works of art whose makers evidently thought “little of minute correctness,” a suggestion which clearly allies technique and judgment to crafts but denies their relevance to the products of free genius.  The writers of the eighteenth century, I repeat, saw the problem clearly in terms of human freedom.  They sought to solve it by denying that there is either an identity of techniques in art and fine art or, indeed, that there may be a technique of fine art.  On this latter issue, they were in error.  And it is precisely in the apparently abortive effort of post-Kantian philosophers to indicate the aesthetic bond among the arts through the analysis of the relations of genius and mechanism that the character of the problem of creative freedom comes clear and may be solved.

Historically, this occurred because the tradition of the artist as free creator flowed into the Critique of Judgment in which Kant, as Bosanquet writes, ¹⁴ gave aesthetic consciousness its “final negative definition” in terms of freedom.  The core of Kant’s theory is the proposition ¹⁵ that “taste in the Beautiful is alone disinterested and free satisfaction.”  But the very abstractness with which Kant wrote upon aesthetic theory confronted his followers with the task of elaborating upon the original pattern of freedom.  The tradition flows strongly from the third critique in a current of classification of fine arts, through Hegel’s, Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies of fine art until it encounters the firm obstacle of Croce’s expressionism, constructed in part to stem all classifications of the aesthetic arts in the name of that very freedom which Kant exalts.  In fact, we can best understand the problem of genius and the aesthetic relation of the arts both in its Kantian and later forms once we ascertain the use to which Kant directed the tradition of genius in clarifying his conception of artistic freedom.¹⁶  The task he set himself is stated in terms which are but an aesthetic echo of those used in the first critique to express his conception of freedom: “Freedom (independence) from the laws of nature is no doubt a liberation from compulsion,” he had written, ¹⁷ “but also from the guidance of all rules.”  This principle is now

specified for aesthetic: ¹⁸ “Art…  is called free… But it is not inexpedient to recall that in all free arts there is yet requisite something compulsory.”  More explicitly, ¹⁹ two factors are to be recognized in genius, “Spirit,” introduced to ensure “originality,” and “mechanism,” “without which the spirit, which must be free in art and which alone inspires the work, would have no body and would evaporate altogether.”

Kant’s “reconciliation” of spirit and mechanism in the theory of genius is tantalizingly brief.  Spirit, Kant holds, is “ineffable” and related to “inspiration,” but he is careful to relate ²⁰ it on its ideal side to reason: “We ought only to describe as Art, production through freedom, i.e. through a will that places Reason at the basis of its actions.”  This evidently is based on the supposition ²¹ that the determining ground of the judgment of taste lies in “the concept of that which may be regarded as the supersensible substrate of humanity.”

If, however, the theoretical raises tantalizing possibilities for metaphysics, the practical reconciliation, the interrelating of spirit to actual mechanisms, does so no less for the aesthetician: “In poetry,” writes Kant,” “there must be an accuracy and wealth of language, and also prosody and measure.”  From this, the seed, grow such elaborations of “mechanism” as the studies of media, symbols, and feelings which find their places in the philosophies of art in the nineteenth century.  It appears to me that these elaborations remain, principally, studies of classification and interrelations of “mechanisms,” rather than with the aesthetic interrelations of the arts.  As such, there is stress upon the means-end relation in its rational application to the “something compulsory” in signs, media, feelings, and unity.  It is when we ask how what Kant called “spirit” is related to these “mechanisms” that Young’s conception of the genius as a “magician” rather than one with “a good understanding” assumes its proper importance as the reasons for his suggestion that the “magician” uses “means invisible” become meaningful.  For to deal with “mechanisms,” with “common tools,” means to proceed by technique or rationally according to rule and where error enters, the end-product is flawed.  Many an able critic, after Longinus, cogitating upon genius, had been struck by the fact that the artisan who makes a work of fine arts may not only ignore rules but would appear never to have subjected himself to the disciplines ordinarily needed to acquire them.  It is evident that, in this sense, Young’s “means invisible” are means non-technical or non-rational.  This, in fact is all too apparent in the long history of the thesis that the artist is one literally mad, one whose eye in “fine frenzy” doth roll.  The origin of this notion is the theory of enthusiasm or ecstasy, ²³ its methodology is the illogical conversion of a- or non-rational into irrational, and its barren conclusion is sufficiently clear in Jung’s remark ²⁴ that “Any reaction to stimulus may be causally ex-

Primitivism assumes a variety of forms.  There is Schopenhauer’s suggestion,” that “the genius is to a certain extent a child” in his “naiveté and sublime simplicity.”  It is notable that the view is grounded on the twin assumptions that “the mental powers develop much earlier than the needs they are designed to serve” and that “phenomena are brooded over and stored up carefully for the coming time.”  Thus to lay stress upon the imagination’s powers of preformation of technical skills is interesting but the general theory rests, or so it appears to me, upon an untenable identification of play and art. ²⁶

For Hegel, the relation of Kant’s dualism of freedom, “spirit” and mechanism, would appear to be grounded on what I prefer to call cultural primitivism.  On this hypothesis, the modifications of material employed in art, if taken from the age in which we live, ²⁷ will not readily escape the appearance of a purely artificial and intentional composition.” Hegel argues, ²⁸ therefore, that the “artist has a freer hand for his artistic powers of composition… if the actions, histories, and characters are borrowed from ancient times.”  The hypothesis, which might perhaps fairly be called a cultural analogue to “aesthetic distance,” is presupposed by an heroic age.  It but partially frees the artist from the need to submit to the compulsions of signs and, certainly, does not account for the acquisition of such technical skills as fine art requires, perhaps on the unphilosophical assumptions that the fine artist is not only a magician but a prophet as well.

The emphasis which Schopenhauer and Hegel place upon the function of the imagination in interrelating art and fine art, spirit and mechanism, anticipate the most radical, systematic and general form of genius as primitivism.  This I should call epistemological primitivism and, in its employment in the task of freeing the artist from the compulsions of rules and mechanisms, it is perfected by Croce in his theory of genius.  In its epistemological form, however, primitivism was becoming explicit in the writings of both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, more particularly in their application of Kantian theory to music.  Schopenhauer urges ²⁹ that this art is a direct expression of the will and infers ³⁰ that “the essence

of genius must lie in the perfection and energy of the knowledge of perception.”  Such knowledge he characterizes ³¹ as “the most original and fundamental,” and that through which the ³² “peculiar and true nature of things… discloses and reveals itself.”  All primary thought, he maintains, ³³ “takes place in pictures,” which are contrasted to the abstractions of thoughts and conceptions.  Finally, for Schopenhauer, it is imagination which, as the “indispensable tool” of genius, draws fresh nourishment from perception.  In Nietzsche’s writing, the strands of cultural and epistemological primitivism begin to be drawn together.  “Only in so far as the genius in the act of artistic production coalesces with this primordial artist of the world,” writes ³⁴ the author of The Birth of Tragedy, “does he catch a glimpse of the eternal essence of art,” that essence upon which Schopenhauer had pondered.  Culture and theory of knowledge do tend to coalesce in Nietzche’s thoughts concerning genius but, simultaneously, the original interrelation of “spirit” and “mechanism” which for Kant set the very problem of the freedom of genius, moves forward to its disruption: “By no means is it possible,” Nietzsche maintains, ³⁵ “for language adequately to render the cosmic symbolism of music, for the very reason that music… symbolizes a sphere which is above all appearance and beyond all phenomena.”  Nietzsche goes so far, indeed, as to assert that all our knowledge of art is “basically quite illusory.”

These are, however, but signposts on the highway of genius.  Croce’s theory of expression is the ultima thule toward which that highway runs.  In its Crocean form, epistemological primitivism is generalized to assure the unrestricted freedom of the genius, now adjudged to be “humanity itself.” ³⁶  Art is imagination or intuition, the first and primitive stage of spirit, sharply differentiated from knowledge obtained through the intellect. ³⁷  At one stroke, the theory of genius and of his free creativity is extended not only to all humanity and to the denial that there are specific aesthetic arts.  What Pope but hinted at is now asserted in philosophical language: the identity of genius and taste, of creativity and judgment.

Croce understands clearly what he has done.  Imagination, he holds, ³⁸ “has no need for a master” and expression is “free inspiration.” ³⁹  Spirit, in Kant’s sense, has been freed from the “something compulsory” of “mechanisms” and so thoroughly has this been done that imagination, intuition or expression is not only emancipated from technique but - since genius and tests are identified - from objective judgment as well. ⁴⁰  To one troubled by the nominalism of Croce’s

The one sentence is “the search for the end of art is ridiculous… since to fix an end is to choose… to choose is to will.” ⁴¹  And it is significant because to the word “end” have adhered in philosophical speculation the two aspects which Plato attributed to the idea of good, namely, intelligibility and power. ⁴²  In asserting that the artist genius need not search for the end of art Croce is attempting to establish the free originality and autonomy of the genius precisely as did St. Augustine in maintaining that “the world was created by God out of nothing and this creation was due to God’s absolute free will, not to any logical or other necessity, or to any Idea outside himself.” ⁴³ Young’s genius who used “means-invisible” is now recognizable.  In Croce, the denial to the fine artist of a rational technical means-end relation is the assertion that the genius is precisely analogous to the God of the Hebraic-Christian tradition. ⁴⁴  Croce’s genius, like God the creator, creates out of non-existent matter ⁴⁵ and without external compulsion of logic or ideas. ⁴⁶

7 Index

or the music of spirit, and in which there is nothing philosophically contradictory, because the philosophical problem has not yet emerged.”  Now Hegel held that the core of the theory of genius is this, ⁴⁸ that “true originality is identical with true objectivity.”  This can only mean that true artistic freedom consists in the objectification of imagination in suitable media [matter] and with reference to the end of art. ⁴⁹  Stated in this way, Hegel’s thesis is no less absolutist than Croce’s - and for good reason.  What we are in fact dealing with is that alternative interpretation of freedom which stems not from Genesis but from Plato’s Timaeus, a conception of freedom within rational limitations of idea and matter, in which freedom is not freedom to perform miracles but the freedom of self determination within fixed laws of nature.⁵⁰  Indeed, it is startling and illuminating, to find Hegel curbing the absolutism of his own statement concerning complete originality and rationality.  Hegel’s genius is artistically inspired in the sense that he has the “capacity of being entirely absorbed in a given subject.” ⁵¹  The emphasis is upon the “given.” ⁵²  The rational genius, as does Plato’s Demiurgos, encounters something external, which he does not create, is faced by something which “the individual is unable to evolve from himself but has to find it” or, indeed, may not find at all. ⁵³

the nous of Plato’s macrocosm is the nous of our microcosmic soul, ⁵⁴ and because the long history of the development of the conception of a unique, rather than a typical soul in the middle ages finds a modern application in Croce’s assertion ⁵⁵ that “every work of art expresses a state of the soul, and the state of the soul is individual and always new, the intuition implies infinite intuitions… particular works of art are infinite: all are original… each one unsubdued by the intellect”?  Are we, finally, to accept as the result of a century of speculation upon the genius the absurdity that we are all geniuses in the sense that we are in aesthetic and artistic experiences, wholly free of conditioning factors?

The answer is in each case, in my opinion, no.  We do well to emancipate ourselves and aesthetic from the trappings of a theological tradition which in the context of philosophy of art would involve acceptance not of an “attendant,” but of a central “superstition,” namely, that man is omnipotent or omniscient.  It is of no less importance, however, to know why the notion of genius is so tenacious, why it recurs, and what place it merits in the problem of free creativity in art.  Genius does have meaning, both psychologically and philosophically.  Psychologically, it is understandable in aesthetic precisely as the old saying that history is what Alcibiades said and did is understandable to the historian.  Men do not ordinarily think in terms of souls, techniques, or rules.  They cherish images of personages, of heroes, of saints, and of geniuses in art, images in which inhere deeds of unparalleled valor, virtue without stain, and constructions of supreme excellence.  There meet in the genius two notions, that of the miraculous creator of unique individuals and of the wholly rational demiurge, and the product is a personification or hypostatization of the imagined limit of men’s powers.  The genius is a species of the free man, of which the hero is the genus.  As the hero is free to face and overcome dangers fatal to lesser mortals, the saint free in his incapacity to sin, so the genius as artist is free to make without error.  The genius as creator and maker alike is the product of the imagination, a work of art.  If it, as work of art, comes under rules of technique - and it must be remembered that this is a most fertile source of symbol for fine art - it may indeed become a work of fine art.  Shaftesbury, it appears to me, has correctly sensed ⁵⁶ the psychological needs satisfied by the image of the genius: “No poet,” he writes, “...can do anything great in his own way without the imagination or supposition of a divine presence,” and adds, sagely enough, that whether the “divine presence” be spectral or real is of no consequence.  The need is to transport the mind, as Shaftesbury insists, ⁵⁷ “with more than what I feel at ordinary hours.”  Men need the image of the fine artist as genius to embody their own idealizations of perfection and power to avoid or to transcend error.  As, in Lord Rosebery’s words, “France in chill moments of disaster... will turn and warm herself at the glories of Napoleon,” so man will be inspired by the names of Leonardo, Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Giotto and their fellows.  Whether this source of

Within the bounds of these limiting conceptions, may a meaningful statement be made concerning the aesthetic relation of the arts?  We can make such a statement, once we have cast forth such paraphernalia as Young’s “invisible means.”  The arts may be interrelated aesthetically and classified intelligibly provided we also discard the dearly bought and dearly held myths that freedom is freedom only if one may do anything one wants to do and that the only ‘law of freedom is, as Pope suggested, the rule of license.  There is a law of freedom in art and its principal hypothesis is that the work of fine art is explicable in terms of a rational means-end relation. ⁵⁸ Fine art, no less than craft, is τέχνη and it is free only in comparison and contrast to art or craft.  Granted such a technique called fine art, its correlative in judgment - since I should hold that artistic productivity and aesthetic experience are generically the same in being productive although they are specifically different in that one is making and the other is judging - will be rationally grounded and a classification of the aesthetic arts is possible.

This means that epistemological primitivism is unsound precisely because, despite Croce’s assertion, the philosophical problem has emerged in the aesthetic stage.  No aesthetic stage is conceivable except by comparison and contrast to a non-aesthetic stage.  The non-aesthetic work of art is sign or symbol, medium, objectified feeling, i.e. “a concrete significant form” belonging to the realm of mechanism and fact.  The work of fine art, ordered in terms of end, is a single instrument. ⁵⁹

It should next be noted that the mechanisms of art condition but do not determine the work of fine art or artistic freedom.  Architecture, painting, music, poetry, sculpture and the dance are generic names for the specific mechanisms of art, i.e. for buildings, paintings, etc.  As mechanisms, such works of art are not interchangeable. ⁶⁰  Not only is it true that if a man need a habitation he will

find that neither painting nor poem will adequately protect him from the elements; it is also true that no man can “poem a picture” and that only in figures of speech is architecture “frozen music.”  It is no less true that no aesthetically qualified building will exist unless the non-aesthetic and mechanical architecture to construct it, the symbols it incorporates, the feelings it expresses, likewise exist.  It is nonetheless true that in their aesthetic meanings, the conditioning but not determining mechanisms are interchangeable, i.e. precisely in relation to what Kant called “spirit.”  The aesthetic arts are interchangeable instruments for the single and unique end of stimulating the productive imagination to create the creator. ⁶¹

The work of fine art, the single instrument related to this end, operates as an “individual event,” intelligible not as a species of a genus but as an individual of a class.  It is intelligible not as a mere fact but as a valuable individual belonging to a category of value.  Our value experiences of works of fine art consist in movements of the imagination and our reflection upon those movements.  The specification or individualization of those value experiences turns upon the kinds of equilibrium reestablished after we have been profoundly moved in aesthetic experience. ⁶²

This means that the precise relation of the aesthetic arts may be determined by the impact of the whole work of fine art upon our imagination.  These wholes - individuals which fall under the categories of the comic, the tragic, the ugly, and the sublime, although each individual must vary in its mechanical content - are evaluations of the work of fine art in terms of human goods.  If, under the impact of great art, values are destroyed ⁶³ but the experience nevertheless “establishes a new world on the ruins of the old which has been overthrown,” the individual work of fine art belongs to the aesthetic class called tragic; if the