From the Tree to the Labyrinth (97 page)

(ii) From this correct empirical observation he draws the erroneous conclusion that volatile expressions are not material facts, as if writing and recordings did not record sounds. His verbal experience must have made him think of poets who mouth their poems to themselves, thinking of the sound they could give them. But they do so because they have already had experience of what sounds they could produce, so that an experimental psychologist (a category Croce didn’t have much time for) might argue that, when we think of Pavarotti hitting a high C, our organs of phonation, however imperceptibly, imitate the externalization we are thinking of. When we intuit, what we intuit are externalizations; when we think, we do not think outside the body but with the body. Croce is sufficiently well aware of this to have devoted a rather memorable passage to the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which he says that words on the page evoke not just thoughts but auditory, tactile, and thermal sensations. If Michelangelo had been born blind, he could never have “intuited” his Moses.

(iii) Beguiled by his (empirical) experience of discourses that take place in the mind (of which, however, we become fully aware only when they have been “minted in the currency of words”—and the physical metaphor of coining is worth noting), Croce makes this possibility into an absolute and extends it to the arts of permanence. Of course, we can all imagine a sculptor who, away from his workshop, imagines down to the tiniest details the statue he could produce with his chisel. But he can do so only because he has sweated over marble before, because he has hammered away in his shop; he can do so in the same way anyone can intuit that if they swallow a cube of ice they will feel a pain in the middle of their forehead, because they recall having already felt it under similar circumstances. Without the memory of our previous natural experiences we can intuit nothing, and someone who has never smelled a verbena can never intuit the scent of a verbena, just as someone born blind can never intuit what a
dolce color d’orïental zaffiro
(“sweet color of an oriental sapphire” [Dante,
Purgatory,
I, 13]) might be.

When we consider these paradoxes we understand why the generations that came after Croce were fascinated by alternative theories: by Pareyson’s appeal to the fundamental importance of the materials in the genesis of a work of art, by Anceschi’s concern for the artist’s poetics, by Dorfles and Formaggio’s emphasis on artistic techniques, by Morpurgo Tagliabue’s return to the hoary concepts of style and rhetorical apparatus, by Della Volpe’s insistence on the “rational” moment in the artistic process, not to mention the liberation that came with reading Dewey’s
Art as Experience,
in which the fullness of naturalistic empiricism is revalued. The question was what was the place of “the philosophy of the four words” (the polemical characterization is Gentile’s) within that vital flux to which Croce was after all so attentive.
³
How to do justice to Croce himself, in whom there was constantly “a hiatus, as it were, a hidden conflict between his extremely detailed analysis of vast sectors of human experience and culture, and his ‘system.’… On the one hand, part and parcel of the precise discussion of cultural data and experience, we find ‘concepts,’ extremely ‘impure’ if you will, but precious if we are to understand, in other words, connect and clarify, the multiple forms taken by human action and history. On the other, a few extremely abstract ideas, whose development is affirmed rather than demonstrated” (Garin 1966: 2:1315).

6. Perhaps, however, it is the unresolved persistence of this gap that accounts for the influence Croce’s works have enjoyed: readers grasped the abstractness of the few ideas, but they were attracted to them because they saw them as the logical conclusion of the concrete analysis, admirable for its common sense, clarity, and penetration. In the hotchpotch the readers recognized both the embarrassments of their own personal experience and their longing for an uncontaminated idea of beauty, truth, goodness, and the useful itself—values that all the metaphysical systems so abhorred by Croce had defined in their hyperuranic spiritual nature, without descending to compromise with that corporality that is mere envelope, mortal coil, the prison of the soul. In Croce they saw both the confirmation of the inevitable and the promise of the desirable, interpreting as systematic mediation what was instead an unresolved contradiction.

These readers were delighted to be told that art was fundamentally what they were hoping it was, and non-art what they—perturbed and disturbed—could witness all around them. What exactly pure forms were they did not know, but they were quick to embrace a judgment of taste such as that on Proust: “one feels that what is dominant in the author’s soul is a rather perverse sensual eroticism, an eroticism that already permeates his eagerness to relive the sensations of a distant past. But this state of mind does not achieve clarity in a lyric motif or a poetic form, as occurs instead in the better works of the less complicated but more inspired Maupassant” (“Postille” to
La poesia
). Of Manzoni’s
I promessi sposi,
Croce asserts “the critics stubbornly continue to analyze and discuss it as an inspired and poetically successful novel,” whereas all it is “from one end to the other, is a novel of moral exhortation, measured and conducted with a firm eye” (
La poesia,
VII). And, if I may be forgiven the invidious comparison (the two texts after all display certain similarities), when in 1937, one year after the appearance of
La poesia,
a much lesser writer attempted to justify his Philistine parody of Manzoni, after praising the author’s workmanship in
I promessi sposi
(“ah! what a genius he was!”), he adduced the following alibi for the sacrilege he was about to commit: “The truth is this: that in Manzoni the only thing missing is the poet.… Is there a single episode, a character, a personage that remains impressed on my mind with the same ever purer and more glittering clarity that characterizes the immortal creations of art? Well, if I must be sincere, I have to reply in the negative” (Da Verona 1937: viii–xiii).

The thought occurs to us that, instead of Croce creating a readership of Croceans, a readership that already existed, with its own myths and its own unshakable uncertainties regarding the good and the beautiful, adopted him as their spokesperson.

For this readership (and for our good fortune) Croce was then obliged (in
La poesia
) to open up a no man’s land (no man’s and everyman’s), where hotchpotch and purity could live together in peace and reconciliation, a space he called
literature.
To this space Croce could allocate the entertainments composed by the likes of Dumas and Poe, whom he basically enjoyed, as well as the works of authors he did not relish, like Horace and Manzoni. “Literature” is not a spiritual form, it is a part of civility and good manners, it is the realm of prose and civil conversation.

And this is the region from Croce writes. Why are Croce’s readers not aware of the unresolved contradiction, why do they see a well-knit system where things were falling apart? Because Croce is a masterly writer. The rhythm, the subtle dosage of sarcasm and pacific reflection, the perfection of his periodic sentences, make everything he thinks or says persuasive. When he says something, he says it so well, that, being said so well, it is unthinkable that it shouldn’t also be true. Croce, the great master of oratory and style, succeeds in convincing us of the existence of Poetry (incorporeal and angelified as he understands it) through a corporeal, courtly, harmonious example of Literature.
⁴

A reworking of a book review, written for
La rivista dei libri
in October 1991, of the new edition of Croce’s
Estetica
published in 1990 by Adelphi. The essay was republished in Eco (1997) with the title “Croce e l’intuizione” (but it was not included in the English translation of that work,
Kant and the Platypus
[Eco 2000]). [
Translator’s note:
Page references to Croce’s
Estetica
in this chapter are to the English translation by Colin Lyas (Croce 1992).]

1
. The work was first published by Sandron in 1902 (when Croce was thirty-five years old) and represented the point of arrival of a study begun in 1898. After an initial reprint by Sandron in 1904, subsequent editions were published by Laterza, with the ninth edition—the last in the author’s lifetime—appearing in 1950. For three of these reprintings, Croce wrote new prefaces (dated November 1907, September 1921, and January 1941) pointing out corrections that he had made in the text (see Maggi 1989) to bring it into line with the subsequent development of his thought (his
Logica, Filosofia della pratica, Teoria e storia della storiografia,
and, naturally, his
Breviario d’estetica, Aesthetica in nuce, Problemi di estetica, Nuovi saggi di estetica,
and
La poesia
). Since the author did not make any changes after the 1941 edition, we must presume that he still considered it current at mid-century. The 1941
ne varietur
is the text reprinted by Adelphi and discussed in what follows.

2
. The reader is referred to De Mauro (1965: ch. IV).

3
. [
Translator’s note:
This characterization of Croce’s philosophy is that of fellow Italian Idealist and sometime collaborator Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). The four words in question were aesthetics, logic, economics, and ethics.]

4
. [
Translator’s note:
In his criticism Croce opposes
poesia
(
=
poetry), the term he applies to inspired art, and
non-poesia
(
=
non-poetry), which he also he calls
allotria
(
=
extraneous matter, padding),
struttura,
or simply, with negative implications,
letteratura
(
=
literature or intellectual confectionery). Croce’s dichotomy is famously hard on the structural elements in that most structured of works, Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
Croce and his disciples dominated Italian literary criticism in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.]

17

Five Senses of the Word “Semantics,” from Bréal to the Present Day

The term “semantics” has a number of different meanings, several of which seem to be completely at odds with one another. This state of affairs is often a source of considerable embarrassment in dealing with our students, to whom we find ourselves having to explain that our discipline is a bit like the country where some people call “red” what others call “white” and vice versa. With the result that, every time we use the word “red,” we would have to assign it a superscript or subscript number, specifying that we mean “red
₁
, in such and such a sense.”

Still, although the term “semantics” may have a number of meanings, those meanings are less irreconcilable than might at first appear.

In 1883 Michel Bréal
(Les lois intellectuelles du langage: Fragment de sémantique)
defined semantics as the science of meaning, but when he came to publish his
Essai de sémantique
in 1897 he gave it the more general subtitle
Science des significations,
and only in chapter IX, in which he proposed to examine “by what causes words, once created and endowed with a certain meaning, are induced to restrict, to extend, to transfer this meaning from one order of ideas to another, to raise or to lower its dignity, in short to change it,” does he say “it is this second part which, properly speaking constitutes Semantics or the Science of Significations.”
¹

Semantics, then, is the science of meanings, but, for Bréal, only insofar as they are subject to historical development. And this is not all. Each time Bréal has to deal with the meaning of a word he proves incapable of isolating it from the set of enunciates, or more extensive fragments of text, in which the word appears. To give but a single example, in the chapter on the laws of specialization, Bréal is less interested in defining the meaning of the French word
plus
than in the fact that it takes on different meanings in different expressions.

The notion of semantics, then, is born, historically speaking, in reference to that imponderable entity we label meaning, but only to a lesser extent is it concerned with the meaning of words, or, to put it differently, of terms in isolation. For this, what was needed was not a science but an empirical praxis, lexicography in its most hands-on sense, that is, the actual compilation of dictionaries. Still, we must not forget that the whole of lexicography is simply the description of a
langue,
and therefore of an abstract entity, and not of the practical use of
parole
by means of which the speaker “means” something.

I would argue that the more or less explicit semiotics of former centuries did not question the fact that terms expressed something, but they did not presume that a special science was needed to clarify what that something was. Knowing the signs implied knowing either the things they referred to or the ideas they brought to mind, or the definitions given them by common consent, according to which the Latin
homo,
for instance, signified “a mortal rational animal.” In any case, for Aristotle, providing correct definitions was a task either for logic (see the
Analytics
) or for the various natural sciences, as is seen in his definitions of animals.

If we examine Abelard’s use of terminology, we remark that a verbal expression (i)
significat
a mental concept, (ii)
designat
or
denotat
its definition or “meaning,” and (iii)
nominat
the thing.

What we have here are three notions of semantics: (i) as the study of cognitive processes, (ii) as the study of dictionary or encyclopedia definitions, and (iii) as the study of the truth conditions of sentences. Many of our current problems stem from these medieval perplexities (and they are indeed perplexities: what exactly does a
vox significativa
do—signify, denote, or name?). Furthermore, Abelard’s threefold division is missing a fourth dimension, not unknown to previous semiotics, that of the disambiguation of complex texts (see Augustine’s
De doctrina christiana,
which is concerned with the “meaning” of a text like that of Scripture). And, lastly, there is also a fifth dimension missing, whose absence in Abelard does not imply its absence in medieval thought. What is missing is what we would call today a
structural semantics
as a theory of content, already present in the binary system of the division of predicables as represented in the
Arbor Porphyriana
(see
Chapter 1
).