Benedetto Croce

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Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce ['kro: tʃe] Italian pronunciation ? / i (born February 25, 1866 in Pescasseroli , province of L'Aquila , † November 20, 1952 in Naples ) was an Italian idealistic philosopher , humanist , historian , politician , art historian and critic . Audio file / audio sample

Life

Croce came from a wealthy family of landowners in Abruzzo . In an earthquake in 1883 he lost his parents and his only sister. Croce inherited his father's fortune and, after studying law in Rome and Naples, moved back to Naples in 1886 , where he lived as a private scholar until his death. Shaped by the experience of the Risorgimento , by the Enlightenment traditions of southern Italy, as represented by Giambattista Vico , Gaetano Filangieri and Francesco De Sanctis , and by the philosophy of German idealism , Croce became one of the formative figures in the first half of the 20th century of Italian culture and philosophy. In Europe, he remained Italy's liberal voice in the fight against fascism and totalitarianism until his death .

Initially concerned with local history studies, Croce turned to philosophy at the beginning of the 1890s and published his main work from 1902, the multi-volume philosophy of spirit . The first band in particular, the Estetica , established Croce's philosophical reputation. Over the years, there were also numerous works on history and literature as well as essays in which he modified and explained his philosophical position. In 1903 he founded the magazine La Critica with Giovanni Gentile , which he had a major influence on as editor and contributor and made it the most important literary magazine in Italy. In 1910 he was appointed Senator of the Kingdom of Italy . In the 5th Cabinet of Giovanni Giolitti , Croce was Minister for Education from June 1920 to July 1921.

From 1896 he became friends with Gentile, the second great Italian exponent of philosophical idealism. The friendship fell apart when Gentile joined fascism. Croce remained loyal to liberalism and was the main initiator of a manifesto published in 1925 by Italian intellectuals against fascism . During the Mussolini period, he fell out of favor, but was able to stay in Italy. Croce's house in Naples became a center of intellectual opposition. Since 1923 member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei , he was expelled in 1935 because he refused to take the oath of allegiance to fascism. In 1945 he was resumed with the other excluded, after he had already submitted a proposal for the reorganization of the academy in August 1943. In 1947 he was made an honorary member of the academy. In 1928 Croce was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1934 as an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1935 he became a corresponding member of the British Academy . Since 1944 he was a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Croce had a particularly close relationship with German culture. Evidence of this is provided by his monographs on Hegel and Goethe, his decades-long friendship with the Romanist Karl Vossler and the art historian Julius Schlosser and his correspondence with Thomas Mann . Since 1951 he was a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry . The Prussian Academy of Sciences , he belonged from 1925 as a corresponding member. At his request, he was deleted from the list of members of the subsequent German Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1950 .

In 1943 Croce was involved in the re-establishment of the Italian Liberal Party . After Mussolini's overthrow in 1944, he made himself available for a short time as minister without portfolio. He was a member of the Consulta nazionale and the Assemblea Costituente and, due to the transitional provisions of the republican constitution, was a member of the Senate of the Republic without election until his death in 1952.

During his lifetime, Croce opened his Palazzo Filomarino in Naples with its huge library to interested parties from all over the world for study purposes. From this the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici developed after his death . Based on this model, Gerardo Marotta founded the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici a few decades later .

Philosophy of mind

Croce designed his philosophy of the mind in response to the positivism prevalent in Italy in the late 19th century. He was influenced equally by German and Italian philosophy. Originally coming from Francesco De Sanctis and Johann Friedrich Herbart , he found his own path to the philosophy of reason Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel through Karl Marx . Even more important for him, however, was Giambattista Vico's philosophy, as it was formulated in his main work Scienza Nuova . Croce follows Vico's principle that man can only understand what he himself has produced, that an understanding of the world is therefore only possible through human history and culture and not through nature. In Vico's philosophy of history, human history is repeated in the regularity of successive epochs, in which the relationship between stages of human forms of knowledge, from perception through imagination to reason, is reflected. For example, the poetic understanding of the world becomes the basis of a conceptually rational understanding of the world.

Croce reinterprets Vico's conception of the philosophy of history in a systematic way. He differentiates between different forms of spiritual world empowerment, two theoretical and two practical. He taught a four-tier structure of the mind: intuition (aesthetic knowledge), concept, economic and ethical action; each of these stages presupposes the previous one, with intuition, i. H. the aesthetic knowledge that is the basis of all others.

Croce has dedicated various works to each of these forms of knowledge: The Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale from 1902 deals with the aesthetic knowledge that the “Logica come scienza del concetto puro” from 1909 has the conceptual-logical knowledge and the Filosofia della pratica from 1909 the useful (economic) and moral action on the subject. Croce added his work on historiography, the "Teoria e storia della historiografia" from 1917, to this system.

Aesthetics and literary criticism

Of all parts of the “Philosophy of Spirit”, from the beginning it was aesthetics that achieved the greatest and most far-reaching effect. Croce influenced all of the aesthetics and literature that followed in Italy. He has modified his aesthetics several times in the course of his life, but never fundamentally revised them.

For Croce, aesthetic perception is an independent and autonomous form of knowledge that has an independent place next to conceptual knowledge. It is "intuition" and at the same time "expression". What is meant is not that the artist "expresses" his own personality in the work, on the contrary, that he processes impressions into objectified and comprehensible forms. In this sense, for Croce, aesthetics is the art of expression, because it is only the transformation of impressions into expression and form that defines the artist; the result of a successful transformation is “Poesia”, the rest is “Non Poesia”. Both a simple call of astonishment and a complex artistic representation can count as intuition / expression. One of the most controversial theses of Croce's aesthetic is that for a long time he did not differentiate between simple and highly complex intuitions / expressions - i.e. art. Croce's intention was to deny art any elitist position. For him, art is an activity of knowledge that can be understood by everyone.

For Croce, here again following Vico, the origin, essence and basis of language lie in intuition. Croce did not deal with the important role played by the communication and sign function in language until his late work “La Poesia” from 1936. Here he differentiates for the first time between aesthetic and non-aesthetic expressions.

Croce's literary criticism, which is available in numerous collections of essays and monographs, is characterized by the fact that it concentrates entirely on the work of art as an individualizing expression and considers questions of rhetoric, the history of style and material to be of secondary aesthetic importance. Every work of art is an unmistakable individual and can neither be conceptually "explained" or translated into any other form. Form and content are identical in the work of art. Croce can thus also be seen as one of the fathers of New Criticism .

History and politics

Croce was shaped by the Enlightenment and liberalism of the 19th century. His relationship with Hegel , as whose supporter he is repeatedly called, is complex. On the one hand, following Hegel, he understood history as an “advance in the consciousness of freedom”. But he rejected Hegel's view that history as a whole necessarily developed according to the law of dialectic. His ambivalent attitude towards Hegel is the subject of his work Living and Dead in Hegel's Philosophy (orig. 1907, German 1909). As early as 1893, in his early writing, The History of Art , Croce rejected the idea that history was a science. For him it is rather a form of condensing events, a form of narrative interpretation. Croce thus becomes one of the fathers of narrative historiography.

His concept of freedom, which was influenced by the Italian Risorgimento, a secular “religion of freedom”, was a memorial in the history of Europe in the 19th century . Croce was an early proponent of the European idea. He saw local and national history embedded in the history of the western freedom movements. However, he remained culturally aristocratic and distrusted the masses. He was opposed to an egalitarian democracy.

Fonts (selection)

Essays

  • Marginal Notes by a Philosopher on World Wars 1914–1920 . In: Raymund Schmidt (ed.): The philosophy of the present in self-portrayals . Felix Meiner Verlag, Leipzig 1922.
  • Antihistorism, lecture given at the International Congress of Philosophers in Oxford on September 3, 1930 . In: Historische Zeitschrift , Volume 143 (1930/31), pp. 457-466, ISSN  0018-2613 (translated by Karl Vossler ).
  • Silvio Bianchi (Ed.): Una pagina sconosciuta degli ultimi mesi della vita di Hegel . In: Quaderni dell critica , Volume 13 (1948).
    • New edition: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Napoli 2006 (reprint of the Bari 1948 edition).
    • An unknown page from the last months of Hegel's life . In .: Merkur , Volume 36 (1982), Issue 1, pp. 61-80, ISSN  0026-0096 .

Letters

  • Carteggio Croce-Vossler 1899-1949 (Biblioteca di cultura moderna; Volume 488). Laterza, Bari 1951.
    • Correspondence between Croce-Vossler . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1955 (translated by Otto Vossler )
  • Ernesto Paolozzi (Ed.): Benedetto Croce - Thomas Mann. Lettere 1930-36 . Flavio Pagano, Napoli 1991.

Monographs

  • La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell'arte . Giannini, Naples 1893.
  • Filosofia come Scienza dello Spirito . Bibliopoli, Naples 1996 (4 vols., Reprint of the Milan edition 1902/17)
  1. Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale .
  2. Logica come scienza del concetto puro .
  3. Filosofia della pratica. Economica ed etica .
  4. Teoria e storia della storiografia .
  • Philosophy of mind . Mohr, Tübingen 1929/30 (4 vol.).
  1. Aesthetics as the science of expression and general linguistics, theory and history .
  2. Logic as a science of the pure concept .
  3. Philosophy of practice. Economy and Ethics .
  4. Theory and History of Historiography .
  • Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto nella filosofia di Hegel . Laterza, Bari 1907.
    • Living and dead in Hegel's philosophy . Winter, Heidelberg 1909.
  • La filosofia di Giambattista Vico . Biopolis, Naples 1997, ISBN 88-7088-344-2 (reprint of the Naples 1911 edition).
    • The philosophy of Giambattista Vico . Mohr, Tübingen 1927.
  • Breviario di estetica . Adelphi, Milan 1990, ISBN 88-459-0742-2 (reprint of the Bari 1913 edition).
    • Aesthetic plan. Four lectures (Knowledge and Research; Volume 5). Meiner, Leipzig 1913.
    • What is the art (Writings on art theory; Volume 1). Alexander-Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-923854-36-6
  • Materialismo storico ed economia Marxistica . Laterza, Bari 1914.
  • Goethe . Laterza, Bari 1919.
    • Goethe. Studies on his work . Düsseldorf 1949 (translated by Werner Ross ).
  • Ariosto , Shakespeare e Corneille . Laterza, Bari 1968 (reprint of the Bari 1920 edition).
    • Ariost, Shakespeare, Corneille (Amalthea Library; Volume 26). Amalthea-Verlag, Zurich 1922.
  • La poesia di Dante . Laterza, Bari 1921
    • Dante's Poetry (Amalthea Library; Volume 27). Amalthea-Verlag, Zurich 1921.
  • Poesia e non poesia. Note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimono . Laterza, Bari 1964 (reprint of the Bari 1923 edition).
    • Poetry and non-poetry. Notes on European Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Amalthea Bookie; Volume 46/47). Amalthea-Verlag, Zurich 1935
  • Storia d'Europa nel secolo decimonono . Laterza, Bari 1981 (reprint of the Bari 1932 edition).
    • History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century . Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1993, ISBN 3-458-33177-8 (reprint of the Zurich edition 1935; translated by Karl Vossler and Richard Peters).
  • La poesia. Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura . Bari 1936.
    • The seal. Introduction to the Critique and History of Poetry and Literature (Concepts of Linguistics and Literary Studies; Volume 1). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1982, ISBN 3-484-22000-7 (translated by Peter Jaritz and Jürgen Ziegler).
  • La storia come pensiero e come azione . Laterza, Bari 1938.
    • The story as thought and deed . Verlag von Schröder, Hamburg 1949 (reprint of the edition Bern 1944).
  • Il dissido spirituale della Germania con l'Europa . Bari 1930.
  • Europe and Germany. Confessions and reflections . Verlag A. Francke, Bern 1946 (translated by Giuseppe Zamboni ).

literature

Essays

Monographs

Web links

Commons : Benedetto Croce  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cabinet list Giolitti V in the Portale storico of the Camera dei deputati
  2. ^ Honorary Members: Benedetto Croce. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 8, 2019 .
  3. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed May 17, 2020 .
  4. ^ Member History: Benedetto Croce. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 2, 2018 .
  5. ^ Members of the previous academies. Benedetto Croce. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on March 10, 2015 .
  6. ^ Entry in the Portale Storico of the Camera dei deputati
  7. ↑ a b Translated by Hans Feist and Richard Peters.
  8. ^ Translated by Felix Noeggerath.
  9. ↑ Translated by Enrico Pizzo.
  10. ^ Translated by K. Büchler.
  11. ^ Translated by Erich Auerbach and Theodor Lükke.
  12. ↑ a b Translated by Theodor Poppe.
  13. ^ Abbreviated translation of Breviario di estetica .
  14. ↑ a b Translated by Julius von Schlosser
  15. ↑ Abridged translation of the two works Due città and L'infancia dorato e ricordi familiari .
personal data
SURNAME Croce, Benedetto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian philosopher, humanist, historian, politician and critic
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Pescasseroli , L'Aquila
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1952
Place of death Naples