The name is absent

14 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

Tasso, Parini and AIfieri, Manzoni and Mazzini. And the
moralistic doctrine of art was and is and will be perpetually
beneficial by its very contradictions; it was and will be an
effort, however unhappy, to separate art from the merely
pleasing, with which it is sometimes confused, and to assign
to it a more worthy post: and it, too, has its true side, be-
cause, if art be beyond morality, the artist is neither this
side of it nor that, but under its empire, in so far as he
is a man who cannot withdraw himself from the duties of
man, and must look upon art itself—art, which is not and
never will be moral—as a mission to be exercised as a priestly
office.

Again (and this is the last and perhaps the most important
of all the general negations that it suits me to recall in rela-
tion to this matter), with the definition of art as intuition,
we deny that it has the character of conceptual knowledge.
Conceptual knowledge, in its true form, which is the philo-
sophical, is always realistic, aiming at establishing reality
against unreality, or at lowering unreality by including it in
reality as a subordinate moment of reality itself. But in-
tuition means, precisely, indistinction of reality and unreal-
ity, the image with its value as mere image, the pure ideality
of the image; and opposing the intuitive or sensible knowl-
edge to the conceptual or intelligible, the aesthetic to the
noetic, it aims at claiming the autonomy of this more simple
and elementary form of knowledge, which has been com-
pared to the dream (the dream, and not the sleep) of the
theoretic life, in respect to which philosophy would be the
waking. And indeed, whoever should ask, when examining
a work of art, whether what the artist has expressed be
metaphysically and historically true or false, asks a question
that is without meaning, and commits an error analogous to

<<   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   >>

More intriguing information