Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Croce and Interpretation. Deconstruction and Pragmatism

2014; De Boeck Superior; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2033-0138

Richard Shusterman, Gilles A. Tiberghien,

Philosophy, Science, and History

juncture of nineteenthand twentieth-century thought, Janus-like facing both. On the one hand, he looks back to Hegel and to nineteenth-century idealism with its faith in the superior power of the imagination and its pre-Freudian trust in the integrity and identity of individual consciousness. On the other hand, Croce boldly looks forward to the major theme of twentieth-century philosophy in both analytic and continental traditions, viz., the linguistic turn. The fundamental and inalienable linguistic nature of our experience and knowledge of the world, indeed the linguisticality of the world itself as it can be meaningfully said to be referred to or thought of, was advocated by Croce long before the likes of Wittgenstein, Goodman, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Little, if any, attention is given today to Croce's general philosophical views. He is, deservedly, most remembered for his aesthetic, which was exceedingly influential in the early part of this century, expressing, as it did in an admirably coherent philosophical form, the captivating spirit of the Symbolist-Aestheticist revolt against middle to late nineteenth-century positivism. Symbolism's enormous appeal stemmed from its attempt to protect a rich realm of spirituality, the mysterious glories of art, from the relentlessly encroaching and reductivist grasp of deterministic causal explanation which characterized the regnant positivism of the day. This positivism had effectively undermined religious faith, making the defense of human spirituality on the artistic front even more necessary and pressing. In any case, people who had long been nourished on the Romantic ideas of artistic spiritual genius did not want art reduced, as the positivist Taine would have it, to a mere causal product of race, milieu, et moment, where artistic masterpieces were seen as mechanically determined and bound up with their causes as a physical phenomenon with its condition.i