Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) is was one of the most important Italian philosophers since the 18th century, and it is his work in aesthetics that is most widely known. You are reading selections from a book, Aesthetic, that was originally published in 1902; the Hofstadter and Kuhns anthology contains a later presentation of his views, an article published in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1929). Although Croce was influenced by Hegel, that is probably not very apparent in what you will read. A closer connection is with R. G. Collingwood, who translated Croce’s text for the encyclopedia article and who is well known in his own right as a philosopher of art. Their views are close enough that people sometimes speak of a “Croce-Collingwood” position on aesthetics. (Although the connection isn’t as close, there is a similarity also to the views of the American philosopher John Dewey, whose Art as Experience, 1934, was the most influential work on the subject produced in U. S. before WW II; selections from it are also included in Hofstadter and Kuhns.)

• Croce’s first chapter has two key points. The first is the characterization of what he calls “intuition” by distinguishing it from intellectual or conceptual knowledge on the one hand and mere sensation of the other. The other is his identification of intuition in this sense with what he calls “expression.” Since both of these are technical terms, it would be possible to understand the identity intuition = expression to be a stipulation of what “expression” means, so ask yourself whether the identity might do more, in particular whether it might help to characterize intuition. The idea of a “lyrical image” that is presented in the first section of the encyclopedia article (HK 556-558) is a later, more positive way of presenting this idea; the identity of intuition and expression is also stated in a brief later section of that article (HK 565-566).

• The second chapter makes the connection between intuition and art explicit but it is largely devoted to rejections of alternative ways of characterizing art. One section of the encyclopedia article (HK 559-561) makes analogous points, but with regard to a different set of characterizations. (Some of these appear in chapters of Aesthetic that I haven’t assigned and others overlap arguments in ch. XV of Aesthetic.)

• Chapter XV is Croce’s account of the works of art or art objects by way of the idea of “externalization.” He refers to communication only in passing in the first paragraph of this chapter; but, in the encyclopedia article, Croce’s key points about externalization appear as a distinction between intuition or expression on the one hand and communication on the other (HK 566-567). In both cases, he goes on to claim that issues concerning technique are beside the point of art as such.

It is possible to take Croce’s formula intuition = expression ≠ communication to be true by stipulation as a constraint on the possible meaning of the terms it involves. But it can still be asked whether such a set of terms provides any insight into art. Think about what can be said on behalf of his way of using them and also about possible objections.