Critica della percezione. Fiedler e la “rivoluzione copernicana” dell’arte

Leaving out the question of whether or not it is proper to speak of “pure visibility” with regard to Konrad Fiedler’s account of bloße Sichtbarkeit, this study addresses Fiedler’s theory of the origin of artistic activity in the interpretations of Benedetto Croce and Ernst Cassirer. As a result, rather than a critical appraisal of Fiedler’s work, it offers a comparison between Croce and Cassirer in terms of their account of aesthetics, expression and representation. In order to grasp the elusive world of sensations, so as to raise them up to their contemplation, which is beyond the concept’s jurisdiction, it is necessary to abstract pure visibility from natural data. Failing concepts and words, expressions and representations make sensations visible. So Croce in his essay on Fiedler La teoria dell’arte come pura visibilità. Both Cassirer and Croce recognize Fiedler’s debt toward Kantianism. However, their assessments of this debt are influenced by their respective conceptions of Kantianism, above all by their different accounts of the critical foundation of knowledge. In The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, I. Language, Cassirer objects that Croce and Vossler think of aesthetics as the science of expression in general, inasmuch as it attends to the “spiritual interpretation” of facts by means of language and art. Cassirer is right to claim that language cannot be considered a particular case of aesthetics, unless we think of aesthetics as just a specific science of expression among the others, that is to say, among the other symbolic forms. Each symbolic form is, then, an autonomous science of expression and unity of aesthetics and language is not founded in expression, but in representation (Darstellung), as Cassirer puts it in his Metaphysics: «We always gain access to the depiction of the world through the gateway of “representation”; however this has two different basic forms neither of which can be reduced to the other». These forms, continues Cassirer, are word and image. For Croce, aesthetics pertains specifically to art as art, because art is the expression of beauty, and it presupposes impression, of which it is a transformative elaboration. Why then language and expression would remain at the stage of mere expression? And to which extent is expression a transformation? In his critique of Fiedler, Croce questions the opportunity to distinguish between conceptual knowledge and intuitive knowledge, without providing any philosophical reasons for this distinction. This gnoseological parallelism, as Croce puts it, would compromise the account of language, which ends up being “analogous” in the logical sphere, to what expression is in the artistic sphere. Since Fiedler does not admit any hyatus between vision and expression, as if it were a purely psycho-physical relation, expression is, in the end, stripped of its symbolic and spiritual value. Moreover, the exclusive attention to visual arts would prevent Fiedler from inquiring into the universality of art in general. Although Cassirer seems not to know Croce’s essay on pure visibility, apparently confining himself to referring to his monumental Estetica, it is possible to find in his reflection on Fiedler an ideal response to Croce. In his quoted essay, Cassirer clears up Fiedler’s position on language: for the art historian, language is not “the expression for a being”, but “a form of being itself”. We may well consider Cassirer as a fiedlerian: for they both, as Croce would say, deny any hyatus between impression and expression in the construction of the symbolic forms. Thus, even if Fiedler addresses himself only to visual arts, with this he does not mean to deny that the unity of the senses operate in the unity of perception, like Croce states: at the representation-level, what emerges is form, not perception. If art may be considered as a symbolic form, it[...]