Croce on Interpretation: Deconstruction and PragmatismAuthor(s): Richard ShustermanReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 1, Critical Reconsiderations (Autumn, 1988), pp.199-216Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469328 .Accessed: 20/12/2011 16:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

Croce on Interpretation: Deconstruction and Pragmatism

Richard Shusterman

I

ROCE is a pivotal figure in modern aesthetics. He stands at the juncture of nineteenth- and 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 superi- or power of the imagination and its pre-Freudian trust in the integri- ty and identity of individual consciousness. On the other hand, Croce boldly looks forward to the major theme of twentieth-century philos- ophy in both analytic and continental traditions, viz., the linguistic turn. The fundamental and inalienable linguistic nature of our expe- rience 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 philosophi- cal 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 re- ductivist grasp of deterministic causal explanation which character- ized the regnant positivism of the day. This positivism had effectively undermined religious faith, making the defense of human spiritual- ity 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 mo- ment," where artistic masterpieces were seen as mechanically deter- mined and "bound up with their causes as a physical phenomenon with its condition."i

200 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

In insisting that art could not be reduced to laws or causes, in de-

fending the autonomy, primacy, and cognitive power of the creative intuition which generates art as against the prevailing dogma that science was the only worthy form of thought, and further in specifi- cally attacking all existent varieties of aesthetic positivism (historical, naturalistic, and rhetorical-academic), Croce worked the visionary in-

sights and gnomic witticisms of the likes of Wilde and Mallarme into a systematic gospel of the aesthetic, articulated in a respectably philo- sophical idiom. With artists and men of letters at the dawn of our century caught up in the swell of art for art's sake in fearful defiance of the imperialistic claims of science, it is not hard to see why Croce was swiftly hailed as a savior of art and enthroned as the dominant twentieth-century aesthetician, a position he more or less maintained until his analytic critics rudely discredited and deposed him. But I have told this story elsewhere.2

In this paper I want to turn from genealogy to examine an impor- tant issue in the body of Croce's aesthetic, an issue essential to any philosophy of art-the possibility of valid interpretation. The prob- lem with Croce is that given his views on language and reality, this

possibility seems an impossibility. For while he explicitly affirms that true interpretation and appreciation can be and frequently are achieved, the subversive subtext of his Aesthetics (which sometimes clearly surfaces in the text) would seem to condemn all interpretive readings to be misreadings because of philosophical considerations

currently commanding much attention through the fashion for de- construction as a philosophy and critical practice.

The Crocean problem of validity of interpretation is best presented to our present-preoccupied eyes in relation to Derrida and decon- struction. This should not be surprising once we realize that we can hardly find a more perfect contemporary analogue of Croce than Derrida. Both have digested Hegel's historicism but refused to swal- low his conceptualism and teleology of progress, both placed lan- guage at the center of their thought, and both rebelled against the reigning literary science of their respective days. For Derrida this of course was structuralism. More significantly, Croce and Derrida share a number of important philosophical themes and strategies. Both insist that what we call reality is essentially a temporary and dynamically developing linguistic construct, "a provisional dynamic system developing through provisional and dynamic systematiza- tions," where there is no promise of an ultimate system.4 Just as for Croce all the world "is nothing but intuition or aesthetic [= linguistic] fact," so for Derrida "I1 n'y a pas de hors-texte." There cannot be "i

reality..,. outside the text whose content could take place, could have

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 201

taken place outside of language" and its changing "systematic play of differences."5 Both for Croce and for Derrida, language not only constitutes the world, but is an irrepressibly creative force which is

constantly transforming itself. "Language," says Croce, "is perpetual creation" (A 150); and Croce's continually creative, category-defying, linguistic intuition-expression clearly adumbrates Derrida's uncon- tainable disseminating diffprance, which "is incompatible with the stat- ic, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motives in the concept of struc- ture" and which "marks an irreducible and generative multiplicity."6

This points to yet a third important theme of Croce and Derrida which may be called antitaxonomism. Both insist that distinctions which we naturally employ and take as valid have no ultimately un-

challengeable rationale or justification. They are inherently imper- fect, wobbly and conventional, since they lack any grounding in onto-

logical essences or in transcendental rational justification outside the system of language. Derrida's deconstructive reversal and undermin-

ing of privileging binary oppositions are perhaps the hallmark of his

thought, but Croce pointed the way here as well and was notorious in his day for his subversive challenge of the rhetorical categories of traditional criticism and of some traditional distinctions in philoso- phy.7 In rebelling against the dominating yet ungrounded constraints and distinctions of the positivisms of their times, in their common revolt against closure, Croce and Derrida share a common strategy of insurrection. To defy the dominating discipline's authoritative stric- tures, a more potent and fundamental force is invoked, a supreme and subversively protean principle of creative generative freedom:

intuition-expression, disseminating diffrrance. Further, it is shown that the restrictive science's constitutive distinctions cannot be clearly and consistently drawn, and their hierarchical order can be reversed. Croce's dismantling reversal of Tainean positivism's privileging dis- tinction of historical reality versus art (the latter epiphenomenal to the former) is a reversal performed by maintaining that historical re-

ality is itself the product of aesthetic intuition and thus a form of art. This is surely a striking precedent for Derrida's deconstructive rever- sal of the philosophy/literature opposition, performed by treating philosophy as a form of writing.

In pressing these very deep affinities between Croce and Derrida, I do not wish to deny that in other significant respects they are ob- viously very different. Certainly Croce's key aesthetic and linguistic formula that intuition is expression seems quite remote from Derri- da's diffrrance and indeed seems painfully susceptible to Derridean deconstruction. Croce's equation would be deconstructively con- strued not only as a pathetically unconvincing begging of the ques-

202 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

tion and a graphic admission of the alterity of intuition and expres- sion, signified and signifier, presence and trace, but also as a poi- gnant example of the distortive longing for closure and stasis through the complete commensurability and union of signifier (ex- pression) and signified (intuition). Derrida would point to the anxiety behind Croce's identification of intuition and expression, behind his assertion that "they are not two, but one"-an anxiety tellingly be- trayed in Croce's remark that "he who separates intuition from ex- pression never succeeds in reuniting them" (A 8, 9). Moreover, we should note that Croce's antiessentialist undermining of distinctions did not go quite so far as Derrida's and did admit some essential dif- ferences, for example, between conceptual (logical) and intuitive (aes- thetic) thought (albeit that the former must be based on the latter) and between practical and theoretical activity.

Still more important for our present purposes, however, is the cru- cial difference that Croce believed in the possibility and indeed actual achievement of interpretive knowledge, of the recovery or reproduc- tion of original meaning, while Derrida clearly denies it. Indeed Der- rida has fathered, particularly through his Yale disciples, the cur- rently fashionable idea that texts are "unreadable," that they admit of no correct understanding or valid interpretation. This important di- vergence seems particularly intriguing against the background of Croce and Derrida's shared historicist view of language as proteanly dynamic and creative. How, one wonders, can Croce maintain a de- sirable flexibility and historicist openness without abandoning the no less desirable claim to interpretive knowledge and true or valid ap- preciative understanding? Croce's problem of interpretation is surely one which haunts and exercises many of us today who are uncom- fortable with any ahistoricist foundationalism but are no less uncom- fortable with Derrida's interpretive skepticism. Croce's theory of in-

terpretation therefore deserves our detailed consideration, which should not be further deferred.

II

For Croce, the understanding or appreciation of a work of art re- quires some significant identity of meaning or shared apprehension between the artist and his interpreters. More specifically, this "iden- tity" is to be achieved by the interpreter's "reproduction" of the art- ist's original intuition-expression with which Croce identifies the work of art itself. If the artist's aim is to achieve a successful intuition- expression, one's aim as interpreting critic is "To reproduce it in one-

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 203

self." Thus, if we succeed in properly interpreting or appreciating Dante's Commedia, "in that moment of contemplation and judgement, our spirit is one with that of the poet, and in that moment we and he are one thing" (A 118, 121; Croce's emphasis). Viewing criticism thus as a close spiritual communion between artist and appreciating inter-

preter, Croce not surprisingly asserts the essential identity of genius and taste, that which creates and that which judges. They represent the same intuitive-expressive capacity; their "only difference lies in the diversity of the circumstances" of its application: the former in "aesthetic production," the latter in "reproduction" (A 120). Their

divergence can only be a matter of context or quantity, because "to

posit a substantial difference between genius and taste, between artis- tic production and reproduction, would render both communication and judgement alike inconceivable" (A 121).

The premise that underlies Croce's argument here is that the prod- ucts of a given activity can only be properly judged by that same activ-

ity or one essentially the same. If we accept this premise but deny that

"genius and taste are . .. substantially identical" (A 120), then inter-

pretation and appreciation are indeed impossible. This particular threat to the possibility of interpretation is not the one I shall pursue, for it does not seem all that serious to me-first, because I recognize the continuum of taste and genius, criticism and creation, but still more obviously because the motivating premise seems so dubious.

Judging the winner of a race is surely altogether different from rac-

ing it, yet who would deny that such judgments are possible and valid?

The more serious, Derridean threat to Croce's idea of true inter-

pretation (which emerges from Croce's own views and text) concerns the impossibility of ever properly replicating or reproducing a partic- ular intuition-expression because of the linguistic character of any intuition-expression and the essentially changing and contextual na- ture of language. For Croce, all thought and hence all the intuitions which constitute works of art and their reproductive criticism are

necessarily linguistic. This is why he describes them as intuition-ex-

pression; and since the very essence of language, for him, is its creativ-

ity and expressive structuring of experience, language is substantially the same as art. Hence he strikingly declares, "Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing" (A 142; Croce's emphasis).

Founding art and criticism on language is not in itself problematic, but it becomes so if language is conceived as an irrepressibly creative and protean force; and this is clearly how Croce sees it: "Language is perpetual creation. What has been linguistically expressed is not repeated.... The ever-new impressions give rise to continuous

204 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

changes of sound and meaning, that is, to ever-new expressions" (A 150). If aesthetic intuitions are always linguistic (and at least with re- spect to literature they must be) and if language is continually chang- ing, it would seem we could never succeed in adequately replicating the original intuition-expression with which the work is identified. And if exact replication is not possible, then, for Croce, true inter- pretive understanding is an impossibility.

Croce, committed to the validity of interpretation and too careful and consistent a philosopher not to see how it is thus threatened, prudently makes an exceptional proviso to allay the threat. "What has been linguistically expressed is not repeated," says Croce (now intro- ducing the exception which I temporarily elided above), "save by re- production of what has already been produced." Once this exception is granted, interpretation is indeed possible. But why should we grant it, especially given Croce's (or Derrida's, or perhaps even our own) general view of the continuously creative and changing nature of lan- guage? The historico-mental context of the interpreter and the cur- rent state of language in which he is situated must be different in some respects from that in which the author originally produced his work; and such contextual and linguistic differences would preclude this complete mental identity of author's and critic's intuition-expres- sions which is required by Croce's model of interpretation. Even if the artist and critic grasp what would ordinarily be called the very same words, these words are not really identical, having (for them and not only for them) somewhat different meanings and associa- tions by having at different times different systemic functional rela- tions (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) with other elements in the open-ended changing linguistic system. (Even the author rereading his own work after some lapse of time will face the problem of the difference of context and language which time's passage inevitably brings.)

Croce comes close to recognizing such problems of context, admit- ting that works of art as "the aesthetic synthesis of impressions" must vary since "impressions or contents [must] vary, every content differs from every other content, because nothing repeats itself in life" (A 68). Croce infers from this "the impossibility of translations," for the translator's attempt at aesthetically capturing or "remoulding" an original expression necessarily involves "mingling it with the personal impressions of the so-called translator," producing unavoidably a new, different intuition-expression (A 68). But the same problem surely arises with respect to interpretations, which (as Gadamer and others have noted) are like translations in the sense of rendering one literary text in the words of another.8 Surely the personal impres-

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 205

sions of the interpreter are invariably there and potently mingling with the text in his apprehension of it, just like the translator's are. The very same logic which leads Croce to the impossibility of transla- tions would appear to bring one to the impossibility of interpreta- tions, which Croce desperately wants to resist.

In recent times, deconstructionist literary theorists who share Croce's conception of language and understanding seem quite un- troubled-if not tantalizingly thrilled-by the prospect that valid in-

terpretation is impossible. They are quite content to conclude on Crocean premises (as well as on others) that texts are "unreadable" and that "all readings are [necessarily] misreadings" because of the

changing contextual nature of language and understanding, for they assume that true understanding or interpretation must rest on un-

changing, determinate identity of meaning.9 Thus Culler maintains that the notions of "[r]eading and understanding [claim to] preserve or reproduce a content or meaning, maintain its identity, while mis-

understanding and misreading distort it; they produce or introduce a difference."'0

Yet Culler argues, in Crocean-Derridean fashion, that this claim of

reading is groundless. Since language (and hence its understanding) is always changing with context and thus always involves some differ- ence, this makes absolute identity, preservation, or replication of

meaning an impossibility. As Culler pithily puts it, "meaning is con- text-bound but context is boundless," "new contextual features ... alter illocutionary force."" Since meaning can never be completely circumscribed contextually so as to permit perfect replication, true reading or interpretation is rendered impossible, and "all readings are misreadings."

It should be said immediately that this line of argument is not very compelling. For even if its skeptical conclusion seems to follow validly from its two premises, at least one of these is dangerously false. Whatever we think of the Crocean-Derridean view of language and its continuously changing character (and I at least am ready to admit that to some extent language is in perpetual change and develop- ment, even if some of this change is barely perceptible or significant and occurs against the dominant background of some sort of conti-

nuity), the notion of understanding or interpretation as the recovery or reproduction of an identical object, "a content or meaning," is a terribly wrongheaded and misleading, though very pervasive, philo- sophical picture which has long captivated and frustrated our

thought. As Wittgenstein labored to teach us, meaning is not a sepa- rate object or content but merely the correlate of understanding something. And understanding something is not the mirroring cor-

206 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

respondence, capturing, or reproduction of some fixed and deter- minate intentional object or content, but fundamentally an ability to handle or respond to that thing in certain accepted ways which are

consensually shared, sanctioned, and inculcated by the community (forming part of the fabric of its form of life) but which are nonethe- less flexible and open to (divergent) interpretation and emenda- tion.12 The best (perhaps the only) way to make a convincing case for validity or objectivity of interpretation is to eschew the identically re- flective, reproductive, correspondence model of objectivity for that of objectivity as consensuality within an interpretive community or tradition. This alternative model of objectivity and understanding is surely worth pursuing further, but demands a more sustained ac- count than can be provided here.'" In any case, it was not the model explicitly employed by Croce, to whom we should now return.

Croce is admirably brave and honest in confronting the threat that the changes of language and context that time inexorably brings would preclude the possibility of identical reproduction of an intu- ition-expression and hence of true interpretation. "When speaking of ... [such] reproduction," he cautions:

we said the reproduction takes place, if all the other conditions remain equal. Do they remain equal? Does the hypothesis correspond to reality?

It would appear not. In order to reproduce an impression several times by means of a suitable physical stimulus it is necessary that this stimulus not be changed, and that the organism remain in the same psychical conditions as those in which was experienced the impression that it is desired to reproduce. Now it is a fact that the physical stimulus is continually changing, and in like manner the psychological conditions. (A 123-24; Croce's emphasis)

Croce goes on to give several examples of the very numerous ways in which history significantly alters both the material work of art (or in literature, the text) and the interpretive conventions and psycho- logical conditions of its reception. He refuses to seek refuge in the popular idea that works of art are or involve natural signs and are therefore in principle identically experiencable by all men, no matter what their historical, linguistic, or psychological contexts. In a radical move which should warm the hearts of many contemporary semioti- cians, Croce boldly declares, "Natural signs do not exist; because all are equally conventional, or, to speak with greater exactness, histori- cally conditioned" (A 125).

Granting the undeniable changes of material, historical, linguistic, and psychological contexts and their undeniable influence on our understanding of a work of art, Croce pointedly asks, "how are we to

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 207

succeed in causing the expression to be reproduced by means of the

physical object? How obtain the same effect, when the conditions are no longer the same? Would it not, rather, seem necessary to conclude that expressions cannot be reproduced, despite the physical instru- ments made for the purpose [that is, the material objects or texts in which artworks are embodied], and that what is called reproduction consists in ever new expressions?" (A 125). This is precisely the con- clusion of the deconstructionists, for whom every reading is necessar- ily a new misreading, somehow altering rather than identically repro- ducing the author's original meaning. (Indeed the deconstructionist

critique of meaning's "presence" and of the integrity and autonomy of the authoring "subject" would challenge whether we could proper- ly speak of an author having a unique, determinate, and definitive

original meaning.) To avoid the conclusion that all reading necessarily alters and thus

fails to reproduce meaning, to save the possibility of interpretation on his reproductive model, Croce must show that "the varieties of

physical and psychical conditions" and the differences of linguistic and historical contexts are not "intrinsically insurmountable," and that "we can replace ourselves in the conditions in which ... [the work] was produced" and thus can reproduce or truly understand its

intuition-expression (A 125). But how can he show or even maintain this?

III

One argument that Croce employs is the analogy with our under- standing of our past selves and of our friends, for this surely involves understanding through different temporal or psychological contexts. If we could not "replace ourselves" in the conditions of our past selves and those of our acquaintances, Croce presumes, self-knowl- edge and social understanding, resting on some identity of experi- enced content, could never be achieved. "Individual life, which is communion with ourselves (with our past), and social life, which is communion with our like, would not otherwise be possible" (A 125).

This argument, however, is far from convincing, even apart from its dubious assumption that understanding requires the possession or reproduction of an identical determinate mental content. For the ar- gument seems to beg the question in a "wishful thinking" way. On Croce's presuppositions, understanding ourselves and others entails our ability to place ourselves imaginatively in the requisite conditions so as to achieve the requisite identical mental content. Then, san- guinely assuming what he wishes to be the case-that we really have

208 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

"as a matter of fact" such true understanding of self and others- Croce feels he can conclude that we must have the capacity for this mental "replacing" and reproduction (A 125-27). But this assump- tion of true understanding or communion is precisely what is at issue in the skeptical challenge from variety of context. This same chal-

lenge can be directed at the subject's own claims to understand his past self by identically reproducing its past mental contents despite significant changes of context. Surely Freudian and structuralist theories, perhaps more than the arguments of Hume, have made it easier for deconstructionists to follow the impulse of radical histori- cism and contextualism to the dissolution of the subject. Croce still has a nineteenth-century faith in the unity and integrity of individual consciousness. He also has an extremely nineteenth-century and Romantic faith in the power of imagination, which serves as the de- vice (one could say the deus ex machina) that enables us to surmount the variety of contexts and achieve identical reproduction and

understanding. Croce is quite forthright about the importance of "the intuitive ab-

soluteness of the imagination." "If the absoluteness of the imagina- tion were removed, the life of the spirit would tremble to its founda- tions. One individual would no longer understand another, nor indeed his own self of a moment before, which is already another individual considered a moment after" (A 122, 123). Croce thus ap- pears to conceive the imagination as some sort of transcendental, all- powerful force which can overcome the seemingly logically insur- mountable differences of intuitive-expressive content that changing contexts clearly bring.

If this claim of imagination to absolute power inspires more mys- tery than conviction, Croce tries to allay suspicion by emphasizing that the imagination does not work its miracles alone. It relies, first, on the efforts of artistic restoration (whether of pictures, or, in the case of literature, on the philological reconstruction of texts) to re- produce the material conditions of the work, and second, on histori- cal criticism, which serves "to reintegrate in us the psychological con- ditions which have changed in the course of history." It is only with the aid of restoration and historical research (and their necessary pre- condition-an unbroken tradition)'4 that imagination "revives the dead, completes the fragmentary, and enables us to see a work of art (a physical object) as its author saw it in the moment of production" (A 126).

This may somewhat conceal the apparent extravagance of Croce's claim for imagination, especially if we forget that he sees history itself

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 209

as a product of aesthetic intuition and aesthetic imagination (A 26-30). But it in no way relieves the mystery of how imagination can really surmount all differences to achieve an identity of intuited

meaning with the artist's privileged, definitive intuition of the work. Moreover, no clue is given as to how we could ever know that such an

identity is really achieved rather than falsely assumed, how we could measure our imagined reproduction with the original intuition itself.

To avoid such mysteries, the best way for Croce to defend his claim for validity of interpretation without altogether abandoning the model of interpretation as some sort of reproductive unity or com- munion with the work's meaning is by adopting a radical pragmatist remedy. Flaunting pragmatism's insouciant indifference to "the dis- tinction between discovery and creation, finding and making,"'5 Croce should assert that the imaginative reconstruction of the artist's intuition by the work's interpreters is all that really remains of that intuition to be united with or to replicate. If one wishes, as Croce does, to identify the work of art itself with the artist's intuition-ex-

pression of it, then he should hold that there is nothing more to the work and to its proper understanding than our imaginative recon- struction (with the aid of history, restorative devices, traditions, and so forth) of the artist's definitive intuition-expression. This strategy would, of course, bring his interpretive theory profitably more in line with the very cogent, Wittgensteinian consensual-practice account of meaning and understanding which we briefly discussed earlier.

The pragmatic point is that there is no "cash value" to the artist's intuition-expression, no possible way to grasp it and use it as a touch- stone of correct interpretation, apart from some possible interpretive reconstruction of it. For whatever use we wish to make of the artist's original understanding of his or her creation, all we (or the artist) can ever have of it is an interpretive reconstruction of what it was, even if that reconstruction is based on the artist's own retrospective testimo- ny. The desired unity of understanding which Croce sees as required of valid interpretation could then be construed and achieved as a unity or fusion between the interpreter's point of view and the pro- jected understanding of the artist as it is (continuously) reconstructed by the interpretive community in the course of the work's interpre- tive history. Here, then, we find another sense for Croce's notion of the absolute power of imagination: not a Romantic transcendental potency to surmount all differences of contexts and mysteriously unite us with remote realities as they originally were, but an immin- ently pervasive power which is continuously making or refashioning the realities with which it deals.

210 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Not only could Croce avail himself of this pragmatist strategy (which is at least implicit in the nonskeptical theories of interpreta- tion of Gadamer and Fish),16 he in fact seems committed to it by his view of historical reality and of literary history in particular. "Histo- ry," says Croce, "is included in the universal concept of art," since it consists of "neither induction nor deduction" nor the presentation of

general truths or concepts, but is rather a representational narrative of particulars, produced and understood only through the shaping and synthesizing agency of the imagination and memory. History or "real imagination" is distinguished from the "pure imagination" of fiction by means of memory, but both rely on "probability" and "veri- similitude" to convince us of their validity (A 27, 28). That history is ever new intuitive-expression rather than mirroring reproduction of old facts and perceptions is confirmed in Croce's account of artistic and literary history. The historical facts themselves are "formless, in- coherent, and meaningless" until they are shaped into a convincing and ordered narrative representation by the aesthetic intuition, yielding a new expression. "Artistic and literary history is therefore a historical work of art founded upon one or more works of art" (A 129, 131; Croce's emphasis). Historians of art continuously reshape as they re- construct the art of the past. "Purely historical historians do not and cannot exist ... they will always add something of their own" (A 134-35). The same, of course, must hold for all interpreters of past works, or for any reader the moment he tries to articulate his under- standing of the text.

We have, then, two possible interpretations of Croce's theory of

interpretation. The Romantic one insists that the interpreter truly reproduce in his mind the author's original intuition as it was actual- ly, historically constituted. This is allegedly achievable through metic- ulous historical research of the author's life and times, through the restoration of the original artifact as it was originally produced, and most importantly through the absolute power of imagination to transport us mentally into such perfectly reconstructed conditions and to intuit as the author. On the other hand, the pragmatist inter- pretation requires no perfect "foundational" objectivity of historical research and no titanic leap of imagination to place us in the mind of the author. For both the author qua author and the intuition or

meaning of his work are seen not as "real" objects already fully and finally determined in the past, but rather as entities continuously shaped and reshaped by literary historical understanding. This un- derstanding is essentially imaginative and creative, molding facts rather than mirroring them. On this view of history, one which Croce surely shared, all historical facts and objects are in a sense ideal (that

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 211

is, constructed by the mind) rather than simply real. However, if the

pragmatist account seems both more intrinsically attractive and more consistent with Croce's view of history, there is clearly more explicit textual support in his Aesthetic for the Romantic view. How is one to decide which of them is most representative of Croce's actual view of interpretation?

Perhaps the best way would be to look at Croce's actual interpretive practice. For Croce not only theorized about literary criticism but ex- tensively practiced it. Soon after the Aesthetic, he began to write criti- cal essays on modern Italian literature (since 1860), which were sub-

sequently collected in his mammoth six-volume La Letteratura della nuova Italia; and he went on to write sizeable individual studies of Goethe, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Corneille, and Dante, as well as other more general treatises dealing with a variety of literatures: ancient and modern, Italian and other European, folk and high poetry.

Not surprisingly, Croce's critical practice was much more in line with the pragmatist account of his theory of interpretation, and be- came increasingly so as he matured.17 Even when interested in inter-

preting an author to define and highlight his individuality, Croce would not treat the author as a "real" historical person, that is, as an

empirical, biographical subject whose actual psychological conditions and circumstantial motives are to be reconstructed. Instead he came to see the author as an ideal personality, essentially present in and constructed from his works as they are progressively construed by perceptive critics. We can see this quite clearly in his treatment of Shakespeare, whose distinctive poetic sentiment Croce defined as the "profound sense of life" in all its contradictions, tensions, and "strife in vital unity."18

Croce begins by distinguishing very sharply Shakespeare's bio-

graphical (or "practical") personality from his "poetical personality." We must not confuse "the character and development of his life" with "the character and development of his art." Only the latter should be "the object and study for the critic and historian of art"; preoccupa- tion with the former "often leads to delusion" and inspires scholarly "conjectures based upon air" that have no substantial bearing on the work of art, given Croce's assertion here of the "indifference of the

poetical work towards biography" (ASC 117, 129, 131). Thus the de- velopment of Shakespeare's art that Croce traces (proceeding from the dreamlike vagueness of the comedies of love and romance to the "hard reality of the historical plays" and finally "to the great trage- dies, which are dream and reality and more than dream and reality" [ASC 267]) turns out to be altogether different from the actual chronological development of the Shakespearean corpus so praised

212 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

by Eliot. It is instead "nothing less than the ideal development of

Shakespeare's spirit, deduced from the very quality of the poetical works themselves, from the physiognomy of each and from their re-

ciprocal relations" (ASC 267). Croce does not confront the thought that these reciprocal relations

(and the resulting differentially perceived physiognomic qualities) might be very different if the corpus were construed in its chronolog- ical order. For he imperiously rejects the actual or "real" chronology as unreal: "the ideal is the only truly real development, while the

chronological is fictitious or arbitrary, and thus unreal; that is to say, in clear terms, it does not represent development, but simply a series or succession" (ASC 268). Apart from its unconvincing bluster, Croce's remark fails to recognize that biography and the dating of

plays are also history (involving imaginative acts or ordering) and thus must be ideal as well.

Rejecting the laborious attempts at detailed historical reconstruc- tion of Shakespeare's life and circumstances (impugned as "errone- ous philology" [ASC 133]), Croce urges an "intrinsic" approach. The critic's interpretation should arise from a focused "examination of the works before him" (ASC 119). Yet this scrutiny is not that of an innocent eye, since one already begins with a constructed view of

Shakespeare, "the synthetic or compendius image ... [he has in] the common patrimony of culture" (ASC 138). It is noteworthy that Croce's interpretation of Shakespeare builds largely on the opinions of past critics (albeit polemicizing against many); and he cites them almost as frequently as he does Shakespeare's texts. Croce's anti-in- tentionalism is so radical as to insist "that it is necessary to make an effort of abstraction, to forget biographical details concerning the

poets, in those cases where they abound, if we wish to enjoy their art, in what it possesses of ideality, which is truth" (ASC 133).'9

It should by now be patently clear how far Croce has forsaken the Romantic view of interpretation which aims at exactly reconstructing an author's biographical circumstances so that we may then unite with his original intuition of the work by some fantastic leap of the

imagination. Croce makes it still clearer by explicitly imputing the "useless labours" of philological and historical scholarship to the Ro- mantic dream of perfect understanding through unity with the au- thor's actual lived experience or intuition of his work. Such "hybrid biographical aesthetic" interpretation, "in common with the philology of the nineteenth century in general, is unconsciously dominated by romantic ideas of mystical and naturalistic unity.... These labours are animated with the hope of obtaining knowledge of the poetry of Shakespeare in its full reality by means of discovery of the complete

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 213

chronology, of biographical incidents, of allusions, and of the origin of his themes" (ASC 121).

The sharp distinction between the poetic personality and the bio- graphical author, the rejection of intentionalist interpretation for an intrinsic textualism ("we do not know what were the intentions of

Shakespeare and as usual they matter little, because Shylock lives and speaks, himself explaining what he means" [ASC 216]), and the con- sequent devaluation of historical exegesis in interpretation--these all make Croce look very much like a New Critic. But this does not mean he does not end up looking something like a pragmatist. For the New Critical argument against intentionalism, especially as articulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley, was clearly and consciously pragmatic in its motivation. Not only is the text far more available than the author's original intention, but concentration on the text is far more produc- tive of aesthetic rewards.20

IV

Having examined Croce's theory of interpretation through our postmodernist perspective, we have seen that its skeptical decon- structionist drift is best countered not by a Romantic appeal to a mys- terious, transcendental imagination, but by a down-to-earth pragma- tist refusal to fuss about the distinction between the work of art itself and the work as it is reconstructed to be. Before concluding, howev- er, we should at least briefly consider one important challenge to this pragmatist strategy. The strategy's strength lies in the cogency of the view that we can make no sense of the notion of the work itself (or its meaning) apart from some available reconstruction of it. We thus can never measure our understanding of the work against something permanently, independently, and determinately there-the work "as in itself it really is" or the author's original understanding of it- which we can know (and know we know) independently of our inter- pretive efforts to determine it, to reconstruct and refashion it through our interpretive imagination.

But what seems most objectionable in the pragmatist ploy of identi- fying the work with what the work is reconstructed or interpreted to be is that this makes logically problematic the possibility of error in a widely accepted, well-established interpretation; and without the pos- sibility of error, there is arguably no significant, substantive sense to validity in interpretation. Of course, the pragmatist can explain the error of a particular reader's interpretation in terms of its failing to comply with the reconstructed understanding of the work that is es-

214 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

tablished in the given critical community. But what are we to say about this firmly entrenched and community-endorsed understand-

ing with which the pragmatist here identifies the work and its mean-

ing? Surely it must be possible for such an interpretation to be wrong, to require correction, if we want our calling it right to have any dis- tinct sense, if we want "the right interpretation" to mean something other or more than "the currently established interpretation." Yet how can we allow for our accepted interpretation to be wrong, if we refuse to admit the notion of the work itself as existing apart from all

interpretations and functioning as the standard which can prove even

accepted ones to be mistaken or inadequate? The only apparent pragmatist reply to this challenging query is to

argue that the ever-present possibility that an established interpreta- tion may prove wrong can be explained not through the possibility of

finding the one true interpretation but through the possibility of

finding or forming a better one that could or should be more accept- able, convincing, or fruitful. And such evaluative predicates would in turn have to be construed in pragmatic terms rather than in terms of truth (for instance "better" could not denote "closer to the truth" or "closer to the work [or its meaning] as in itself it really is").

As long as the future is open, as long as interpretation continues, there is always the possibility that a more compelling or acceptable interpretation will appear which we think should oust the interpreta- tion currently established as the valid (or most valid) one. Thus the reason we cannot simply and finally identify the right (true, valid) interpretation with the accepted one is not that it is always an open question as to whether the latter truly mirrors or reproduces the work, but rather because it is always open that we may find or devise an interpretation that is still more acceptable, more cogent and valid. Validity could, of course, still be understood in terms of the nonarbi-

trary, considered, consensual endorsement of the competent, and construed as a gradable, contestable, and continually reassessable term of commendation.21

This notion of validity surely requires more elaboration than I can

supply here. It seems closely related to Rorty's recently attempted "dissolution of the traditional problematic about truth" by a reductive analysis which reveals that the predicate "'true' has no [philosophi- cal] explanatory use" but merely three major rhetorical ones. Rorty lists them as (1) "an endorsing use"; (2) "a cautionary use, in such remarks as 'Your belief that S is perfectly justified, but perhaps not true,' " since there is no guarantee that future developments will allow belief in S to remain justified; and (3) "a disquotational use" for metalinguistic clarification of sentence meaning (as in "'S' is true iff ").22

CROCE ON INTERPRETATION 215

The pragmatized version of Croce's defense of interpretive validity sketched above captures both the endorsing and the cautionary use of "true," while repudiating the traditional model of truth (interpre- tive or otherwise) as mirroring correspondence, a model which (given certain Crocean and deconstructionist premises and arguments) leads to interpretive skepticism. But whether we prefer to read Croce as a protodeconstructionist or a latent pragmatist, and even if we continue to see him as a late Romantic, early twentieth-century ideal- ist,23 he surely deserves and rewards a contemporary rereading.

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1 See Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, tr. Henry Van Laun (New York, 1886), p. 18; a related passage is quoted in William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (Chicago, 1954), p. 534. 2 See Richard Shusterman, "Analytic Aesthetics, Literary Theory, and Deconstruc- tion," Monist, 69 (1986), 22-38. 3 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, rev. ed., tr.

Douglas Ainslie (London, 1922); hereafter cited in text as A. 4 For a brief account of this aspect of Croce and its criticism of Hegel, see John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 300-1. (The translated citation from Croce's Saggio Sullo Hegel appears on page 300.) Cf. Jacques Derrida, Positions, tr. Alan Bass (London, 1980), pp. 27-29. 5 See, respectively, Croce, Aesthetic, p. 26 (see also p. 30); Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), p. 158; and Positions, p. 27. 6 Derrida, Positions, pp. 27, 45.

7 See Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Hus- serl's Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill., 1973), p. 141; and also Derrida, Positions, p. 58. For Croce's challenge of such classificatory distinctions, see his Aesthetic, pp. 13-14, 67-70, 87-92, 114-15, 120, 142. 8 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1982), p. 346: "every translation is at the same time an interpretation." 9 See, e.g., Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, 1979), pp. 119-31; Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction:

Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 79-82, 175-80; Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), pp. 3-105; J. Hillis Miller, "The Critic as Host," in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (London, 1979), pp. 217-53; and Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (Lon- don, 1983), pp. 158-59. I should repeat that most of these theorists augment the Crocean line with other arguments for the essential unreadability (or necessity of

misreading) of texts. Consider, for example, de Man's argument for the fundamental and inescapable tension between the constative and the performative in all language, and Bloom's Freudian argument for the reader's anxiety of influence and consequent willful, self-assertive misprision. 10 Culler, p. 176. 11 Culler, pp. 123, 128; and, more generally, pp. 121-30.

216 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

12 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (Oxford, 1974), pp. 68-69, and

Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1958), ?? 143-242. For further elaboration of these

Wittgensteinian points, see Gordon P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Mean-

ing and Understanding (Oxford, 1983), pp. 29-45, 321-46; and Joseph Margolis, "Wittgenstein and Natural Languages: An Alternative to Rationalist and Empiricist Theories," in his Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht, 1984), pp. 133-62. 13 Such an account is available in the works cited in n. 12 and, with particular focus on literary criticism, in chs. three and five of my T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (New York, 1988), and my "Interpretation, Intention, and Truth,"Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46 (1988), 399-411. 14 Croce, Aesthetic, p. 126: "A condition of this historical labour [toward true inter-

pretation] is tradition .... Where the tradition is broken, interpretation is arrested." 15 See Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 (Minneapolis, 1982), p. 152. 16 See Gadamer, esp. pp. 265-78, 293-305; and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 11-17, 303-21, 338-55. 17 Nowhere, however, in theory or practice, does Croce present a full-blown, self- conscious, and unequivocal pragmatism. His literary criticism can be seen as develop- ing from an emphasis on the individuality of the intuition-expression and the artist to a more dominant emphasis on the universality of the artist and his work. Significant continuity exists, however, for artistic universality is claimed to be necessarily reflected

through individuality, in the manner of a Hegelian concrete universal. For a conve-

niently compact but detailed account of Croce's development as a literary critic, see Giovanni Gullace's "Translator's Introduction" to Croce, Poetry and Literature (Carbon- dale, Ill., 1981), pp. xxxix-lxxiv. 18 See Croce, Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, tr. Douglas Ainslie (New York, 1966), pp. 141, 147; hereafter cited in text as ASC. 19 With specific regard to Shakespeare, Croce asserts that the effect of philological and historical studies "is never to clear up or decide anything, but on the contrary, to darken what appeared perfectly certain." Hence we should "resolutely banish them from the mind, and read and reread Shakespeare's plays without more ado" (ACS 318). 20 It is interesting that William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, in "The Inten- tional Fallacy," The Verbal Icon, ed. William K. Wimsatt (Lexington, Ky., 1954), p. 282 n., note that Croce's critical practice is not consistent with the intentionalism they see as "the main drive of his Aesthetic." I briefly discuss Beardsley's aesthetic pragmatism in

"Analytic Aesthetics," pp. 33-34. 21 It is important to realize that the contingently and conventionally consensual need not be arbitrary in any cognitively vitiating sense. I have argued this in my paper "Convention: Variations on a Theme," Philosophical Investigations, 9 (1986), 36-55, where I show how the erroneous identification of conventionality with superficial, un- justified arbitrariness rests on a conflating confusion of two different senses of "contin-

gent" and "arbitrary." 22 Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson: A Perspective on Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation, ed. Ernest LePore (Ox- ford, 1986), pp. 334-35. 23 One might even be justified in calling Croce a turn-of-the-century thinker, since he published several philosophical papers (from as early as 1893) before (and to some extent prefiguring) his Aesthetic, published in 1900. For bibliographical details and a thorough study of Croce's philosophy, see Gian Napoleone Giordano Orsini, Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic (Carbondale, Ill., 1961).