What is Aesthetic Progress? Outlines of Philosophy of History in Croce’s Aesthetics

Progress in the contemporary world is often considered as something for the scrap heap, an “anachronism,” which reflection on history is obliged to do without. It has been the logic of events, from the twentieth century onward, that has made a desecrating, continuous declaration of the fallibility of that law which, since the Enlightenment, seemed to govern the course of human history. Benedetto Croce reflected at length on the idea of progress and pointed out several critical aspects of it. In his most mature reflection on history, he distinguished progress as a “state of mind” from progress as a “philosophical concept”: if we can and must learn to do without the former, because it has no scientific-philosophical foundation, the latter must instead be recovered in a dialectical vision of history that knows the criterion of progression, but is always associated with that of regression, decadence, and catastrophe. In short, only a dialectical view of history teaches us to consider the positive and the negative together. This article discusses Croce’s early thinking on progress: it considers his early writings on aesthetics and shows how the contradic- tions of progress were already visible when Croce was discussing progress applied to poetry or art. These tentative theories on aesthetic progress help to identify lines of philosophy of history in Croce’s aesthetics. This is possible due to the deep connection Croce establishes between art and history.