The boundary of history: language or art?

The article contains a position that explains the historical conditions that limit the historical field by introduction of a historical analysis of certain differences between the language and the arts. Particular attention is paid to Croce’s position serving as a strong counterweight to the other two points of view - Windelband’s and Dilthey’s - on the interaction of history, art and language unfolding in the cognitive field. In particular, Dilthey classifies history to the field of "sciences of the spirit" primarily to separate it from the field of physics and biology which, in his opinion, entirely belong to the field of "sciences of nature". Windelband stressed the unscientific nature of historical knowledge due to the difference of goals and intentions, historical knowledge being descriptive and scientific knowledge being nomothetic. Thus both positions proclaim the totality of cognitive activity in its relation to the strictly scientific field and to history, and even to the arts. According to the apt remark by Rorty, this situation argues the totalitarian language, or even more obvious - is a "linguistic prison" to any impression gained from the outside world. On the contrary, Croce, as it seems, struggles to resist this, when he mentions about no distinguishing between experience and language, art and history, art and language in an attempt to overcome the boundary between language and experience, placing language, history, and arts in the cognitive space. Gradually, he strengthens us in thinking about the possibility of presenting history as art and since the boundary between them cannot be completely overcome (otherwise performance of cognitive activity would be impossible), art functions as a boundary. However, this leads to more internal contradictions arising from necessity and with further identification of intuition and expression, which leads Croce to a conclusion that intuition and expression are basically the same, for expression (along with intuition) is a spiritual action. This is even more confusing, since Croce neutralizes the specificity of the two distinct, in our opinion, actions, and explains their identification by a necessity for them to acquire meanings. This puts everything in its place, because it finally clarifies and allows to determine Croce’s position as aggressive linguicism.

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