This essay arises from the need to clarify whether in the present cultural muddle, which for some time has been seen as being at "the end of history", and in the present condition of aesthetic research, which for some decades has showed such a marked and shattering polymorphism of knowledge as to threaten to blow up the unity of the discipline, it still makes sense, and, if so, on what conditions of scientific rigour, to hypothesize speaking of a "history of aesthetics".
The author criticizes opinions and practices which conceive of the historiographical task as being inside and dependent on the theoretical one, observing that historiographic research which is not sufficiently aware of its own scientific vocation is prevented, on the one hand, from fully expressing its own virtual potential while, on the other it risks not even being able to provide stimulating motivations for its own speculation. He therefore advocates a distinction between two specific epistemic profiles, one configurated as "history" and one as "theory". History and theory thus have equal scientific ranks, each having an autonomous methodologically articulated goal, and cooperating, in different forms, through continual reciprocal enrichment, in nourishing the universe of research.
In order to begin to explore the complex problems posed by this theme, preliminary research has been carried out "in medias res", through the deep analysis of an exemplary historiographical proposal. We refer to the History of Aesthetics, published by Benedetto Croce in 1902 as the second part of Estetica, which is the most famous unitary and general history of aesthetics in the 20th century, and indeed has been judged to be «the best that exists» (Wellek). It is a highly interesting text, also because it is from it that derives the tendency to work out the history of aesthetics in a speculative way, that is to say to consider it as an aspect of theoretical reflection, and so to practise historiography which by intrinsic vocation is highly dependent on theoretical interests; this text thus makes it possible to scrutinize with the greatest clarity both the way this approach is constituted and above all the historical limits, and the historiographical consequences, which derive from the maintenance, implicit, involuntary and even partial, of that model, and more in general of such models, however different they may appear to be from Croce's.
The careful analysis of the "History" is deepened and broadened through a minute examination of external sources which are not very well known or so far have been neglected, such as the very correspondence between Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile and a note written by Croce in 1901 on the history of science, and more in general a great number of other works by Croce. Consideration of Croce's paradigm of the history of aesthetics, centred on the methodological polarity of history/prehistory and on the thesis of the eighteenthcentury origin of aesthetics, has also involved clarification of the genesis of this model. This genesis is placed in the debate beginning in the 18th century with the coining of the word "aesthetica" and the new prospects opened up for the discipline by Baumgarten, side by side with the parallel and convergent proposal of a "system of the Fine Arts" by Batteux, which led the first historian of aesthetics, Robert Zimmermann, to outline (in 1858) a historiography which was predominantly speculative and gave little importance to true hstoriographic observation; it was this approach that Croce took over. In the latter's "History", moreover, the original model was to be reinforced and made more rigorous by a polemic element linked to Croce's intention to reformulate aesthetics as the philosophical science of expressive activity.
The essay ends with the proposal that the history of aesthetics, a history of aesthetics aware of its own epistemic role and of present needs, abandoning the placeless search for a mythical "truth" of the discipline, should address its commitment to an understanding of the determined "sense" of aesthetic research in the different epistemic thresholds, and of the "significance" that its theorizing has taken on within these thresholds, investigating how and to what extent in the course of time it has represented and interpreted its own paradigmatic existence.