This article examines the reception of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Lectures on Aesthetics by Benedetto Croce. As one of his few constructive critics, Croce considers Schleiermacher’s aesthetics to be the most remarkable of its entire epoch and sees in it approaches to a conception of aesthetic expressivity, which Croce founded in his Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic with the concept of “intuitive recognition.” To answer the question of how Croce brings forth this astonishing view of Schleiermacher’s aesthetics, this article first presents the key points of Croce’s interpretation and then examines them in the light of current research, emphasizing the basic lines of Schleiermacher’s aesthetics.

aesthetics, aesthetic expressivity, Croce, ethics, individual activity, intuitive recognition, language, Schleiermacher