The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4) / Hegel's Aesthetik

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

For the real content either remained essentially the natural according to its substance and abstract universality, and consequently the isolated thing in the objective world of Nature[123], although it was regarded as the real determination of that universality, was not able to present the same in a mode adequate to it, or that which is purely ideal, and only to be apprehended by spirit, in so far as it was received in the artistic content, carried with it in that which was foreign to its essential nature, namely the immediate individual and sensuous thing, the mode of its appearance that was in fact incongruent with it. And generally here significance and form only stood in the relation of mere affinity and suggestion; and however much in certain respects they could be brought together homogeneously, they as clearly fell apart again in other directions. This original unity was therefore torn asunder; this simple and abstract inwardness or ideality was imaged for the Hindoo conception of the world on the one side in the manifold reality of Nature, and on the other in finite human existence; and the imagination, in the unrest of its impetuous motion, was carried from the one to the other by turns, without being either able to deliver the ideal in its essentially pure and absolute self-subsistency, or to thoroughly infuse it with the phenomenal matter as it was presented and informed, and so reproduce it throughout that material in undisturbed union. The disorder and grotesque appearance, which arose in the commingling of elements opposed to one another, no doubt again vanished, but only to make way for an enigmatical condition equally unsatisfying, which, instead of solving the problem, was only able to prevent the problem's solution. For here, too, still was lacking the freedom and self-subsistency of content, which only thereby is rendered explicit in that the Inward is presented to consciousness as in itself a whole, and by this means as that which overlaps the externality which in the first instance is other than itself and foreign to itself. This essential self-subsistency, cognized as free and absolute significance, is self-consciousness, which has for its content the Absolute, and for its form the subjectivity of Spirit. In contradistinction to this self-determining, thinking, willing power everything else is self-subsistent in merely a relative and momentary sense. The material phenomena of Nature such as the sun, the heavens, stars, plants, animals, stones, streams and sea have only an abstract relation to themselves, and are in the eternal process of Nature bound up with other facts of natural existence, so that they can only pass as self-subsistent for the finite perception. The real significance of the Absolute is not presented in them. Nature is indeed under a mode expressed[124], but only under the mode of what is outside itself; its inwardness is not as such for itself, but poured forth into the varied show of its appearances, and consequently devoid of self subsistency. Only in Spirit as the concrete, free and, infinite self-relation, is the true and absolute significance actually disclosed, and self-subsistent under the mode of its determinate existence.

On the way to this emancipation of the Idea from the immediately sensuous medium and to its self-establishment we are confronted by the Sublime and the consecration of the imagination. The absolute significance is, that is to say, in the first instance the thinking, absolute and senseless[125] One, which is self-related as the Absolute, and in this relation affirms that which it creates; Nature and finitude generally, as the negative, thing, that which is essentially in itself devoid of stability. It is the explicit and essential Universal, conceived as the objective power over collective existence, whether it be that this One be brought now to consciousness and represented in its expressly negative attitude to the created, thing, or in its positively pantheistic inherence in the same. The twofold defect of this point of view, so far as it is connected with art, consists first in this that this One and Universal which constitutes the fundamental significance has not yet in itself arrived at the closer determination and distinction, and by this means just as little at the point of real individuality and personality in which it could be apprehended as Spirit, and could be set before the sensuous perception in a form which would be applicable to its spiritual content, according to its own notion, and duly conformable therewith. The concrete idea of Spirit on the contrary requires, that it both defines and distinguishes itself in itself, and by the very act of making itself an object discovers through this reduplication an external phenomenon, which although material and present, nevertheless is throughout permeated by Spirit, and consequently taken by itself expresses nothing at all, simply permitting Spirit to declare itself as its inner core, the expression and reality of which it is. Secondly, from the point of view of the objective world the defect is bound up with this abstraction of an Absolute to which the principle of self-determination is lacking that now also the real phenomenon, being that which is essentially without substance, is unable to set forth under any true mode the Absolute in concrete shape. In contrast to those songs of praise and glory, those celebrations of the abstract and universal majesty of God, we have now in the passage we are making to a higher form of art to recall to our minds that phase of negativity, change, pain, and progress through life and death, which we discovered among other matter in the conceptions of the East. We have here set before us the principle of self-distinction in its essential character under a mode which is unable to unite with its conception the unity and self-subsistency of that subjective principle. Both aspects, however, both the essential and self-substantive unity, and the differentiation of that unity by virtue of a self-defined content, are equally necessary to unfold a true and free self-subsistency in its concrete and mediate totality.

In this connection we may incidentally, together with this reference to the Sublime, mention that further conception which at the same time entered on its process of explication in the East. It is that apprehension, in opposition to the substantiality of the one God, of internal freedom, self-subsistency and innate independence of the individual, so far as the elaboration of this impulse was permitted to Eastern nations. The main source of this attitude we must seek for among the Arabs, who in their deserts, upon the infinite sea of these expanses, with the clear heavens over their heads, in a nature such as this have emphasized their own courage and the bravery of their hand, as also the means of their self-preservation, whether it be camel, horse, lance, or sword. Here we find the more stubborn independence of personal character asserting itself in its contrast to the Hindoo softness and lack of individuality, as also to the more recent pantheism of Mohammedan poetry, and opposing also to the objective world its circumscribed, securely defined and immediate reality. With this incipient stage of the independence of the individual we must also associate free friendship, hospitality, and august nobility, but at the same time an insatiable lust of revenge and the inextinguishable memory of a hate, which is insistent and will have satisfaction with an unsparing passion and an absolutely remorseless cruelty. None the less all that happens on this soil is wholly within the circle of humanity. We have here deeds of revenge, conditions of love, traits of self-sacrificing nobility from which the fantastic and the wonderful have vanished; everything is carried forward in the secure and determinate shape which the causative connection of the facts necessitate. A similar conception of real objects which are referred to their determinate basis of actuality[126], and are made visible in their free power, not merely in that which conserves an exterior purpose[127], we discovered in an earlier stage of our investigations among the Hebrews. The more assured independence of character, the savagery of revenge and hate lie, too, at the root of the original Jewish nationality. But the difference is at once pronounced, that in this case even the most powerful images of Nature are depicted less for their own sake than for that of the glory of God, as related to which they at once again lose their self-subsistency; and furthermore even hate and persecution are not merely a personal matter affecting persons, but are embraced in the service of God as national vengeance against whole peoples. As, for example, the later Psalms and yet more the prophets frequently only are able to desire and plead for the misfortune and overthrow of other nations, and not unfrequently find the main strength of their utterance in curses and imprecations.

No doubt the elements of true beauty and art are presented to each of these points of view above noticed; but they are in the first instance brought together in haphazard and confused fashion, and are set in a false relation to each other, instead of being referred to a genuine principle of identity. For this reason the purely ideal and abstract unity of the Divine is unable to bring forth any entirely adequate art-product in the form that is characterized by real individuality; and at the same time Nature and human individuality either are manifestly not, whether we consider their inward principle, or their external mode of appearance, permeated by the Absolute, or at least not positively pervaded by it. This externality of significance, which is thus made the essential content, and the determinate mode of appearance under which it is generally reproduced is finally and in the third place exemplified in the comparative activity of art[128]. In this type both sides have become wholly independent, and the unity that binds them together is merely the invisible subjectivity which compares. For this very reason that which is defective in such an external presentment returned in ever more emphatic degree and betrayed itself as that which was for the genuine art representation merely negative or, rather, entirely subversive. And when this dissolution is really effected the significance can no longer remain the inherently abstract ideal, but the inherently determinate and self-defined ideal principle, which in this its concrete totality possesses quite as essentially the other aspect thereof, that is, the form of an inherently exclusive and determinate appearance; and consequently in its external existence, as that which is its very own, merely expresses and signifies itself.

1. This essentially free totality which remains constant to itself throughout each successive self-determination in something other than itself, this ideal principle, which in its objectivity is self-related is the essentially true, free, and self-subsistent, which in its determinate existence unfolds nothing other than itself. In the realm of art, however, this form is not present in its form of infinitude, is not, that is, the thinking of itself, as the essential, absolute, which is made an object for itself in the form of ideal universality, and makes itself, wholly explicit, but is still in immediate natural and sensuous existence. In so far, however, as significance is self-substantive, it must in art borrow its form from its own resources and inherently possess the principle of its externality. It must consequently, it is true, repair to Nature, but as predominant over that which is external, which, in so far as it is itself an aspect of the totality of this ideal realm, no longer exists as purely natural objectivity, but being without its own self-subsistence, simply serves as the expression of Spirit. In this interpenetration consequently the natural form and externality, which is modified by Spirit contains out and out on its part, as immediately given, its significance in itself, and no longer points to this as to something separate and different from the corporeal appearance. And this is that identification of the spiritual and natural which is appropriate to the notion of Spirit, which, that is, does not merely proceed no further than the neutralization of the two opposed aspects, but raises that which is spiritual into the higher totality, in which it is able to preserve itself in its own Other, to bring the natural within its own ideal range and to express itself in and relatively to the natural. It is on this type of unity that the notion of classical art is based.

(a) This identity of significance and bodily form may be approached yet more closely under the view of it that no separation of these opposed aspects[129] takes place within their consummated union; and consequently the ideal principle does not, as purely inward spirituality, return upon itself from out of the corporeal and concrete reality, under a process which would give us once more the distinction of these aspects in opposition. And inasmuch as the objective and external, in which Spirit is made visible as an object of sense, according to the very notion of it, is at once throughout defined and separate, mind which is free, and which it is the function of art to elaborate in the form of reality truly commensurate with it, can only be that spiritual individuality which is not merely defined but essentially self-consistent in its natural form. For this reason it is the human which constitutes the centre and content of true beauty and art; but as content of art—we have already developed the subject in discussing the notion of the Ideal—it is brought under the essential determination of concrete individuality and the external appearance adequate thereto, which in its objectivization has been thus purified from the imperfection of the finite condition.

(b) Under such a consideration of the matter it is at once obvious that the classical mode of representation, if we take it for what it essentially is, can no longer be of the symbolic type in the strict sense of the term, however much now and again we may find along with it the play of that which belongs to symbolism. Greek mythology, for example, which, in so far as art asserts its mastery over it, belongs to the classical Ideal, is, if we grasp it in its fundamental character, not of a beauty which is symbolical, but unfolded under the genuine character of the Art-ideal, albeit there may be certain remnants of symbolism which adhere to it, as we shall shortly see.

If we now proceed to ask ourselves what, then, is the nature of the determinate form, which can thus enter into this unity with Spirit without offering merely the suggestion of its content, we shall find it determined for us in the conception that in classical art both content and form must be adequate, must, that is, in the aspect of form meet the demands of totality and essential self-subsistency. For it is a prime condition of the free self-subsistence[130] of the whole, which constitutes the fundamental determination of classical art, that either of these aspects, the ideal form no less than its external embodiment, should be essentially a totality which goes to make the notion of the whole. Only by this means is either side essentially identical with the other, and consequently their difference reduced to the purely formal differences of one and the same, through which also the totality appears now as free, the adequacy of both of its aspects being now fully displayed, inasmuch as it declares itself in either of them and is one and the same in both.

The lack of this free reduplication of itself within the same unity carried with it in the symbolic type precisely this absence of freedom in the content and with it also in the form. Spirit was here not clear to itself, and for this reason declared its external reality not as that which belonged to itself, set forth in its explicit significance through and in it. Conversely the form had no doubt to be significant, but its significance only lay partly and on one side in it. The external existence gave here primarily to what passed for its ideal aspect, though still under a mode that was external, merely itself instead of a significance which declared an ideal content; and in attempting to show that there was something further which it suggested its power was necessarily put under a constraint. In this distortion it neither remained true to itself, nor was it the Other, that is significance, but declared nothing save that which was a problematical connection and confusion between incompatible things, or tended to be the purely co-adjutant attire and external adornment of what was simply the glorification of the one absolute significance of all things whatever, until it was finally obliged to surrender itself to the purely subjective caprice of comparison with a significance which was far removed from it and indifferent to it. If this relation of unfreedom is to find a release the form must already inherently possess its significance, or, to speak more definitely, must possess the significance of mind or Spirit itself. This form is essentially the human form because the externality of this form is alone capable of revealing the spiritual in sensuous guise. Human expression in countenance, eye, pose, and carriage is, it is true, material and therein not that which the spirit is; but within this corporeal frame itself the human exterior is not merely alive and a part of Nature as the animal is, but it is the bodily presence which reflects Spirit to itself. Through the human eye we look into the soul of a man just as through the entire presentment of him his spiritual character is expressed. When consequently the body belongs to Spirit, as its determinate presence, Spirit is also that ideal principle which is appropriate to the body, and is no form of ideality which is foreign to the external form in the sense that materiality still inherently possesses a significance other than that to which it testifies or suggests. It is quite true that the human form still carries within it much of the universal animal type, but the fundamental distinction between the human and the animal body consists simply in this, that the human is obviously, by virtue of its entire conformation, declared as the dwelling, nay, we may add the only possible dwelling-place of Spirit. And for this reason also it is only in the body that Spirit is immediately present to others. This is, however, not the place to discuss the necessity[131] of this association and the peculiar reciprocity of soul and body. We must here assume this necessity. We have, of course, many indications on the human figure of death and ugliness, that is, of other influences and defects which are traceable to their source. When we find this to be the case it is the function of art to expunge the divergence between the purely natural and the spiritual, to exalt the external bodily appearance to a form of beauty, that is, a form throughout dominated and suffused with the animation of Spirit.