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

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Earnestness and depth of consciousness should no doubt be prominent in the expression of such heads, but the specific features and lines both of countenance and figure ought as little to be of a simply ideal beauty as they are entitled to fall short in the direction of the commonplace and the ugly, or erroneously to aspire after the bare pretensions of the Sublime. The truest success in respect to the external figure will be found in a mean between the directness of Nature's detail and the ideal of beauty. Rightly to hit on this just mean is difficult. It is pre-eminently in this that the ability, taste, and genius of an artist will assert itself. And in general we may assert that in all artistic execution of this character—putting on one side entirely the different nature of the content, which is inseparable from religious faith—there is more scope offered for the exercise of the artist's private judgment than is the case when dealing with the classic Ideal. In classical art the artist seeks to present the spiritual and Divine immediately in the lines of the bodily shape itself, in the organism of the human figure; the lines of the human form, therefore, in this ideal divergence from what is ordinarily met with in finite existence, are fundamentally necessary to the interest. In the kind of art we are now discussing the configuration remains that of ordinary experience; its specific lines are up to a certain point unessential, detail, in short, that may indifferently be treated in divers ways and with greater artistic licence. The supreme interest, therefore, is concentrated, on the one hand, in the mode and manner whereby our artist makes that which is spiritual and ideal within the content under the mode of Spirit itself shine forth through this envisagement of ordinary experience; and, on the other hand, in the individual discretion exercised in the execution, the technical means and shifts employed, by virtue of which he is able to impart to his creations the breath of spiritual life and to bring home this finer essence to our hearts and senses.

(β) With regard to the further aspect of the content we have already pointed out that it is referable to the history of the Absolute under the mode that the same is deducible from the notion of Spirit itself; a history which makes objective in the real world bodily and spiritual singularity as infused with its own essential and universal nature. For the reconciliation of our individual consciousness with God does not immediately appear as an original harmony, but rather as a harmony which only is modulated from infinite pain, from resignation, sacrifice, and the mortification of the finite, sensuous, and particular. We see here the finite and the infinite brought into unity; and this reconciliation only asserts itself in its true profundity, intimacy, and power by means of the grossness and severity of the contradiction which yearns for resolution. We may therefore without fear assert that the entire asperity and dissonance of the suffering, torture, and agony, which such a contradiction brings in its train, is inseparable from the very nature of spiritual life, whose final consolation constitutes here the content.

This process of Spirit is, if accepted frankly for all it implies and unfolds, the essence, the notion of Spirit absolutely. It consequently determines for conscious life that universal history[226] which is for ever repeated in every individual consciousness. For it is nothing less or more than this consciousness as the universal mind or Spirit is explicated in the multiplicity of individual life, reality and existence. In the first instance, however, for the reason that the essential significance of the spiritual process is concentrated in that mode of reality which is purely individual, this universal history comes before us itself merely in the form of one person, to which it is conjoined as its own, as the history, that is, of his birth, his suffering, death, and return from death; at the same time there is the further significance attached to this personal history, namely, that it is the history of universal and absolute Spirit itself.

The supreme turning-point of this life of God is the putting aside of individual existence as the life of a particular man simply—the story of the Passion, the suffering on the Cross, the Calvary of Spirit, the agony of death. In so far as the content here comprises the fact that the external and bodily form—immediate existence in its personal mode—is, in the pain of its inherent contradiction, propounded in this aspect of negation in order that Spirit may secure its truth and its blessedness by the sacrifice of the sensuous and its individual singularity, to that extent we reach the extreme line of division between it as an artistic creation and the classic or plastic Ideal. From one point of view no doubt the earthly body and the frailty of human Nature is expressly exalted and honoured in the fact that it is God Himself who is made manifest within it. On the other hand, however, it is just this human and bodily side which is posited as negative, and declares itself in its pain. In the classic Ideal the undisturbed harmony in no way vanishes before the co-essential Spirit. The main incidents of that Passion, the mocking of Christ, the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross, the final death on the same in the agony of a torturing and tedious death, are wholly incompatible with the presentment of the Greek type of beauty. The lofty aspect in such situations as these is the essential holiness implied in them, the depth of the Spirit's inmost, the eternal significance of the agony in its relation to the spiritual process, the endurance and Divine repose.

The personal environment of this sublime figure is in part composed of friends and in part of enemies. The friends are throughout no ideal creations, but relatively to the notion[227], particular individualities typical of ordinary men, which the impulse of Spirit attaches to Christ: the enemies, on the other hand, by virtue of the fact that they place themselves in hostility to God, judge, mock, put to torture, and crucify Him, are presented to us as spiritually evil, and this conception of their wickedness of heart and enmity to God brings in its train on its exterior side ugliness, grossness, barbarity, the rage and distortion of Spirit. In all these respects, in contrast with the classical beauty we have before us in such representations the non-beautiful as an inevitable concomitant.

(γ) The process of death, however, in the Divine nature is only to be regarded as a point of transition, by means of which the self-reconcilement of Spirit is effected; and the aspects of the Divine and human, the out and out universal and the phenomenal individuality, to mediate the division of which is the main object in view, are positively suffered to coalesce. This positive affirmation, which is the underlying root and origination of the process, is consequently also forced to exhibit itself in a like positive way. As emphatic situations in the Christ-history the resurrection and ascension supply conspicuously the very means to put that affirmation in the clearest light. In more isolated fashion we have over and above this for the same purpose those occasions in which Christ appears to His own as teacher. Here, however, plastic art is confronted with an exceptional situation of difficulty. For in a measure it is Spirit in its purity, which is to be presented in this very impalpable ideality, and in a measure, too, it is nothing less than absolute Spirit, which in the full pregnancy of its infinitude and universality is affirmatively propounded in union with an individual consciousness and exalted above immediate existence; and yet notwithstanding such preconceptions it has undertaken the task to envisage for sense in the bodily configuration of this person the entire expression of the infinite and innermost spiritual profundity which it refers to him[228].

2. RELIGIOUS LOVE

Mind in its ultimate and most complete explication as reason is, as such, not the immediate object of art. Its highest and most essentially realized reconciliation can only find such satisfied consummation in the intellectual medium as such, that is to say, the ideal medium which is withdrawn from the reach of artistic expression; for absolute Truth stands on a higher level than the show of beauty, which is unable to break away from the sensuous and phenomenal. If, then, Spirit is to receive an existence as Spirit in its positive reconciliation through the medium of art, an existence which is apprehended not merely as ideal, in other words, as pure thought, but can be felt and envisaged, it follows that the only mode left to us, which supplies this two-fold condition of spirituality on the one hand and of its capability of being conceived and presented by art on the other, is that of the inner realm of Spirit itself, what we understand by the soul and its emotional experience. And the condition of that kingdom which alone fully answers to the notion of free Spirit brought into peace and joy with itself is Love.

(a) In other words, if we look at the content, we shall see that its articulation is in its important features similar to the fundamental notion of absolute Spirit, the return of a reconciled presence from its Other to itself. This Other in the sense of the Other, in which Spirit continues by itself, can only be itself something spiritual, or rather a spiritual personality. The true essence of love consists in the surrender of the self-consciousness, in the forgetting oneself in another self, yet for all that to have and possess oneself for the first time in this very act of surrender and oblivion. This mediation of Spirit with itself and surcharge of its own to the unit of totality is the Absolute, not, however, of course, under the mode in which the Absolute coalesces with itself as merely singular and thereby finite individuality in another finite subject; rather the content of the spiritual individuality which is here self-mediated in another is the Absolute itself. It is, in short, Spirit which is only the knowledge and volition of its own substance as the Absolute by being in another, and which receives therewith the fruition of such knowledge.