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

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

(β) Secondly, the kind of prose life, from which poetry has to separate itself, postulates an entirely different nature of conception and speech.

(αα) In other words, looked at from one point of view, such a consciousness regards the wide expanse of reality according to that association of cause and effect, object and means, and all other categories of the mode of reflection which deals with finite conditions and the objective world generally, that is, the limited categories of science or the understanding. It is a feature of such thought that every particular trait should at one moment appear with a false subsistency, at another should be placed in the position of bare relation to something else, that as such it should be so apprehended in its relativity and dependence that no unity of a free nature whatever is possible, no unity, that is, which remains essentially throughout, and in all its branches and separate filaments, a complete and free totality, no unity, in short, where we find that the individual aspects are simply the appropriate explication and phenomenal presence of one content which constitutes the point of focus, the soul that unites all together, and which also finds its vital principle in this all-pervading centre of animation. Rather the type of conception we above refer to as that of science goes no further than the discovery of particular laws in phenomena, and persists for this reason in the separation, or bare relation, of the particular existence with its general law, the laws themselves under this view tending to harden from each other in their isolate singularity; that their relation is, in fact, conceived exclusively under external and finite conditions.

(ββ) And, furthermore, man's ordinary consciousness has nothing to do with what we call the ideal principle of association, the essential core of facts, their bases, causes, ends, and so forth. It rests satisfied with the acceptance of the mere fact that something exists or happens as distinct from something else; or, in other words, with its insignificant contingency. It is no doubt true that the unity of life is not, in such a case, deliberately cancelled by any express separation; that unity, I mean, in which the intuition of the poet arrests the ideal rationale of the fact, its expression and determinate existence. What, however, is absent here, is just that flash of insight into this core of reason and significance, which becomes consequently for our intelligence a thing essentially vacant, possessing no further claim on our minds to a rational interest. The comprehension of a rational cosmos; and its relations is exchanged then and there for a mere flux and contiguity of indifference, which it is true may possess a large expanse of external animation, but which none the less suffers the profounder impulse of reason[4] to remain unsatisfied. True vision, no less than soul-life in its full vigour, can only obtain satisfaction, where such are made aware in phenomena, through feeling no less than contemplation, of the reality in its essence and truth which is compatible with such a world. The life which is a mere external show is defunct to our deeper sense, if all that is ideal and intrinsically rich in significance fails to shine through as the very soul thereof.

(γγ) These defects, thirdly, in the conceptions of science and our ordinary conscious life speculative thought effaces. It stands, therefore, in one respect in affinity with the imagination of the poet. The cognizance of reason[5] is not solely, or even mainly, concerned with contingent singularity, nor does it overlook in the phenomenal world the essence of the same. It does not rest satisfied with the differentiations and external relations proper to the conceptions and deductions of the understanding; it unites them in a free totality, which in the apprehension of our finite faculty in part fails to preserve its self-consistency, and in part is posited in a relation that possesses no synthetic unity. Pure thought, however, can have but one result, namely thoughts. It evaporates the mode of reality in that of the pure notion. And although it grasps and comprehends actual things in their essential separation and their actual existence, it does also nevertheless translate this particularity into the ideal element of the universal, in which alone thought is at home with itself. Consequently there arises, in contrast to the world of phenomena, a world that is new in this sense, that though the truth of the Real is present, it is not displayed in reality itself as the power itself which gives it form and the veritable soul thereof. Thinking is simply a reconciliation of truth with reality in Thought. The creations and reconstruction, however, of the poet is a reconciliation under the mode of phenomenal reality itself, albeit such a real appearance is merely ideally conceived.

(γ) We have, therefore, two distinct spheres of consciousness, that of poetry and prose. In former times, in which there is neither present a deliberate outlook on the world elaborated, in respect to its religious belief and its general knowledge, under the co-ordinated form of scientific ideas and cognition, nor an actual world of human condition regulated conformably to such a standard, poetry is confronted with a lighter task. Prose is not in such a case opposed to it as an essentially independent field of ideal and external existence, which it has first to overcome. Its problem is for the most part simply limited to deepening all that is significant or transparent in the forms of ordinary consciousness. If, on the contrary, the prose of life has already appropriated within its mode of vision the entire content of conscious life, setting its seal on all and every part of it, the art of poetry is forced to undertake the task of melting all down again and re-coining the same anew. In every direction it finds itself involved in difficulties by the unresponsive nature of prosaic existence. It has, in short, not only to wrest itself from the adherence of ordinary consciousness to all that is indifferent and contingent, and to raise the scientific apprehension of the cosmos of fact to the level of reason's profounder penetration, or to translate speculative thought into terms of the imagination, giving a body to the same in the sphere of intelligence itself; it has further to convert in many ways the mode of expression common to the ordinary consciousness into that appropriate to poetry; and, despite of all deliberate intention enforced by such a contrast and such a process, to make it appear as though all such purpose was absent, preserving the original freedom essential to all art.

(c) We have now summarized in its most general terms that in which the content of poetry consists. We have further distinguished the form of poetry from that of prose. In conclusion, it is of importance to draw attention to the particularization which the art of poetry, to a degree unattained by the other arts, whose development is not nearly so rich in results, admits of. We find, no doubt, architecture illustrated in the arts of very varied peoples, and continuous through many centuries. But of sculpture, at least, it is true that it reaches its culminating point in the ancient world of Greece and Rome, just as painting and music have done more recently in Christendom. The art of poetry celebrates its epochs of brilliancy and bloom among all nations and in all ages almost that present any real artistic activity at all. It embraces the collective Spirit of mankind, and it is differentiated through every kind of variation.

(α) Furthermore, inasmuch as poetry does not accept the universal in scientific abstraction from its object, but seeks to represent what is rational under the mode of individuality,[6] the specific traits of national character are essential to its growth; the content and the particular mode of its presentation are in fact conditioned by the nature of these and the general outlook in each case. We find it consequently adapting itself to every variety of form and peculiarity. It matters not what the poetry may be, whether Oriental, Italian, Spanish, English, Roman, Hellenic, or German, each and all differ totally in their spirit, emotional impulse, general outlook and expression.

A similar distinctive variety asserts itself in particular epochs as they are favourable to the art of poetry or the reverse. The results secured, for example, by our German poetry were impossible in the Middle Ages, or the times of the thirty years' war. The particular motives, which in our own day excite the greatest interest, are inseparable from the entire evolution of contemporary life. And in the same way every age has its own wider or more restricted, more exalted and liberal, or more depressed phase of emotional life, in short its specific outlook on the world, which it is the express aim of poetry to bring home to the artistic consciousness in the most intelligible and complete manner, inasmuch as language is the one medium capable of expressing the human spirit wherever and in whatever form it may be manifested.

(β) Among these national characteristics, or views and opinions peculiar to particular epochs, some have closer affinity with the poetic impulse than others. The Oriental consciousness is, for example, in general more poetic than the Western mind, if we exclude Greece. In the East the principle predominant is always that of coherence, solidity, unity, substance. An outlook of this nature is intrinsically most penetrative, even though it may fail to reach the freedom of the Ideal. Our Western point of view, especially that of modern life, is based on the endless breaking up and division of its boundless material into fragments, in virtue of which process, the extreme emphasis laid here on particular facts, what is merely finite becomes substantive for the imagination, and despite of this must be once more subsumed under the converse action of relativity. For the Oriental nothing persists as really substantive, but everything appears as contingent, discovering its supreme focus, stability and final justification in the One, the Absolute, to which it is referred.