The spirit’s being is its alteration. The more it is,—that is, the more it becomes, the more it lives,—the more difficult it is for it to recognise itself in the object. It might therefore be said that he who increases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if 229 he is unable to trace this knowledge back to its origin, and if the spirit’s rally does not induce him to rediscover himself at the bottom of the object, which has been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more from the secret source of its own becoming. Thus it happens, as was said of old, that “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” All human sorrow proceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty.
Subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in their living unity, the spirit, which therefore is neither a subject standing against an object, nor its opposite. The two terms, each one for itself, isolated, are equivalent. But every time human thought has isolated them, whether striving to conceive itself, its own spiritual substance, objectively (God), or as a simple subject (a particular man), it has ever reached most desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way to the comprehension and justification of its own subjectivity, and now secluding itself in an abstract subjectivity, removed from all which man theoretically and practically needs in order to live. The reality of the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the object, but in the subject that has in itself the object as its actuality.
It is on account of this inseverable unity, by which the subject presses to itself the object and becomes actual therein, that the progressive alteration of the 230 object is also the progressive alteration of the subject. At every given moment, the subject, altered as it is, made into the “other” or determined, is yet pure subject, and nothing else than the subject which becomes conscious of itself, and therefore actual by determining itself as subject of its object, in such a way that the subject as well as the object is always new and always different. Not because it is now one subject and now another, in which case succession and enumeration would import multiplicity, and would therefore reduce the spirit to a thing; but because it appears and cannot but appear thus, if observed from the point of view which distinguishes one individual from another, and in the same individual one instant from the next, although from a rigorously idealistic point of view the spirit is one, and its determinateness does not detract from its absolute originality.
This dialectic in which the spiritual becoming unfolds itself (subject, object, and unity of subject and object), this self-objectifying or self-estrangement aiming at self-attainment,—this is the eternal life of the spirit, which creates its immortal forms, and determines the ideal contents of culture and education. The spirit’s self-realisation is the realisation of the subject, of the object, and of their relationship. If of these three terms (the third being the synthesis of the first and second) any one should fail, the spiritual reality would cease to be.
This threefold realisation admits empirically of a separation that makes it possible to have one without the others. On the strength of this triple division we speak of art, of religion, and of philosophy, as though each one of them could subsist by itself. So that commonly people believe that it is possible to be a poet without in any way burdening one’s mind with religion or philosophy,—especially philosophy, which appears to be the bugbear of most poets. In the same way many philosophers, and among them one of the very greatest, held art to be the negation of philosophy, to the point that it should be banished from the kingdom where the latter was expected to reign. And how often has religion taken up arms, now against poetry, and now against speculation! All of these occurrences were possible because the three terms were looked upon as separable, as though they were three material things, each one of which could be what it was only on condition that it excluded the others.
A superficial understanding of the differences intervening between these three terms is the reason why they are often looked upon as separable. But in reality they are so indissolubly conjoined, that separation would destroy their spiritual character, and put in its place mechanism, which is the property of all that is not spirit.
Art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject. 232 Man becomes enfolded in his subjectivity, and hears but the voice of love or other inward summons. Living without communication with the world, he refrains from affirming and denying what exists and what does not exist. He simply spreads out over his own abstract interior world, and dreams; and as he dreams, he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of his enchanted realm, which is true in itself until he issues from it and discovers it to be a figment of his phantasy. This man is the artist, who, we might say, neither cognises nor acts, but sings.
His subjectivity appears empirically to us always as a determined subjectivity, the determination of which proceeds from the object in which the spirit, theoretically and practically, has previously objectified itself. But this priority of the act, by which the artist is considered a man of this objective world before he withdraws into his dreams, is a mere empirical appearance. If we relied on it, we could not preserve to the spirit in its artistic life that originality and autonomy, that absolute spontaneity and freedom, which is the essential character or, as we called it, the attribute of spiritual activity. To become objective, the spirit must first be subject; and in front of the object in which it objectifies itself, it again inevitably becomes subject,—an ever determined one indeed, but nothing else than a subject. That is why the contemporary theory of aesthetics holds that form in art 233 absorbs in itself the content, with no residuum. It absorbs it qua subjectivity; for whatever the object be which this subjectivity, empirically considered, has enwrapped, it draws it entirely over to itself, reassumes it, and as pure subjectivity it cannot return to its object without passing through the moment of its opposition to the object,—the moment in which the subject is nothing else than subject, and finds in itself infinite gratification. This is the realm of art, a realm from which the spirit, in consequence of the very function of the subject, is compelled to issue; since the subject is subject in that it issues from itself, becomes self-conscious, objectifies itself. So the poet as he dreams breathes life into the personages of his dreams, builds them up, and gives them reality. What is his own abstract subjectivity he chooses as a world in which he himself may live absolutely; and the ideas which mature in that fantastic world of his—which is nothing more, as I have said, than his abstract subjectivity—are affirmed by him without any reserves, and are opposed to the ideas of philosophers and of men who prefer concrete reality to phantasy.
This lyrical bent, peculiar to the artist who enhances himself by exalting his own abstract individuality, is in direct contrast with the tendency of the Saint, who crushes and annihilates this same individuality in the face of his God,—that God who infinitely occupies his consciousness as the “other” in absolute 234 alterity to him, so that the subject is hurled into the object in a total self-abstraction. It sinks in the contemplation of its own self in its objective “otherness,” of itself become the other, in which it no longer recognises itself. So he deifies this other self, places it on the altar, and kneels before it. Thus the saint’s personality is nullified; or rather, it is actualised and realised in this self-annulment, which is the theoretical and practical characteristic of mysticism and the specific act of religion.