The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory EssayHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Aesthetics; Art -- Philosophy
([Greek: bb]) A second mode in which the externally present may be
related to the mind is, in contrast with singular sensuous perception
and desire, the purely theoretical relation to the _Intelligence_. The
theoretic contemplation of things has no interest in consuming them as
particulars, in satisfying itself sensuously, and in preserving itself
by their means, but rather in becoming acquainted with them in their
universality, in finding their inner being and law, and in conceiving
them in terms of their notion. Therefore the theoretical interest
lets the single things be, and holds aloof from them as sensuous
particulars, because this sensuous particularity is not what the
contemplation exercised by the intelligence looks for. For the rational
intelligence does not belong, as do the desires, to the individual
subject[63] as such, but only to the individual as at the same time
in his nature universal. In as far as man has relation to things in
respect of this universality, it is his universal reason which attempts
to find himself in nature, and thereby to reproduce the inner essence
of things, which sensuous existence, though having its ground therein,
cannot immediately display. But again, this theoretic interest, the
satisfaction of which is the work of science, is in the scientific
form no more shared by art, than the latter makes common cause with
the impulse of the purely practical desires. Science may, no doubt,
start from the sensuous thing in its individuality, and may possess a
sensuous idea of the way in which such an individual presents itself in
its individual colour, shape, size, etc. Still, this isolated sensuous
thing, as such, has no further relation to the mind, inasmuch as the
intelligence aims at the universal, the law, the thought and notion of
the object. Not only, therefore, does it abandon all intercourse with
the thing as a given individual, but transforms it within the mind,
making a concrete object of sense into an abstract matter of thought,
and so into something quite other than the same object _qua_ sensuous
phenomenon. The artistic interest, as distinguished from science, does
not act thus. Artistic contemplation accepts the work of art just as
it displays itself _qua_ external object, in immediate determinateness
and sensuous individuality clothed in colour, figure, and sound, or as
a single isolated perception, etc., and does not go so far beyond the
immediate appearance of objectivity which is presented before it, as
to aim, like science, at apprehending the notion of such an objective
appearance as a universal notion.
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