The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's AesthetikHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Aesthetics
Agreeably with such a content the sensuous element of art has likewise
to show itself potentially adapted to such particularization and the
display of such an inward content of heart and mind. Media of this
description are supplied by colour, musical tones, and finally in sound
as mere sign for ideal perceptions and conceptions; and we further
obtain the means of realizing with the use of such media a content
of this kind in the arts of painting, music, and poetry. Throughout
this sphere the sensuous medium is found to be essentially disparate
in itself and throughout posited[162] as ideal. In this way it
responds in the highest degree to the fundamentally spiritual content
of art, and the coalescence of spiritual significance and sensuous
material attains a more intimate union than was possible either in
architecture or sculpture. At the same time such a union is necessarily
more near to soul-life, leaning exclusively to the subjective side
of human experience; one which, in so far as form and content are
thus constrained to particularization and to posit their result as
ideal, can only be actually effected at the expense of the objective
universality of the content as also of the fusion with the immediately
sensuous medium[163].
The arts, then, which are lifted into a higher strain of ideality,
abandoning as they do the symbolism of architecture and the classical
Ideal of sculpture, accept their predominant type from the _romantic_
art-form; and these are the arts most fitted to express its mode of
configuration. They are, however, a totality of arts, because the
romantic type is itself essentially the most concrete.
(_c_) The articulation of this _third sphere_ of the particular arts
may be fixed as follows:
(_α_) The _first_ art which comes next to sculpture is that of
painting. It avails itself for a medium of its content and the plastic
configuration of the same of visibility as such, to the extent that
it is differentiated in its own nature, in other words is defined in
the continuity of colour. No doubt the material of architecture and
sculpture is likewise both visible and coloured. It is, however, not,
as in painting, visibility in its pure nature, not the essentially
simple light, which by its differentiating of itself in its opposition
to darkness, and in association with that darkness gives rise to
colour[164]. This quality of visibility made essentially ideal[165]
and treated as such no longer either requires, as in architecture, the
abstractly mechanical qualities of mass as appropriate to materials of
weight, nor, as is the case with sculpture, the complete dimensuration
of spatial condition, even when concentrated into organic forms. The
visibility and the making apparent, which belong to painting, possess
differences of quality under a more ideal mode--that is, in the
specific varieties of colour--which liberates art from the objective
totality of spatial condition, by being limited to a plane surface.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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