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
In this sphere of human existence, which is fundamentally the same as
purely animal life, the content of such satisfaction is, however, of a
finite and limited range. Such satiety carries with it no permanence,
but moves forward without rest to a renewed sense of want. Men eat,
drink, and sleep, and on the morrow are as hungry and weary as before.
Man is compelled, therefore, to strive for a freedom more lasting in
that element of the spiritual life which he appropriates in knowledge
and volition, the sciences and his social activities. The ignorant
man is unfree because he faces a world which is foreign to himself, a
world which tosses hither and thither aimlessly, to which he is joined
as an appendage, unable to unite that foreign world to itself, and to
feel itself at home there as in its own demesne. The merest impulse of
curiosity, the awakening of the love of knowledge, the lowest phase
of animate unrest, and the highest grasp of philosophical insight are
ultimately derived from the same source, namely, the desire to overcome
every condition that is unfavourable to freedom, and to bring the
world of everyday life, and that of the subject which reflects upon
it, into one harmonious unity. If we consider the world of _action_
the result is the same; freedom in human action is the attempt to
make positive or real the reason of the Will. Reason is realized by
voluntary action through the life of the State. In a State that is
differentiated through itself on any rational principle, all the laws
and social institutions which belong to it are simply a realization of
freedom according to their own essential determinants. This being so,
the reason that belongs to any citizen discovers in such institutions
its own essential life: and, so long as such is not in revolt from
those laws, proceeds with them as with its own kith and kin rather than
a foreign adversary. We not infrequently find licence identified with
freedom. But the freedom of licence is irrational; it depends upon a
choice and self-determination which has nothing to do with a rational
will, but is rather the product of accidental impulses and their
dependence on the world of sense and physical Nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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