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
We may conclude, then, that the physical needs of man, no less than
his knowledge and power of volition, receive in fact, each in its
own sphere, a satisfaction in the world, and deliberately break up
the contradiction between the subjective and objective, that is to
say, between the freedom of consciousness and the external necessity
of things with which it is confronted. The content, however, of
such a freedom and the satisfaction which is therein experienced
is still subject to _limitations_, and for this reason both still
retain an element of _finitude._ And wherever we find such an element
supervening it is inevitable that the original contradiction should
again reassert itself, and the self-satisfaction only maintain a
relative significance. For example, in the sphere of jurisprudence and
its realization in the State it is true enough that the rationality
of each citizen, his will and his freedom are recognized; he is a
person and as such is respected; he is the owner of property, and
if that property is in danger the courts of law reassert his rights
in their integrity. This recognition, however, and the freedom it
establishes are confined to single relations and isolated objects,
such as a particular house, a sum of money, some particular right
or law, in fine some particular transaction in the practical world.
What the consciousness has at any one time before it are particular
things, which no doubt are related to one another, and in fact form a
nucleus of such relations; but, on the other hand, they are appropriate
to categories of purely relative validity, are subject to various
conditions of tenure, which make the satisfaction only immediately
experienced when their predominance is reasserted, or at any rate
fail to establish any degree of permanence. And further than this
the life of the State in its organic entirety, as a related whole of
monarch, government, courts of justice, military control, and general
grouping of all the various societies which compose it, no less than
the obligations and duties which such arrangements presuppose, the
aims and satisfaction to which they are directed, the entire scope of
its civic and commercial activities already referred to, in one word
the complete organism of a nation's life, is indeed in a genuine State
complete in itself, and in a sense rounded off as a real totality. At
the same time we must observe that the fundamental _principle_, for
the realization of which the State exists, and wherein the individual
man finds his satisfaction as a citizen, is, despite all the variety
of that life, all the manifold differentiation of class within itself
and as related to the world without, still a whole that is _one-sided_
and in a real sense abstract. It is only the rational freedom of the
_will_ made explicit in a particular totality. It is, in short, only
the national life, and further the life of a _particular_ nation;
a life, moreover, in which freedom is realized in a _particular_
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