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
and freely by virtue of its own immanent weight, or only determined
through the position of the body and the pose and motion of the limbs.
In the determination thus implied we find the external shape entirely
reflecting the mutable expression of the spirit which animates the
body. The particular form of the garment, the folds of it, the motion
of it either up or down is clothed in the shape dictated direct from
the inward impulse, and as each may momentarily appear appropriate to
the particular pose or movement--and it is this form of determination
which constitutes the ideality of such drapery. In the clothing we
have adopted nowadays, on the contrary, the entire material is, from
the first, cut out and worked up stiffly into the forms of particular
limbs, so that anything approaching spontaneity in its rise and
fall is impossible. Even the character of the folds is determined by
previous models, and generally both cut and fall are worked out wholly
by the technical rules and craftsmanship of the tailor. It is true,
of course, that the configuration of the limbs determines generally
the form of such clothing; but in this arrangement of the bodily form
we merely have either a perverse imitation, or an enveloping of human
limbs according to the convention of fashion and the accidental taste
of the times. The cut of our cloth once made is irrevocably made,
and neither the position of the body nor the motion of the limbs can
appreciably affect it. We may move our arms and legs about as much
as we please, the sleeves of our jackets and our trousers remain
unalterable. Folds or creases may perhaps appear in them, but even
then only on the lines of the original cutting out, as we see them,
for example, on the statue of Scharnhorst. Our modern way of clothing
is consequently, as an external cover, not sufficiently differentiated
from the inner life to appear on its reverse side as the formal
expression of that life; instead of this we have a false imitation of
the human form stereotyped in the preordained and unalterable cut of
our tailor.
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