The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik — John Shaqi
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's AesthetikHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Aesthetics
sensuous appearance, whose visibility is converted into the mere _show_
by art, and on the other in _colour_ by means of the distinctions,
transitions, and modulations of which this transformation is effected.
The art of painting, consequently, in order to express the soul in
its ideality, resolves the three dimensions of space into that of
superficies as that which most intimately asserts the ideality of what
is external, and represents spatial distance and form by means of the
phenomena of colour. For painting is not concerned with producing
mere visibility in its general significance, but with that form of
visibility which, if it is ideally produced, is also quite as much
essentially particularized. In sculpture and the art of building forms
are visible by means of external light. In the art of painting, on the
contrary, the material which is itself essentially obscure possesses
intrinsically within itself its inward or ideal, light in short. It is
itself transfused in its own medium, and mere light is to that extent
essentially obscured. The unity, however, and blending of light and
dark is colour[26].
_Secondly_, the art of _music_ offers a contrast to that of painting
in one and the same sphere as the latter. Its real element is the
ideal realm as such, emotion in its formless independence, capable of
asserting itself not in externality and its reality, but purely through
the external medium which disappears immediately when it is expressed
and thereby cancels itself. Its _content_ consequently consists of
the internal life of Spirit in its immediate, essential subjective
unity, emotion simply; its _material_ is musical tone, its form and
configuration, the concord, discord, harmony, contrast, opposition, and
resolution of such tones according to the laws of their quantitative
intervals respectively and their artistically elaborated time measure.
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