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
Self-consciousness has not as yet ripened in the fruit, is not yet
independently secured, but is restless, seeking, surmising, ever for
producing without absolute satisfaction, and consequently without
repose. It is only in the form that is commensurate with Spirit
that mind essentially at home with itself finds satisfaction and
finds its true definition in what it produces. The symbolical work
of art on the contrary remains more or less indefinite. Among such
creations of the Egyptian art of building we may include the so-called
_labyrinths_, courts with columned approaches, circumambient paths
between partitions, which entwine about in a mysterious fashion, but
whose confusing intricacy is not constructed with the puerile object
to make the means of exit a problem, but to create for the senses an
intricate mode of motion that is dominated by mysteries of symbolical
import. For these paths, as we have already indicated, imitate in
their course that of the heavenly bodies and embody the same for
imagination. They are in part constructed above the ground and in part
underneath it, and in addition to their passages are furnished with
chambers and halls of enormous size, whose walls are covered with
hieroglyphics. The largest labyrinth which Herodotus himself saw was
not far from the lake Maeris. He affirms[53] that its size exceeded his
powers of description, and it surpassed the pyramids themselves. The
building he ascribes to the twelve kings, and he describes it in the
following terms. The entire building surrounded by one and the same
wall consisted of two stories, the one above and the other beneath
the level of the ground. Taken together they enclosed three thousand
chambers, each story containing fifteen hundred. The upper story which
alone Herodotus was able to see was divided into twelve adjacent
courts[54], with doors placed opposite to each other, six facing the
North and six the South, and every court was engirt with a colonnade,
constructed of white and carefully worked stone. From these courts,
Herodotus continues, you have ingress to the chambers, and from these
into the halls, and from the halls into other chambers, and from these
chambers into the courts. According to Hirt[55] Herodotus only so far
defines this latter relation to the extent that he places in the first
instance the chambers in juxtaposition to the courts. With regard to
the labyrinthine passages, Herodotus states that the numerous passages
through the roofed-in chambers and the multitudinous incurvations
between the courts had filled him with infinite astonishment. Pliny[56]
describes them as obscure and tedious for a stranger on account of
their windings, and when their doors were opened there was a noise
in them like thunder; we also learn from Strabo, an evidence of
importance, for he was an eye-witness no less than Herodotus, that the
labyrinthine passages encircled the court spaces. It was the Egyptians
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