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
out such works, so that Hirt includes such among the Pyramids which
remained unfinished[61]. In the older Pyramids according to the latest
evidence of Frenchmen the chambers and passages are more winding;
in the more recent ones they are simpler, but entirely covered with
hieroglyphics, to interpret which throughout will take several years.
In this way the Pyramids, despite all the wonder they arouse of their
own accord, are really nothing but crystals, mere shells, which
enclose a kernel, that is a departed spirit, and serve as custodians
of his still consistent bodily presence and form. In this departed
and deceased person, who secures an independent reproduction, we fail
to find consequently any significance[62]; the architecture, however,
which up to this point independently possessed its significance in
itself as architecture, is now divided in its aim, and in this division
is _subservient_ to something else, whereas sculpture receives the
function to give body to the genuine ideal aspect, although in the
first instance the individual figure in its unique and immediate
natural shape is retained. We find consequently, on a general survey
of the Egyptian art of building, on the one hand, the self-subsistent
symbolical buildings; on the other, however, and more particularly
in everything which is attached to the monuments of the dead, the
specific determination of architecture to be an enclosure and nothing
more, already clearly asserts itself. It is an essential concomitant
of this, that architecture not only be limited to the construction of
excavations and caves, but attest itself as an inorganic Nature built
by human hands on the spot where men have actual need of it, and for a
definite purpose will it to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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