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
What still is absent from both these spheres is the reality that is
present within the elementary substance of the _external_ phenomenon
itself. For although both in our examination of the Ideal as such, and
in that of the specific modes of symbolic, classical, and romantic
art, we throughout referred to the relation or complete mediation
which obtains between the significance conceived as an ideal principle
and its embodiment in the external or phenomenal _materia_, yet
this realization merely retained its validity as that which was
still exclusively the _ideal_ art-activity in the sphere of general
world-impressions[2] of beauty, in and through which it is diffused.
Inasmuch, however, as the fundamental conception of beautiful implies,
that it make itself objective for the immediate vision, that is to
say for the senses and sensuous perception as an external work of
art, so that what is beautiful becomes only then itself through such
a definite form appropriate to itself explicitly united with the
beautiful and the Ideal, we have in the _third_ place to review this
territory of the art-product as actually self-realized in the entirely
sensuous medium. For it is only through this final configuration that
the work of art is truly concrete, an individual entity which is at
once real, self-contained, and singular. The Ideal can only constitute
the _content_ of this third sphere of our aesthetic philosophy for
the reason that it is the idea of the beautiful, in the collective
totality of all its world presentments, which is thus self-realized
in objective form[3]. For this reason the art-product is still, even
up to this point, to be conceived as a totality articulated in
itself, nevertheless as an organism, whose organic parts, which--while
in the second part of our inquiry they were differentiated under a
collective concept of essentially disparate world-aspects--now fall
asunder as isolated members, every one of which becomes independently a
self-subsistent whole, and in this singularity is capable of bringing
into display the totality of the different art-types. Essentially and
in accordance with its notion it is quite true that the collective
result of this new reality of art belongs to _one_ single totality.
Inasmuch, however, as it is a portion of the realm of the sensuous[4]
present, in which the same is made real to itself, the Ideal is now
resolved into its phasal states as a process[5], and confers on them
an independent and self-subsistent stability, albeit they are capable
of coming into juxtaposition, essential relation, and reciprocal
reintegration with one another. And this real world of art is the
system of the _separate_ arts. Just as then the particular types
of art, regarded throughout as totality, expose intrinsically a
process, an evolution, that is, of the symbolical to the classical and
romantic types, we find also, on the one hand, a similar advance in
the particular arts, in so far as it is the very art-types themselves
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