The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4): Hegel's AesthetikHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Aesthetics
We have already, in another connection, when concluding our discussion
of the particular artistic types, come across what was practically the
same thing. What we sought for, then, in our conclusion was that art
in one of its types should make itself independent of that mode of
representation properly called specific, remaining thereby predominant
above the entire sphere in which such a totality of particularization
is reproduced. An elaboration so comprehensive is among all the
particular arts by the very nature of the case only possible to poetry.
Its realization is effected through the development of poetical
creation in part by means of the actual reconstitution of every
particular type, and partly by the liberation of the mode of conception
and its content from the boundaries fixed for it in the essentially
exclusive types of conception, whose character we have severally
defined as symbolical, classical, and romantic.
(_b_) The above considerations will further serve to justify the
position, which, in the course of our inquiry, regarded as the
development of a philosophy, we previously assigned to the art of
poetry. In other words by reason of the fact that poetry is, to a
degree quite impossible to any other mode of artistic production,
concerned with the universal simply as such in Art, we might appear
to have some reason for insisting that it marks the commencement
of an investigation in the full sense of the word philosophical,
and only from such a starting point can we enter into the sphere of
particularization, in which we find the series of the other arts as
limited and determined by their specific sensuous medium. Looking
back, however, at the result arrived at in our investigation of the
particular art types we shall find that the course of philosophical
evolution consisted, first, in an increased penetration of the ideal
content, and, from another point of view, in the demonstration that
originally Art sets forth in the search, then in the discovery of and
finally with an advance beyond that content compatible with its powers.
This notion of the beautiful and _Art_ must enforce itself in _the
arts_ themselves. The starting-point of our inquiry, therefore, was
architecture, in which we found merely an impulse toward the complete
representation of what pertains to Spirit in a material medium. This
is so much the case that it is only through sculpture that art first
attains to a genuine interfusion of ideality with the medium; and
further that only in the arts of painting and music do we reach the
stage where, by virtue of the ideal and subjective character of their
content, we find the perfected fusion effected no less under the aspect
of conception than that of practical execution in the medium accepted.
This process culminates most decisively in poetry, by virtue of the
fact that the very nature of its objective realization can only be
apprehended as an effort to draw apart from and cancel the material of
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