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
detail as the soul and vital core of the whole; but this presence
remains for Art an ideal bond which is implied rather than expressly
posited, precisely as the soul is immediately made vital in all the
bodily members, without robbing the same of the appearance of an
independent existence. We have the same truth illustrated by colour and
tone. Yellow, blue, green and red are different colours which admit
of the most absolute contrast; but none the less, on account of the
fact that as colour they all essentially belong to one totality, they
maintain a harmony throughout; and it is not, moreover, necessary that
this union as such should be expressly declared in them. In a similar
way the dominant, the third and the fifth remain independent as tones,
and yet for all that give us the harmony of the trichord; or, rather,
we should put it that they only produce this harmony so long as each
tone is permitted to assert its own essentially free and characteristic
sound.
(_γγ_) In connection with this organic unity and articulate synthesis
of a poetical composition we have further to consider essential
_features of distinction_ which are due to the particular _artistic
form_ appropriate to the composition under review, no less than the
particular _type_ of poetry in which we discover the specific character
of its working out. Poetry, for example, of symbolic art is unable,
owing to the more abstract and indefinite traits which constitute its
essential and significant content, to attain to a fully organic fusion
in the degree of transparency possible to the works of the classical
art-form. In symbolism generally, as we have already established in the
first part of this enquiry, the conjunction of general significance
and the actual phenomenon, in association with which Art embodies
its content, is of a less coherent character: as a result of this we
find that what is particular in one direction preserves a greater
consistency; in another, as in the case of the Sublime, only so far
asserts this quality in order, through the negation thus implied, to
render more intelligible the _one_ supreme power and substance, or
merely to advance the process to a condition of mysterious association
of particular, but at the same time heterogeneous no less than related
traits and aspects of natural and spiritual facts. Conversely, in
the romantic type, wherein the ideality of truth reveals itself in
essential privacy to soul-life only, we find a wider field for the
display of the detail of rational reality in its self-subsistency; in
this latter case the conjunction of all parts and their union must
necessarily be present, but the nature of their elaboration can neither
be so clear or secure as in the products of classical art.
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