The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Georg Hegel · en
the contingent finiteness of phenomenal existence. The outer shape
must be thus purified in order to express in itself a content adequate
to itself; and again, if the conformity of import and content is to
be complete, the spiritual meaning which is the content must be of
a particular kind. It must, that is to say, be qualified to express
itself completely in the physical form of man, without projecting
into another world beyond the scope of such an expression in sensuous
and bodily terms. This condition has the effect that Mind is by it at
once specified as a particular case of mind, as human mind, and not
as simply absolute and eternal, inasmuch as mind in this latter sense
is incapable of proclaiming and expressing itself otherwise than as
intellectual being.[151]
Out of this latter point arises, in its turn, the defect which brings
about the dissolution of classical art, and demands a transition into a
third and higher form, viz. into the _romantic_ form of art.
([Greek: g]) The romantic form of art destroys the completed union
of the Idea and its reality, and recurs, though in a higher phase,
to that difference and antagonism of two aspects which was left
unvanquished by symbolic art. The classical type attained the highest
excellence, of which the sensuous embodiment of art is capable; and
if it is in any way defective, the defect is in art as a whole,
_i.e._ in the limitation of its sphere. This limitation consists in
the fact that art as such takes for its object Mind--the conception
of which is _infinite_ concrete universality--in the shape of
_sensuous_ concreteness, and in the classical phase sets up the perfect
amalgamation of spiritual and sensuous existence as a Conformity of
the two. Now, as a matter of fact, in such an amalgamation Mind cannot
be represented according to its true notion. For mind is the infinite
subjectivity of the Idea, which, as absolute inwardness,[152] is not
capable of finding free expansion in its true nature on condition of
remaining transposed into a bodily medium as the existence appropriate
to it.