The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
worlds to which in our everyday life, the life, that is, of visible
experience, we are accustomed to attach the worth and name of reality,
actuality and truth as contrasted with that of art, which fails to
possess such reality as we suppose. Now it is just this entire sphere
of the empirical world, whether on its personal side or its objective
side, which we ought rather to call in a stricter sense than when
we apply the term to the world of art, merely a show or appearance,
and an even more unyielding form of deception. It is only beyond the
immediacy of emotional life and that world of external objects that
we shall discover reality in any true sense of the term. Nothing
is actually real but that which is actual in its own independent
right and substance[10], that which is at once of the substance of
Nature and of mind, which, while it is actually _here_ in present and
determinate existence, yet retains under such limitation an essential
and self-concentred being, and only in virtue of such is truly real.
The predominance of these universal powers is precisely that which art
accentuates and manifests. In the external and soul-world of ordinary
experience we have also no doubt this essence of actuality, but in the
chaotic congeries of particular detail, encumbered by the immediacy of
sensuous envisagement, and every kind of caprice of condition, event,
character, and so forth. Now it is just the show and deception of this
false and evanescent world which art disengages from the veritable
significance of phenomena to which we have referred, implanting in
the same a reality of more exalted rank born of mind. The phenomena
of art therefore are not merely not appearance and nothing more; we
are justified in ascribing to them, as contrasted with the realities
of our ordinary life, an actually higher reality and more veritable
existence. To as little extent are the representations of art a
deceptive appearance as compared with the assumed truer delineations
of historical writing. For immediate existence also does not belong to
historical writing. It only possesses the intellectual appearance of
the same as the medium of its delineations, and its content remains
charged with the entire contingent _materia_ of ordinary reality and
its events, developments and personalities, whereas the work of art
brings us face to face with the eternal powers paramount in history
with this incidental association of the immediate sensuous present and
its unstable appearance expunged.