The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
and objectivity, so that, while he no doubt offers us a resolution in
an abstract sense of the antithesis between conception and reality,
universality and particularity, understanding and sense-perception,
and suggests the Idea, yet he once more conceives this resolution and
reconciliation itself in a wholly _subjective_ sense, not as being
true and real both essentially and on its own independent account. In
this respect the Critique of the power of the judgment, in which he
investigates the aesthetic and teleological power of the judgment is
both instructive and remarkable. The beautiful objects of Nature and
art, the products of Nature with their adaptations to ends, by means
of which he approaches more closely the notion of the organic and the
living, he considers wholly from the point of view of the reflection
which judges them subjectively. And indeed Kant himself generally
defines the power of judgment as "the capacity to think the particular
as comprised under the universal," and calls the power of judgment
_reflective_ "when it has only the particular submitted to it, and has
to discover the universal under which it is subsumed." To this end it
requires a law, a principle, which it has to contribute to itself; and
Kant affirms _teleology_ to be this law. With regard to the conception
of freedom which belongs to the practical reason the achievement of end
or purpose gets no further than a mere "ought"; and in the teleological
judgment, however, relatively to the living thing, Kant does manage to
regard the living organism in such a way that the notional concept, the
universal, succeeds in also including the particular, and as end does
not determine the particular and external, the structure of the members
from outside, but as an inward principle, and under the mode, that the
particular conforms to the end spontaneously. Yet with such a judgment
once more it is assumed that the objective nature of the thing is not
known, but that it is only a mode of subjective reflection which is
thereby expressed. In a similar way Kant so conceives the _aesthetic_
judgment that it neither proceeds from the understanding, as such,
in other words as the faculty of ideas, nor yet from the sensuous
perception as such, and its varied manifold, but from the free play of
the understanding and the imagination. In this common agreement of the
faculties of knowledge the object finds its relation to the individual
consciousness, and its feeling of pleasure and contentment.