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
series of Schiller's productions is devoted to this insight into
the nature of art. Above all in importance come the "Letters upon
aesthetic education." In these letters the main point of departure is
that every individual man contains within himself the natural capacity
of an ideal humanity. This genuine human being is represented by the
State, which, in his view, is the objective, universal, and, in short,
normal form, in which the separate individuals or subjects of such
human consciousness aim at making all coalesce and concentrate in
unity. There were then, in his view, two imaginable ways in which man
in the temporal process could thus coalesce with the human being in
the notional Idea[118]. On the one hand this could be effected in the
suppression of individuality by the State under its generic idea of
morality, law, and intelligence[119]: while, on the other, a similar
result could be effected by the individual himself raising himself to
the level of such a generic conception, in other words, by the man of
the particular temporal condition ennobling himself to the level of
the essential man of the Idea. Now, in this view, reason demands unity
as such, the generic attribution; Nature, however, asks for variety
and individuality, and both these legislatures make a simultaneous
claim upon man. Confronted with the conflict of these antagonistic
rivals, aesthetic education simply consists in giving actual effect
to the demand for their mediation and reconcilement. The aim of
such an education is, according to Schiller, to give vital form to
inclination, the senses, impulse and emotional life in such a way that
they become essentially permeated with mind; and, from the reverse
point of view, that reason, freedom, and spirituality come forth from
the grave-clothes of their abstractedness, are mated in union with the
natural element thus essentially rationalized, and thus receive the
substance of flesh and blood. Beauty is therefore affirmed to be the
conformative unification[120] of the rational and the sensuous, and
this union is pronounced the truly real.
This view of Schiller will in its general terms be all the more readily
recognized in "Anmuth und Würde[121]," as also in his poems for the
reason that the praise of women is in such works more particularly the
theme. It was pre-eminently in _their_ character that he recognized and
emphasized the spontaneously present conjunction of the spiritual and
natural.