The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
The _second_ requirement, which is deducible from the first, is the
demand that the content of art should be nothing essentially abstracts
This does not mean, however, that it should be merely concrete in
the sense that the sensuous object is such in its contrast to all
that is spiritual and the content of thought, regarding these as the
essentially simple and abstract. Everything that possesses truth for
Spirit; no less than, as part of Nature, is essentially concrete,
and, despite its universality, possesses both ideality[134] and
particularity essentially within it. When we state, for example, of
God that he is simple One, the Supreme Being as such, we have thereby
merely given utterance to a lifeless abstraction of the irrational
understanding. Such a God, as He is thus not conceived in His concrete
truth, can supply no content for art, least of all plastic art.
Consequently neither the Jews nor the Turks have been able to represent
their God, who is not even an abstraction of the understanding in
the above sense, under the positive mode in which Christians have
represented Him. For in Christianity God is conceived in His Truth, and
as such essentially concrete, as personality[135], as the subjective
focus of conscious life, or, more accurately defined, as Spirit. And
what He is as Spirit is made explicit to the religious apprehension
as a trinity of persons, which at the same time are, in their
independence, regarded as One. Here is essentiality, universality, and
particularity, no less than their reconciled unity, and it is only
a unity such as this which gives us the concrete. And inasmuch as a
content, in order to unveil truth at all, must be of this concrete
character, art makes the demand for a like concreteness, and, for this
reason, that a purely abstract universal does not in itself possess the
property to proceed to particularity and external manifestation, and to
unity with itself therein.