The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
If we now proceed to ask ourselves what, then, is the nature of the
determinate form, which can thus enter into this unity with Spirit
without offering merely the suggestion of its content, we shall find it
determined for us in the conception that in classical art both content
and form must be adequate, must, that is, in the aspect of form meet
the demands of totality and essential self-subsistency. For it is a
prime condition of the free self-subsistence[130] of the whole, which
constitutes the fundamental determination of classical art, that either
of these aspects, the ideal form no less than its external embodiment,
should be essentially a totality which goes to make the notion of the
whole. Only by this means is either side _essentially_ identical with
the other, and consequently their difference reduced to the purely
formal differences of one and the same, through which also the totality
appears now as free, the adequacy of both of its aspects being now
fully displayed, inasmuch as it declares itself in either of them and
is one and the same in both.
The lack of this free reduplication of itself within the same unity
carried with it in the symbolic type precisely this absence of freedom
in the content and with it also in the form. Spirit was here not
clear to itself, and for this reason declared its external reality
not as that which belonged to itself, set forth in its explicit
significance through and in it. Conversely the form had no doubt to
be significant, but its significance only lay partly and on one side
in it. The external existence gave here primarily to what passed for
its ideal aspect, though still under a mode that was external, merely
_itself_ instead of a significance which declared an ideal content;
and in attempting to show that there was something further which it
suggested its power was necessarily put under a constraint. In this
distortion it neither remained true to itself, nor was it the Other,
that is significance, but declared nothing save that which was a
problematical connection and confusion between incompatible things, or
tended to be the purely co-adjutant attire and external adornment of
what was simply the glorification of the one absolute significance of
all things whatever, until it was finally obliged to surrender itself
to the purely subjective caprice of comparison with a significance
which was far removed from it and indifferent to it. If this relation
of unfreedom is to find a release the form must already inherently
possess its significance, or, to speak more definitely, must possess
the significance of mind or Spirit itself. This form is essentially
the _human_ form because the externality of this form is alone capable
of revealing the spiritual in sensuous guise. Human expression in
countenance, eye, pose, and carriage is, it is true, material and
therein not that which the spirit is; but within this corporeal frame
itself the human exterior is not merely alive and a part of Nature as