The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
of departure, and we shall treat of that in our _first_ chapter.
In the _second_ chapter, on the other hand, we have reached by means of
this process the true Ideal of the classical type of art. We find here
as the central fact the fair and novel world of the gods of Greece,
which it will be incumbent on us to develop exhaustively from within,
both in its aspects of spiritual individualization, and those which are
related to the bodily form with which such individuality is immediately
associated.
In the _third_ place, however, the notion of classical art implies
conversely, along with this becoming of the beauty which springs from
itself, also the dissolution of that creation, which will carry us into
a further sphere, namely, that of the romantic type of art. The gods
and human individuals of classic beauty just as they rise so, too, pass
away once more from the art-consciousness, which in part turns round
in opposition to the aspect of Nature that still persists, in which
Greek art, in fact, had elaborated itself in the full perfection of
beauty, in part transcends an undeific[138], defective, and vulgar mode
of reality in order to reveal that which is false and purely negative
therein. In this dissolution, whose artistic activity we shall take as
the material of our third chapter, the specific phases in the process,
which created the truly classical type in that harmony presented by
the perfect fusion of immediate beauty, fall apart. The ideal essence
is made explicit on the one side in its independence of the external
mode of its existence on the other. Subjectivity withdraws into itself,
for the reason that it fails now to find an adequate realization in
the forms hitherto employed, and is constrained to enlarge itself with
the fuller content of a new spiritual world of absolute freedom and
infinity, looking about for novel means of expressing this profounder
grasp of its substance.
[Footnote 121: The central point, that is, in the entire evolution of
the types of art, classical art being intermediate between symbolic and
romantic art and in a certain sense marking a point of culmination.]
[Footnote 122: _Zu ihrem Inneren_, _i. e._, that which unites it as a
whole rather than is the purely external form. The Inward of man is the
notion of man, not the mere fact that he has a head and arms, etc.]
[Footnote 123: The "Nature-existence," as Hegel calls it.]
[Footnote 124: _Die Natur ist freilich heraus._ Nature is there
explicitly before us, but not all that is implied in Nature is made
explicit in the material world.]
[Footnote 125: _Sinnlichkeitslos_, "senseless" as devoid of or
abstracted from all sense.]
[Footnote 126: _Auf ihr festes Maas zurückgeführt._ To their own proper
standard or measure that strictly applies to them.]
[Footnote 127: I think this must be the meaning of _nützlich_ here. But
the passage is not an easy one.]