The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
Despite, then, the victory of the new gods that which came before them
still remains in the classical type of art partly preserved and revered
in the original form in which we have already recognized it, partly
under a transmuted mode. It is only the limited Jewish national god
which is unable to tolerate other gods in its company for the reason
that it purports as _the_ one god to include everything, although
in regard to the definition of its form it fails to pass beyond its
exclusiveness wherein the god is merely the God of His own people. Such
a god manifests his universality in fact only through his creation
of Nature and as Lord of the heavens and the earth. For the rest he
remains the god of Abraham, who led his people Israel out of Egypt,
gave them laws on Sinai, and divided the land of Canaan among the Jews.
And through this narrow identification of him with the Jewish nation
he is in a quite peculiar way the god of this folk; and consequently,
speaking generally, neither stands in positive consonance with
Nature, nor appears truly as absolute Spirit referable back from his
determinate character and objectivity to his universality. Consequently
this austere, national god is so jealous, and ordains in his jealousy
that men shall see elsewhere merely false idols. The Greeks, on the
contrary, discovered their gods among other nations and accepted
what was foreign among themselves. For the god of classical art has
spiritual and bodily individuality and is for this reason not the one
and only one, but merely a _particular_ godhead, which, as everything
else that shares particularity, has a circle of particularity which
surrounds it or in opposition to it as its Other, from which it is the
result, and which is qualified to preserve its validity and worth.
The process here is analogous to that of the particular divisions of
Nature. Although the world of vegetation is the truth of the geological
image of Nature, the animal again the higher truth of the vegetable,
yet the mountains and the flooded land persist as the solid basis of
trees, shrubs, and flowers, which in their turn do not lose their
existence alongside the world of animals.