The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
On the same ground, _thirdly_, the mere conflict between significance
and form and that ferment of the imagination, which was the fantastic
product of Hindoo conceptions, drop away. The significance is, it is
true, even now not yet fully and with absolute clarity cognized in its
pure unity _free_ from all sense-presented reality, so that it could be
set forth in real _contrast_ with the form of its actual embodiment;
conversely, however, the form itself, this particular, object, that
is, whether in its glorified shape of grandiosity or in any other
more conspicuous form of caricature, as an image of animal life, a
human personification, event or action, is not taken to envisage for
immediate sense an adequate existence of the Absolute. This corrupt
form of identity is already surpassed as fully to the extent that it
still falls behind that other complete deliverance. And in the place of
both of these extremes we have asserted that kind of representation,
which we have above already described as the _real symbolical._ On the
one hand it is now _able_ to appear for the reason that the Inward, or
that which is conceived as significance, is no longer something which
merely, as in Hindoo conceptions, comes and passes away, at one moment
is absorbed immediately in externality, at another is withdrawn from
the same into the solitude of abstraction, but it begins to make itself
independently secure against the mere reality of Nature. And on the
other hand the symbol is now forced to seek some form of plastic shape.
That is to say, although the significance, identical in every way with
that which has hitherto obtained, possesses as a phasal condition of
its content the negation of the Natural, yet the true Inward now for
the first time shows a definite tendency to wrest its way from that
Natural, and is consequently itself still swallowed up within the
external mode of appearance, so that it is unable independently to be
brought home to consciousness in its clear universality without having
previously had to comply with the form of external reality.