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
_Secondly_, we have the form in which the Idea, here in accordance
with its true notional activity, is carried beyond the abstraction and
indeterminacy of general characterization[4], is conscious of itself
as free and infinite subjectivity, and grasps that self-conscious life
in its real existence as Spirit (Mind). Spirit, as the free subject of
consciousness, is self-determined through its own resources, and even
in this its conscious grasp of self-determination possesses a form of
externality adequate to express it, and one in which the essential
import of that consciousness can be united with an explicit reality
entirely appropriate. This second type of art, the _classical_, is
based upon such absolutely homogeneous unity of content and form. In
order, however, to make this unity complete the human spirit, in so
far as it makes itself the object of art, must not be taken as Spirit
in the absolute significance we refer to it, where it discovers its
adequate subsistence wholly in the _spiritual_ resources of its own
essential domain, but rather as a still _individualized_ spirit, and as
such charged with a certain aspect of isolation. In other words, the
free individual which classical art unites to its forms appears, it is
true, as essentially universal, and consequently freed from all the
mere contingence and particularity both of the subjective world of mind
and the external world of Nature. But it is at the same time permeated
by a universality which is itself essentially individualized. For the
external form is necessarily both defined and singular by virtue of
its externality, which it is only capable of completely fusing with an
artistic content by representing that content as itself defined, and
consequently of a limited character; and, moreover, it is only Spirit
that is thus particularized which can pass into an objective shape and
unite itself with the same in an inseparable unity.
In this form Art has reached the fulness of its own notion to this
extent, namely, that the Idea, which is here spiritual individuality,
brought into immediate accord with itself in the form of its bodily
presence, receives from it a presentation so complete, that external
existence is no longer able to preserve its consistency as against the
ideal significance which it serves to express; or, to put it in the
reverse way, the spiritual content is exclusively manifested in the
elaborated form within which Art clothes it for sensuous perception,
and thereby affirmatively asserts itself in the same.