The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 2 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
Kant has raised a very interesting distinction between the idea of the
sublime and the beautiful; and indeed all that he discusses in the
first part of his critique of the Judgment from the twentieth section
to the end--in spite of its considerable prolixity and its reduction of
every form of determination to a fundamentally subjective principle,
whether it be the content of feeling, imagination, or reason--still
possesses a real interest. We may in fact recognize this very reduction
on the ground of its general principle of relation to be just[68]; in
other words, to borrow Kant's own expressions, if the matter of our
consideration is primarily the Sublime in Nature, it is not in any fact
of Nature, but only in the content of our emotional life that such a
Sublime is to be discovered, and, further, only in so far as we are
conscious of a Nature peculiar to ourselves which involves the added
assumption of one that lies outside of us. The statement of Kant is
to be taken in this sense where he says: "The true sublime cannot be
enclosed in any sensuous form; it is only referable to the ideas of
reason, which, albeit no truly adequate representation can be given
them, are excited and awakened to life within the human soul by just
this very incompatibility of the permissibly sensuous representation
with its object[69]." The sublime is, in short, generally the attempt
to express the infinite, without being able to find an object in
the realm of phenomenal existence such as is clearly fitted for its
representation. The infinite, for the very reason that it is posited
independently as invisible and formless significance in contrast to
the complex manifold of objective fact, and is conceived under the
mode of inwardness, so long as it remains infinite remains indefinable
in speech and sublimely unaffected by every expression of the finite
categories.