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
This it is which constitutes the real meaning of pantheism, and we
shall only have occasion now to employ the expression in this sense. It
applies first and foremost to the Orient, whose type of conception is
based on the thought of an absolute unity of Godhead and of everything
else as subsisting in this Unity. As such Unity and All the Divine
can only be presented to consciousness by means of the ever recurrent
evanescence of the limited number of particular objects, in which
its Presence is expressed. On the one hand we have here the Divine
envisaged as immanent in the most diverse objects, whether it be life
or death, mountain or sea, and with still closer intimacy no doubt
as the most excellent and pre-eminent among and in all determinate
existence. On the other hand, inasmuch as the One is this and again
that other and that other beyond it, and in short is discharged into
everything, all particular existence appears for that reason to be
a thing which is cancelled and vanishes, for no particular is alone
this One, but this One is this manifold of particulars which pass away
before semi-perception, as such particulars into the universe which
comprises them. For if the One is Life, it is also at another point
Death, and is to that extent not merely life, so that it is neither
as life nor the sun nor the sea that these or any other objective
realities constitute the Divine and One. At the same time we do not
find here, as in the genuine type of the Sublime, that the accidental
is expressly posited in the negative relation of mere service. So
far from this being so, substance is essentially identified with one
particular and accidental existence, inasmuch as it is this One in
everything. Conversely, however, this very particular, because it
is equally subject to change, and the imagination does not restrict
substance to one definite existence, but moves over every definition,
letting it fall that it may advance to another, is thereby relegated
in its turn to the accidental, over which the One is superposed in the
sublimity thus conjoined with it.
Such a way of viewing existence therefore can only be expressed in art
through poetry; the plastic arts are closed to it, inasmuch as they
bring before the vision the definite and particular, which in their
contrast to the substance present in the objects of Nature has to be
given up in a determinate and persistent form. Where we find pantheism
in its purity no plastic art is found as a mode of its presentation.