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
The result we have now arrived at in the above consideration of the
Sublime, and in contradistinction to the strictly unpremeditated
type of symbolization, consists partly in the _separation_ of its
own independent Inwardness, consciously apprehended in its quality
of significance, from the concrete appearance that is thereby
distinguished from it, partly also in the direct or indirect
affirmation of the _incompatibility_ of the two above mentioned
aspects to one another, by which it appears that the significance as
the universal passes beyond the particular fact and its singularity.
But in the imagination of pantheism, no less than in the type of the
Sublime, the real content, that is the One universal substance of all
concrete existence, was unable to be presented to imaginative vision
or sense-perception without some relation to created existence, albeit
created under a mode inadequate to express the essence of that Unity.
This relation, however, was attached to the substance itself, which,
in the negativity of its accidents, supplied the proof of its Wisdom,
Goodness, Power, and Justice[76]. For this reason the relation between
significance and content is also in the case of the Sublime, at least
in a general way, of a kind that is both _essential_ and _necessary_,
and the two sides thus linked with each other are not yet, in the
strict sense of the term, external to each other. It is, however,
inevitable, for the reason that it is implicitly present in symbolism,
that this externality should come to be directly posited and appear
in the forms we have now to consider in this concluding chapter on the
art of symbolism. We may summarily describe them as _conscious_[77]
symbolism, or, in a still more direct way, the _comparative_ type of
art.