The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
We can readily imagine that it must cost the artist a great deal to
sacrifice the eye in its simple aspect of animation. We have only to
look a man in the eyes to discover a point of arrest, a centre that
explains and is basic to his entire presentment, which we may grasp in
its simplest terms from the unifying declaration of its bare look. The
eye-glance is in fact that aspect which is most steeped in soul; it is
the concentration of the inward life and its subjective emotion. Just
as a man by means of a handshake, so, too, with yet more rapidity he
is brought into unity with his fellow by virtue of the eye-glance he
faces. And it is this pre-eminently spiritual mode of revelation which
sculpture is forced to dispense with. In painting, on the contrary,
this outward expression of soul-life makes its appearance by means
of the subtle gradations of colouring either in its entire spiritual
effect, or in a manifest association with external facts and the
particular interests, feelings, and passions, which are called up by
their presence. But the province of the sculptor in his art is neither
the essential inwardness of soul-life, the concentration of the entire
man in the simple centre of self-identity, which gleams out in the
human glance as its ultimate point of illumination, nor the developed
subjectivity as we find it diffused amid the surrounding world. The
end of sculpture is the totality of the external form, into which the
soul must disintegrate itself, and present itself by means of the
manifold of the medium thus utilized, so that the recourse to one
simple soul-focus, in other word the immediacy of the spirit-glance,
is not here permitted. The work of sculpture possesses no such ideal
intimacy in its simplest terms which is allowed to assert itself, as
the human look does assert itself in contrast to other parts of the
human body, thereby unfolding a contrast between the eye and the body;
rather in sculpture what the individual is in his ideal and spiritual
significance remains wholly fused in the total aspect of form, which
the spirit that contemplates it, the spectator, can alone grasp in its
unity. And in the _second_ place, and with equal truth the eye peers
into the world that surrounds it; it necessarily looks at something
positive, and thereby is witness to man in his relation to a manifold
world of objects, just as in the sphere of feeling he is united to his
environment and general experience. It is, however, precisely this
union with external objects from which the true figure of sculpture
is withdrawn, being rather absorbed in what is substantive in its own
spiritual content, essentially self-subsistent, that is without further
diffusion or development. _Thirdly_, the glance of the eye receives
its fully evolved significance by virtue of the expression of the rest
of the bodily presentment, such as in its general mien and speech,
albeit as the purely formal point of subjective life, in which the