The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
The source of the general transition from sculpture to the other arts
is, as we have seen, the principle of _subjectivity_, which now invades
art's content and its manner of exposition. What we understand here by
subjectivity is the notion of an intelligence which ideally exists in
free independence, withdrawing itself from objective reality into its
own more intimate domain, a conscious life which no longer concentrates
itself with its corporeal attachment in a unity which is without
division.
There follows from this transition, therefore, that dissolution,
that dismemberment of the unity which is held together in the
substantive and objective presence of sculpture, in the focus of its
tranquillity and all-inclusive rondure and as such is apprehended
in fusion. We may consider this breach from two points of view. On
the one hand sculpture, in respect to its _content_, entwined what
is substantive in Spirit directly with the individuality, which is
as yet not self-introspective, in the exclusive unit of a personal
consciousness, and treated thereby an _objective_ unity in the sense in
which objectivity suggests what is intrinsically infinite, immutable,
true--that substantive aspect, in short, which has no part in mere
caprice and singularity. And from another point of view sculpture
failed to do more than discharge this spiritual content wholly within
the corporeal frame as the vital and significant instrument of the
same, and by doing so create a _new objective_ unity in _that_ meaning
of the expression, under which objectivity, as contrasted with all that
is wholly ideal and subjective, indicates real and external existence.
When we find, then, that these two aspects, at first thus reconciled
in one another by sculpture, are separated, that which we call
_self-introspective_ spirituality is not merely placed in opposition
to that which is _external_, but also, in the domain of what is
_spiritual_ throughout, what is substantive and objective in that
medium, in so far as it no longer continues to be retained in what
is substantial individuality simply, is dissevered from the vital
particularity of the conscious life, and all these aspects which have
been hitherto held together in perfect fusion are relatively to each
other and independently free, so that they can be treated too by art as
free in this very way.