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
And for this reason
this type of architecture, both in respect to its content and, its
presentation, is really of a _symbolic type._
All that we have said with reference to the principle of this stage
of art applies equally to its mode of _presentation._ Here, too, we
find that the mere distinction between buildings of wood and stone is
not sufficient, in so far as the same points to a means of limiting
and enclosing a defined space for a specific religious or other human
purposes, as is the case with dwellings, palaces, and temples. Such a
space, may be obtained either by hollowing out essentially solid and
stable masses, or conversely, by preparing walls and roofs to enclose
it. We can make our beginning of the art of building with neither of
these alternatives, which we should consequently define as an inorganic
form of sculpture; such a type no doubt piles up independently stable
images, but while doing so does not in any way make the end of free
beauty and the manifestation of Spirit in the bodily form commensurate
with the end it pursues, but in general terms sets up a purely symbolic
form, which purports in itself to indicate and express a particular
idea.
Architecture is, however, unable to remain standing at such a point of
departure. Its function indeed consists just in this, namely, to build
up external Nature as an environment which emanates from Spirit itself
through the gates of art under the forms of beauty, and to build it
for the independently present life of mind, that is mankind, or for
the images of the gods that are set up and clothed by man in objective
form, and to build up the same as that which no longer carries its
significance in itself, but discovers the same in another, that is
man, and his necessities and objects of family and State-life, culture
and so forth, and by so doing surrenders the self-subsistency of such
buildings.
Regarded under this aspect we may assume the _advance_ of architecture
to consist in this, that it suffers the above indicated distinction
between end and means to appear in separation, and constructs for man,
or the individual human form of gods, which is the work of sculpture,
an architectural dwelling, palace, or temple analogous to the
significance of the same.
And, thirdly, the _termination_[32] unites both phases in the
process, and appears within this aspect of division as at the same
time self-subsistent. These points of view present to us, as the
classification of the entire art of building, the following heads of
division, which essentially comprehend the notional distinctions of the
matter in question no less than the historical development of the same.
_First_, we have the genuine _symbolic_ or _self-subsistent_ type of
architecture.