The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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СКАЧАТЬ reality. Devotion is this cultus of the community in its purest, most intimate, and subjective form; a culture, in which the principle of objectivity is at the same time consumed and absorbed, and the content thereof is transmuted without such objectivity into the possession of heart and soul.

      The third and last form or phase in the evolution of absolute mind (spirit) is philosophy. In the boundaries of the religious sphere, where God is apprehended in the first instance perforce as an external object, and men are taught that there is a God, and how He has revealed Himself and still is revealed to mankind, the subjective consciousness is indeed made the vehicle of such knowledge, and the religious sense imparted stirs and fills the heart of the community; but the inwardness of devotion which is born of the emotions and the imagination is not the highest form of inwardness. We are bound to recognize that the purest form of knowledge is conscious thought in its freest activity. In this alone the content of knowledge is, adequate to the demands of that which is consciously apprehended: here alone we are in the presence of that most intelligent form of cultus, which seeks wholly to appropriate to itself, and to grasp in concrete thought what is otherwise only the evanescent content of feeling or the imagination. In the purview of such a philosophy art and religion, as two aspects of one truth, become related under a unifying conception. On the one hand, though philosophy, by its surrender of all sensuous externality, has lost the objective presentation of art, yet it has exchanged it for the highest form under which concrete reality is objectively apprehended and redeemed, in other words, that of speculative reason. It has, on the other, lost the emotional subjectivity of the religious consciousness in the same pure medium. For while human thought is the most inward and appropriate vehicle of subjective life, such thought, in its fullest grasp of truth, the Idea, is actuality in the most objective and universal sense of the term, and is only to be apprehended by pure thought in the medium native to itself.

      With this adumbration of the difference between the spheres of art, religion, and philosophy we must on the present occasion rest content.

      The sensuous mode of consciousness is that which first appears in the history of mankind. The earliest stages of religion are for this reason indistinguishable from a religion of art and its sensuous manner of presentation. In the religion of Spirit for the first time is God as Spirit cognized also on a higher plane, and one more adequate to thought, wherein it likewise follows as a corollary, that the presentation of truth in sensuous shape is not truly adequate to Spirit.

      Now that we know something of the position which art occupies in the field of spiritual activity, and that which belongs to the philosophy of art among the several philosophical sciences, we will proceed in this introductory portion of our work in the first place to investigate the general idea of the beauty of art.

175. The German word here is Geist. I have translated it as best seems to suit the particular context in which the German word occurs.

176. Unendliche Negativität.

177. This is the "Ought" of practical feeling. As such just as in the case of the analytical sciences, what it lacks is objective determination (see "Phil. of Mind," trans. of W. Wallace, p. 94).

178. In seiner Gemeinde. We should rather expect in seiner Gebiete.

179. The reference here appears to be to the three attitudes of thought to the objective world which may be generally indicated as that of ordinary consciousness, that of empiricism and that of speculative Philosophy. In the paragraph which follows, however, Hegel mainly refers to the logical process of dialectic and the Idea of Nature (die natürliche Idee.) The latter may, however, refer to both the previous divisions, i.e., the commonsense point of view and the scientific.

180. The spheres of art and social life are first perceived as merely independent circles of activity.

181. That is to say, nations have not only found in Art the best means of expressing their religious consciousness, but, even where religion has been raised to a higher power, have found in it the most adequate form in which to express the ideality of their general spiritual life.

182. Welche sick durch alles hindurchzieht, i.e., which permeates all experience.

183. In this metaphysical passage Hegel appears to be contrasting his own philosophical standpoint, absolute idealism, with that of critical or empirical philosophy, those at least who conceive reality either as a thing-in-itself, or the materia supplied to sense-perception from a world outside the human consciousness. The entire content of the Real is, on the contrary, all included under the form of self-conscious thought.

184. He means, I think, province of the universal, rather than "universal expansion of horizon."

185. The words of Hegel are "innerhalb derselben im endlichen Geiste die Erinnerung des Wesens aller Dinge." He no doubt has in his mind the derivation of the word Erinnerung. It is the inwardization or idealization of such substance.

186. Anschauung, that is to say, it is the object of man's receptive senses.

187. The punctuation is clearly wrong. It is also very possible that derselben is a misprint for dieselbe. But in any case there should be comma rather than semicolon.

      Subdivision of Subject

       Table of Contents

      IDEA OF THE BEAUTY OF ART, OTHERWISE, FINE ART

      To arrive at the Idea of Fine Art in all its concreteness it will be necessary for us to consider it under three phases.

      1. The first is concerned with the notion of the beautiful generally.

      2. The second is that of natural beauty, the defects of which will demonstrate the necessity of the Ideal as Fine Art.

      3. In the third of these aspects the subject of our investigation will be the Ideal in its positive realization, in other words as the artistic display of this Ideal in particular works of art.

      Chapter I

       The Notion of the Beautiful in Its General Significance

       Table of Contents

      We have defined beauty to be the Idea of the beautiful.

      1. The Idea. By this definition is implied that we have to conceive the СКАЧАТЬ