The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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СКАЧАТЬ every member possesses its unique form rather than one which belongs to another, or one which is determined by that of another, the members appear as self-subsistent parts, and for this reason free and spontaneous227. For the material juxtaposition of the parts alone throws no light upon their particular form.

(γ) Thirdly, it is obvious there must be for our imaginative perception a more inward bond of connection present in the self-subsistence of the organism, if the unity is not offered us in its rational, spatial, temporal, or quantitative relations such as are presented in the examples of uniformity referred to, which, as we have seen, the unique particularity of the parts can extinguish. This identity is not sensuous and immediately present to perception in the way the distinction between the members is presented; it is rather a secret and inward bond of necessity and harmonious relation between the members and their form. If it were only inward, quite out of reach of our vision, such a necessary unity would be apprehended only in thought, removed from our sense-perception altogether. In such a case, however, it would fail to enter into the beautiful object of our vision, and what we found as such in the living, object would cease to be the Idea in its own objective and phenomenal reality. Such a unity must consequently enter into what is externally perceived, although it is, as the ideal principle of life within it, not entirely apparent to sense or confined in spatial dimensions. It appears in fact in the individual totality as the universal ideality of its members, constituting thus the fundamental basis which supports and holds them together, the subject of the living subject. And this subjective unity in organic life finds its first direct expression in feeling. In the emotional life the Soul finds its true expression as Soul. For soul the mere juxtaposition of limbs have no real truth, and in the presence of its subjective ideality the purely spatial multiplicity of external configuration ceases to exist. Such a manifold, with its unique differentiations, its organic articulation of parts228 is no doubt presupposed; but when and in so far as the soul expresses itself through such in feeling the more inward unity ever-present to life asserts itself equally as the dissolution of all absolute independence between the physical parts, which reveal now not merely their materia, but also that wave of animation which fuses all in their soul.

      (c) To start with, however, we must observe that the emotional expression of soul-life neither offers us the visual impression of any necessary inter-dependence between the separate members, nor indeed the perception of an identity which is necessary between such physical articulation and the subjective unity conferred on it by simple feeling. We will investigate this more narrowly.

(α) If indeed the form and only the form renders in some way visible this inward harmony and its necessity, it may be because we look upon this juxtaposition as the habitual relation of such members, a connection which brings to our view some specific type and the oft-repeated formal exemplifications of such a type. But the necessity of custom is after all only a subjective necessity.229 According to such a principle we may find certain animals ugly for no other reason than that we find in them an organism which differs from our ordinary experience, or runs contrary to it. For this reason we call the organisms of certain animals bizarre in so far as the way in which their organs are related together is foreign to what is more common to our experience or entirely contradicts it. Fishes whose bodies are in size out of all proportion to their length of tail, or those in which we find eyes together on one side of the head only, are an example. In the world of plants we are already prepared to find many such strange departures from type, although the cactus with its spines, and the more rectilinear shaping of its angular junctures230 may still arouse our wonder. The more a man is educated, however, in all branches of natural history, the more able he will be to recognize in their truth the subordination of all parts of organic life, and carry in the memory the greatest variety of types in their proper classification, and the less anything he may observe will surprise him.

(β) A profounder penetration into this correlation of the parts will, however, in the second place, tend to give us that truer insight competent to determine from one of the parts the entire form to which it must belong. Cuvier is a famous example of such aptitude: a man of science, who by the examination of a single bone, whether fossil or otherwise, was able to specify at once by its characteristics the kind of animal to which it belonged. An excellent illustration this of ex ungue leonem. So from a claw or a thigh bone we may discover the conformation of the teeth, or vice versa from the teeth that of the hip-bone, or that of the vertebral column. Such a profound synthesis of the type and the knowledge it implies carries us, however, beyond habitual experience only. We must assume, to render it possible, previous thought and the systematic arrangement of the isolated facts of science. Our example Cuvier had no doubt secured from previous experience a determinate content and some specific quality which prevailed in each generic conception, and asserted itself as a unity of principle in all particulars however distinct, and so enabled him to recognize their affinity. Such a specific quality is that of flesh-eating, which is then the determinating principle of the form of the other members of the organism to which it belongs. A flesh-eating animal requires teeth and jaws of exceptional vigour; when hunting it will require claws to seize its prey, mere hoofs are insufficient. Here in short is a quality which necessarily determines for us the form and principle of affinity among all the organic members. A conception of such a typical character is the ordinary one we form of the strength of an eagle or a lion. We may no doubt find something both beautiful and instructive231 in this way of regarding the animal world, in so far as we derive from it some unified idea of its configuration, which is not a mere repetition of that unity in all the parts, but gives full value to the distinctions they possess. For all that it must be remembered the dominant factor of this survey is not the perception of our senses, but the generic thought of our minds with which it is made to conform. Reviewed in this light we ought not to say that we find the object as such beautiful, but rather attribute that beauty to the reflection of our own minds upon it. And if we examine these reflections more closely we shall find they are after all a deduction of our principle of unity from a limited aspect of the organic whole. We concentrate our attention, for example, on the mode in which it is nourished, i.e., whether such an animal is carnivorous or herbivorous. Through such a limited determination we are still removed from a vision of the coalescent unity of the whole we identified with the notion, the soul itself.

      (γ) The truth is we can only, in this sphere, bring before our consciousness the entire unity of life by means of our thought and grasp of reason. In the natural world the soul, in its full activity, is not found; that is to say, the subjective unity, in its pure ideality, does not exist there for a self-consciousness.

If, however, by means of thought, we endeavour to grasp the nature of soul-life according to its essential notion we shall find two aspects under which we may regard it; first, as the form subject to such a principle of animation; secondly, as the notion of soul for thought in all that the conception implies. Such a complete grasp of its true nature is not possible in the sensuous perception of the objects of beauty. Such must neither pass before us as thought, nor must we allow the interest of Thought as such to form a barrier of difference or opposition between itself and the vision revealed to us. We are left, then, with no alternative but to consider, under this point of view, the object as wholly presented to sense; we must assume that in the sphere of Nature a sensuous perception of the natural form is our genuine mode of contemplating the beautiful. "Sense," that is the master-key232 to the position; a word which in itself is interpreted in two opposed senses. In the first place we may indicate thereby the organs of immediate233 perception, secondly, by the "sense of a thing" we may refer to the significance, or the element of thought and the universal within it. In this way "Sense" is related on one side to the immediate externality of existence, and СКАЧАТЬ