The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ cases in which the general type seems almost totally to have disappeared. There is no end to the caprice of the human features. Speaking generally, we would associate with this ground the fact that the beauty of children most arrests us. In their faces we find all pronounced idiosyncracies slumber as it were beneath a quiet veil; no dominating passion as yet ravages their soul; not one of the thousand interests of the grown man has engraved for ever the expression of its necessity on these mobile features. This envisaged innocence of the child, however, though we may discover in its flexible animation the possibility of Life's completed fulness, obviously fails to reveal those profounder indications of a spirit which has been carried forward to explore the range of its own recesses and to make its life one with rational purpose.

We may regard, then, immediate existence, both in the purely physical and spiritual sense of the term, as a finitude, or more justly as a finitude which does not satisfy its notion and for this very reason declares its finitude. For the notion, and more concretely still, the Idea, is essentially independent and free. Purely animal life, although as Life it is the Idea, is no manifestation of infinity as such or freedom. This is alone possible under conditions, where we find the notion penetrate so completely the reality which is adequate to it, that it finds itself entirely at home therein, with no extraneous matter, to disturb its possession. Then alone do we find it a really free and concrete individuality. The natural life, on the contrary, is unable to overcome the element of feeling to which it is attached, and which renders it incapable of penetrating the entire reality which enrings it. It finds itself, moreover, immediately conditioned in itself, restricted in its range and dependent, a result which is due to the fact that its freedom is not truly self-determinate, but conditioned by the external: object. And the same thing is true of the immediate and finite reality of the spirit world in its knowledge, volitional action, and fateful history. For although in this latter case we find centres of unity expressed which have a real significance, neither these any more than the particularities they unite have truth as they stand by themselves; but only that truth which, in their reciprocal relation to each other, they manifest as constituent parts of a whole. And this whole, albeit in a sense adequate to its notion, does not correspond to it in such a way as to manifest itself in its full totality269, which consequently still remains aloof from such envisagement, or rather, is only apprehended in the ideal world of thought. In other words, the notion finds no fully adequate presentation in external reality, such as is powerful enough to marshal homogeneously all the numberless fragments of particularity, and to concentrate them into one expression and one single form.

      (c) This, then, is the fundamental reason which prevents Spirit itself, on the finite planes of determinate existence, and under the restricting conditions of its externality and necessity, from rediscovering the immediate vision and enjoyment of its freedom. It is consequently driven by its absence to seek that vision in a higher sphere. That sphere is art, and its realization is the Ideal.

We have thus seen that it is the defects of immediate reality which drive us forward inevitably to the idea of the beauty of art. We are further under an obligation to prove that its fundamental object270 is to manifest here on this very plane of rational reality and in its freedom the envisagement of life, and, most important of all, the life of Spirit. Here, then, we have at last the external revealed to us in a form adequate to the notion. Here, for the first time, truth is lifted up from its environment of temporal conditions, from its running to and fro among the whirl of finite particularity, and attains repose; nay, more than this, discovers an external form, from which the hunger of Nature and the prose of life no longer stare at us. Here at last we have a form worthy of substantial truth, which is wholly self-contained and self-dependent, determining with freedom its own content, and not driven from such self-assertion by the weight of that of others.

201. Als Beseelung sich kund gäbe. The reference is to the second class which follows rather than truly animates life. The sun is such an animating principle. How far modern physics with its investigations of the laws of motion that obtain among the chemical atoms of any specific form of matter and its denial of all dead matter would have modified Hegel's view is an interesting question.

202. Wir wollen betrachten. Hegel seems to be conscious himself that there is something fanciful in this interpretation of the significance of what is simply an arbitrary, if systematic, arrangement of bodies according to natural laws.

203. Ein besonderes Moment. See note [191] on p. 152. I think what Hegel means here is that every body as a vehicle of light reflects the mode in which the identity of the notion as system in the different parts asserts itself.

204. In other words what should be phasal elements (Momente) of a whole integrated within that unity remain independent units. They are not Momente in the full sense.

205. Als bloss real unterschiedener. The meaning is that the distinction is only in the totality, not as in the former case in a body which though part of a system, could be viewed as an independent body like the sun.

206. Gewöhnliches Bewustseyn, i.e., the ordinary view of understanding (Verstand) and sense-perception.

207. Blosser Zusammenhang. Fortuitous is rather too strong. He means a bond of union cemented by one principle without which either side fails to possess its specific character, e.g., the human body apart from the human soul its animate individuality, ceases to be human.

208. Als Begriff seyende Begriff. The reference I take to be to the logical or dialectical movement of the Idea.

209. Viele tausend empfindende, or centres of feeling.

210. Die realen Unterschiede, i. e., the distinctions of the body viewed as part of the physical process of Nature.

211. Zu ihrer subjektiven Einheit, that is to say, their unity with the notion of Life as objectively realized in Nature, subjective only in the sense that it is ideal, not apprehended by sense-perception as such.

212. Nähere. I think Hegel uses nähe in the idiomatic sense in which he uses it in the phrase (p. 150) when he speaks of Nature as das nächst Daseyn der Idee, i.e., most elementary, more near to it when the notion first presses out of abstraction into totality.

213. Lötze apparently disputes this distinction, but it appears to me very clear.

214. Seyn. The logical terms are here employed in their technical Hegelian sense. Seyn is "being" as part of a process, it is rather a tendency to become than a particular or determinate being (daseyn.)

215. Das Negiren, the negation of them as entirely independent structures.

СКАЧАТЬ