The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

regarded as related to something else, which is presented us as what is essential and ought to be. A work of art would in that case be merely a useful instrument in the realization of an end which possessed real and independent importance outside the realm of art. As opposed to this we must maintain that it is art's function to reveal truth under the mode of art's sensuous or material configuration, to display the reconciled antithesis previously described, and by this means to prove that it possesses its final aim in itself, in this representation in short and self-revelation. For other ends such as instruction, purification, improvement, procuring of wealth, struggle after fame and honour have nothing whatever to do with this work of art as such, still less do they determine the fundamental idea110 of it.

      It is then from this point of view, into which the reflective consideration of our subject-matter finally issues, that we have to grasp the fundamental idea of art in terms of its ideal or inward necessity, as it is also from this point of view that historically regarded the true appreciation and acquaintance with art took its origin. For that antithesis, to which we have drawn attention, did not merely assert its presence within the general thought of educated men, but equally in philosophy as such. It was only after philosophy was in a position to overcome this opposition absolutely that it grasped the fundamental notion of its own content, and, to the extent it did so, the idea of Nature and of art.

      For this reason, as this point of view implies the reawakening of philosophy in the widest connotation of the term, so also it is the re-awakening of the science of art. We may go further and affirm that aesthetic as a science is in a real sense primarily indebted to this re-awakening for its true origination, and art for its higher estimation.

      IV

       Table of Contents

From this point of transition, I will briefly summarize the historical subject-matter that I have in my mind's eye, partly on account of the historical importance itself, and in part because thereby the points of view are more clearly indicated to which importance is attached, and upon the basis of which we propose to continue the superstructure. In its most general definition that basis consists in this, that the beauty of art has become recognized as one of the means which resolve and bring back to unity that antithesis and contradiction between the mind and Nature as they repose in abstract alienation from each other in themselves, whether this latter is regarded as external phenomena or the inward world of individual feeling and emotion111.

      1. It was the philosophy of Kant which, in the first instance, not merely experienced the want of such a point of union, but secured definite knowledge of it and brought it clearly before the mind. Speaking generally, Kant accepted as his basis for intelligence no less than for the will the rationality which relates itself to itself or freedom, the self-consciousness that discovers and knows itself essentially as infinite. This knowledge of the absoluteness of reason in its essential substance, which has proved in more modern times the turning-point of philosophy, this absolute point of departure deserves recognition, and does not admit of refutation, even though in other respects the Kantian philosophy is inadequate. But at the same time it was Kant who through falling back upon the fixed opposition between subjective thought and objective things, between abstract universality and the sensuous individuality of the will, in a pre-eminent degree strained to the extremest limit the very antithesis of morality we have previously adverted to, inasmuch as over and above this he emphasized the practical operation of mind to the disadvantage of the contemplative. In virtue of this fixity of the antithesis as cognized by the faculty of the understanding he had no other alternative than to express the unity exclusively in the form of subjective ideas for which no adequate reality could be demonstrated as correspondent; or, on its practical side, as postulates, which it was no doubt possible to deduce from the practical reason, but whose essential being was not within the cognition of thought, and the practical fulfilment of which remained throughout a mere "ought" deferred to infinity. And for this reason, though Kant did actually bring the reconciled opposition within the compass of intelligible ideas, he was neither able to develop its essential truth scientifically, nor to assert the same as actual and exclusive reality. Unquestionably Kant did press beyond this point, in the sense, that is to say, that he discovered the unity demanded in what he called the intuitive understanding; but in this respect too he is held up by the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity, so that, while he no doubt offers us a resolution in an abstract sense of the antithesis between conception and reality, universality and particularity, understanding and sense-perception, and suggests the Idea, yet he once more conceives this resolution and reconciliation itself in a wholly subjective sense, not as being true and real both essentially and on its own independent account. In this respect the Critique of the power of the judgment, in which he investigates the aesthetic and teleological power of the judgment is both instructive and remarkable. The beautiful objects of Nature and art, the products of Nature with their adaptations to ends, by means of which he approaches more closely the notion of the organic and the living, he considers wholly from the point of view of the reflection which judges them subjectively. And indeed Kant himself generally defines the power of judgment as "the capacity to think the particular as comprised under the universal," and calls the power of judgment reflective "when it has only the particular submitted to it, and has to discover the universal under which it is subsumed." To this end it requires a law, a principle, which it has to contribute to itself; and Kant affirms teleology to be this law. With regard to the conception of freedom which belongs to the practical reason the achievement of end or purpose gets no further than a mere "ought"; and in the teleological judgment, however, relatively to the living thing, Kant does manage to regard the living organism in such a way that the notional concept, the universal, succeeds in also including the particular, and as end does not determine the particular and external, the structure of the members from outside, but as an inward principle, and under the mode, that the particular conforms to the end spontaneously. Yet with such a judgment once more it is assumed that the objective nature of the thing is not known, but that it is only a mode of subjective reflection which is thereby expressed. In a similar way Kant so conceives the aesthetic judgment that it neither proceeds from the understanding, as such, in other words as the faculty of ideas, nor yet from the sensuous perception as such, and its varied manifold, but from the free play of the understanding and the imagination. In this common agreement of the faculties of knowledge the object finds its relation to the individual consciousness, and its feeling of pleasure and contentment.

      (a) Now this general feeling of contentment is, in the first place, without any interest, that is to say, it is devoid of relation to our appetitive faculty. If we have an interest of curiosity, shall we say, or a sensuous interest excited for a physical want, a desire for possession and use, then the objects are not important for their own sake, but in virtue of our need of them. In a case such as this what exists merely possesses a value in relation to such a need, and the relation is of the kind, that the object is on the one side and on the other is an attribute distinct from the object to which we relate it none the less. As an illustration if I consume the object in order to nourish myself therewith, this interest rests exclusively in me, and remains alien to the object. Now, in Kant's view, our position relatively to the beautiful is not of this description. The aesthetic judgment suffers that which is externally presented to subsist in free independence, proceeding as it does from the desire to permit the object to persist on its own account and to retain its end unimpaired within itself. This is, as we have already observed, an important observation.

(b) In the second place, Kant maintains that the beautiful is definable as that which without a conception, i.e., without a category of the understanding, is placed before us as the object of a universal satisfaction. To estimate the beautiful an educated mind is indispensable. The man in the street112 has no judgment about the beautiful; this judgment, in fact, claims universal validity. The universal is no doubt in the first instance simply, as such, an abstraction, one which, however, is in its essential and on its independent account,