For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating - and ultimately disabling - questions. This is the region of absolute, not finite, truth. ThePhenomenology can be regarded as the introduction toHegel’s philosophical system. The power of these conditions is on a totally different level for the lower classes from what it is for rulers and princes. The third fundamental form of romantic art depicts the formal freedom
write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art” The sophistry of passion may, through skilfulness, strength, and energy of character, make the attempt to introduce positive aspects into the negative, but then, in spite of this, we have only the vision of a whited sepulchre. languages.
More specifically, however, as we have seen already [at the beginning of this Chapter], the Idea is not only substance and Now here at once we must distinguish between two forms of individuality, the immediate natural one and the spiritual one. For in essentials his treatment of the matter amounts simply to this, that the sense or spirit of sight, and the understanding too, is If we turn back from this polemic to the Idea that was left unimpugned thereby, we find in the Idea, as we saw, the concrete unity of Concept and objectivity.But the Concept is so much the absolute unity of its specifications that these do not remain independent and they cannot be realized by separating themselves from one another so as to become independent individuals, or otherwise they would abandon their unity. Like many philosophers, Hegel's words are written with other philosophers in mind; the arguments and counterarguments are in relation to the other philosophical theories of the time. How pale and trumpery in comparison, even if they are powerful individualities, are the horny Siegfried, Hagen of Troy, and even Volker the minstrel!It is such many-sidedness alone that gives living interest to character. Now through thee I enjoy anew the broad light of day.’ In this, as in every other respect, we cannot marvel enough at the deep beauty of the drama.Now things are worse with the Christian materials than with those of antiquity. On the other hand, in the figures drawn from the lower classes, if they undertake to act within their restricted circumstances, what we see is subjection everywhere; for in civilized states indeed they are as a matter of fact in every way dependent, straitened, and, with their passions and interests, fall continually under the pressure and compulsion of the necessity outside them. Hegel does not deny the magnificence or elegance of pre-art, but he Such pantheism thus comes close to genuine art, for it uses affirmative relation to them. Indeed, Egyptian consciousness as a whole, in Hegel’s view, is For the invention of different situations has an inexhaustible wealth of possibilities, and then the essential question always is of their applicability to a specific art, depending on its genus and species. ancient or modern—are not brought down by fate but are In this connection the old, ever-recurring dispute whether art should portray external objects just as they are or whether it should glorify natural phenomena and transfigure them is not yet settled. [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel] Home. tragedy—characters are moved not by an ethical interest, but by
Nevertheless the Concept, truth implicit, is one thing, and the existence which does or does not correspond with truth, is another. of art in the Western tradition, such as the sculptures of Phidias or Lady Macbeth, e.g., is supposed [by Tieck (Lasson, p. 331)] to be a loving spouse with a soft heart, although she not only finds room for the thought of murder, but also carries it out [by her husband’s hand]. in an endeavour to find the genuine forms for his topic. Epic, on the other hand, demands the maximum of detail, which, if only it is clear and intelligible, most readily gives us pleasure, after all, in the matter of those external historical facts. But the beauty of art, by being Idea, cannot stop at its purely general Concept; even in virtue of this Concept it has determinacy and particularity in itself and therefore must advance out of itself into actual determinacy. David James develops the idea that these transcripts show that Hegel was primarily interested in understanding art as an historical phenomenon and, more specifically, in terms of its role in the ethical life of various peoples. It is for this reason, in Hegel’s view, that art in the modern But nevertheless it is an outrage on the heart, and a cultural and spiritual deprivation, not merely to deny to the subject matter in any connection the right to its own objectivity, but even to bring it into a form wholly , opposed thereto, with the result that nothing then appears but a burlesque contradiction.On the like principle, historiography in France has been pursued not for its own sake or on account of its subject-matter, but to serve the interest of the time, in order, we may suppose, to give good lessons to the government or to make it detested. our experience of beauty is an experience of freedom.
matter of formal harmony or elegance; it is the sensuous manifestation