The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1. THE GENERAL WORLD-CONDITION
The ideal subjectivity is as such essentially a personal relation, a relation, that is to say, of self to every aspect of motion or activity, in which the self has to assert or perfect its own substance. And to effect this a world environment is necessary as the universal ground of its realization. When in reference to this we speak of _condition_ we understand by this the universally prevailing mode, under which, within the sphere of spiritual reality, that which is the _substantive_ and essentially coalescing fabric of the same is present. In this sense we refer to a _condition_ of education, the sciences, the religious sense, or even of finance, administration of justice, family life, and similar examples. All these objects of reference are, however, merely aspects of one and the same spiritual content, which is thus in and through them rendered explicit and real. In further considering the general condition of the world as the universal mode of the reality of Spirit it will be necessary to pursue our examination from the point of view of the _Will._ It is through the exercise of volition that Spirit generally unites itself to-determinate existence; and the substantial _nexi_ which are immediately present in reality betray themselves in the specific modes in which the determinations of Will, ethical and legal conceptions, and, indeed, all that belongs to that which we are accustomed, in a general way, to define as justice, actively asserts itself.
The question consequently arises how such a universal condition must be characterized in order that it may appear adequate to the individuality of the Ideal. (_a_) Pursuant to the foregoing considerations we may, to begin with, emphasize the following points: (_α_) The Ideal is essential unity; not a purely formal and external unity, but the immanent unity of the content in itself. This substantive repose on its own resources we have already characterized as the self-sufficiency, rest, and beatitude of the Ideal. We will, in direct relation to the plane of discussion we have now reached, develop this characteristic of _self-subsistency_[300], making it a primary demand of our argument that what we have termed the general condition of the world appear in such a self-subsistent form as will enable it to accept the embodiment of the Ideal. (_αα_) Now self-subsistency is an equivocal expression to start with. In ordinary parlance that which is essentially substantial is called simply self-subsistent by virtue of the element of causation being implied within this substantiality; we are wont to use it in this sense when describing the intrinsically divine and absolute. But as retained in this universality of substance merely as such it is not declared as itself subjective, and consequently meets with its irresolvable contradiction in the particularity of concrete individuality. In this bare antithesis all true self-subsistency disappears.
In the Ideal, however, it is precisely the particular individuality which ought to persist in inseparable co-ordination with the substantive reality, and to the full extent that freedom and the self-subsistency of the subjective principle may attach to the Ideal the world-environment of conditions and relations should possess no essential objectivity independent of the individual in the subjective aspect above referred to or already presupposed. For the ideal individual is a self-enclosed totality, which already includes the objective principle, and it must not be permitted to have independent motion and development apart from the individuality of the subject; otherwise the subject falls back into a purely subordinate position in contrast to a world whose independence is already assured. Consequently the universal must indeed be actual in the individual as that which is in a unique sense its own, but not so as the property of the individual, as a _thinker_, but as that of his _character_ and _temperament._ To put the same truth in another way, what is required for this unity of the universal and individual in art as opposed to the mediation and differentiation of thought, is the form of _immediacy_; and the self-subsistency which we claim here is the form of immediate self-subsistency. With that, however, the element of _contingency_ is associated.
That is to say, so long as the universal and effective[301] constituents of spiritual life, such as the self-subsistency of individuals exhibits, are only presented to us in the immediate guise of subjective feeling, temperament, and disposition of character, and debarred any other category of existence, such are thereby already given over to the contingency of volition and its realization. All we have left us, then, is what is peculiar to each individual viewed as such and his sensuous experience. Such a possession of what is nothing more than personal idiosyncracy is unable to assert for itself any further potency or necessity; it appears simply as inclusion of content, fixed achievement and at the same time arbitrary commitment of the wholly self-dependent subject to the influence of feeling, disposition, energy, general ability, cunning, and talents, instead of carrying out its realization over and over again according to a principle of universal import and acknowledged stability. This type of contingency, then, is the characteristic quality of the condition which we required for the ground upon which all the varied wealth of the Ideal is to appear. (_β_) In order to make more clear the actual character of the reality which is most adapted to artistic treatment we will contrast it with that aspect of existence which is not so adapted.
But even in the latter case isolated individuals continue to remain as merely incidental facts, and apart from the organic reality of the State possess no real substantiality in themselves. For substantiality, in the sense we here use the term, is by no means only the _particular_ property of this or that individual, but a fully _explicit_ reality[302], minted, as it were, in all aspects of it, and down to the merest detail in a mode universally applicable and _necessary._ All that mere individuals can effect with _volition_ and _accomplishment_ even in actions right, moral, and legal in themselves in the interest of and attendant upon the progress of the whole, remains and must always remain, in contrast with that whole, insignificant and a mere example. Their actions are always only an entirely partial realization of a single case; and, moreover, the realization of the same has no universal significance in the sense that the particular example of it is thereby of objective validity as law, or, as such law, makes its appearance. And for the same reason, to put the matter the other way, it is wholly unimportant whether the validity of right and justice is acknowledged by private individuals judging as individuals. The validity is a vital fact of State life which holds whether it be acknowledged or no. No doubt it is a matter of interest to the general public that every one should fall in with the order established and desire it; but the wishes of isolated individuals have no influence upon that interest in the sense that it is only by virtue of the assent of this or that person that right and a moral order is preserved. Such require no such isolated example of assent; and a breach of either is followed by punishment.
The subordinate position of private persons in the civilized State is finally emphasized in the fact that, whatever share any one may have in the general civic life, it is of a definite and in every case restricted character. In the real State work must have some relation to the general good[303], just as the active enterprise of the bourgeoisie in the commercial business is subdivided in the most varied way, so that the entire life of the State shall not appear as the concrete achievement of any _single_ person, or in general can be entrusted to the arbitrary wishes, enterprise, courage, resources, and discretion of such, but on account of the fact that it comprises activities and trades of countless complexity, and must be carried out by associations of business men at least as varied. The punishment of a criminal is no longer an affair of personal heroism or the virtue of any _one_ individual, but is throughout the entire process, in the investigation and discovery of the felonious act, in the pronouncement of judicial sentence and its execution, contributed to by different persons; nay, every important phase of such a process is in the same way subject to some kind of division of labour. To see that the laws are properly administered, then, is not within the special province of any _one_ man, but results from an organized effort of great variety and the rules which direct it. Add to this every man who assists in such a process is bound to follow certain general principles which are laid down for his guidance, and all that is carried out under their direction is further subject to the criticism and control of yet higher officials.
This is what differentiates _punishment_ from _revenge._ The punishment exacted by law asserts the validity of the generally applicable and carefully defined right against the violation of that right, and makes use of the public power according to a definite process as its instrument, in other words, it employs a tribunal and a judge, an instrument to which personality is attached as something accidental. Even revenge may in a similar way find a justification; but such as it has is based entirely on the _subjective conscience_ of those who deal with the criminal act, and, in pursuance of their own _private_ convictions, avenge themselves on the unrighteous act and its perpetrator. The revenge of Orestes is, for example, justifiable; but he exacted it under the direction of the law which his own virtue prescribed, not as the execution of a judgment and a right. In the condition, then, that we claim as the most suitable for artistic treatment, that which is moral and just must be throughout personal, in the sense that its source is exclusively in the individual life, and it only is actual in such dependence.
Moreover, to proceed with our contrasted conditions, in regulated States the external environment of man is made secure, and properly is protected, and he is only permitted to retain in absolute independence for himself his private views and opinions. But in that condition where the essential features of a State are not found the protection of life and property depends on the isolated energy and courage of each individual by himself, who is compelled to look after his own security and that of everything which belongs to him. Such a condition we are accustomed to identify with the _heroic age._ It is not, of course, our province here either to discuss or decide which of these two contrasted conditions of life is the worthier; suffice it to say that, so far as the Ideal of art is concerned, it is imperatively necessary that this hard and fixed line between the universal as an independent existence and individuality should be removed, however much this distinction may be necessary in other directions for the realization of human existence. The reason of this is that Art and its Ideal is just that universal, in so far as it may be presented to the perception of the senses, and by such presentment is permitted to enter into the variety and living forms of the world of objects.
The Greek heroes make their appearance in an epoch anterior to legal enactment, or they are themselves the founders of States, so that right and social order, law and ethical custom, emanate from them, and persist as their own creation in an indefeasible relation to them. In this way Hercules was regarded so highly by the ancients themselves, and represents an Ideal of original and heroic virtue. His free and self-reliant virtue, with which he championed the right and battled against the monstrosities of men and Nature is not a prevailing characteristic of the age, but belongs to him as an exclusive and unique possession. And we may add he was not strictly a moral hero, as his reception of the fifty daughters of Thespius in one night[304] clearly shows us; neither would it appear from the tale about the Augaean stables is he pre-eminent for gentility. He is rather the general type of self-reliant strength and resource in its championship of right and justice, to exemplify which he elected summarily and from a free choice to undergo countless toils and labours. It is true that some of his deeds were carried out at the instigation of Eurystheus, but this submission is, after all, rather a formal association than a real one, no connection at least of legal validity or inevitable necessity through which the strength of his self-reliant personality was diverted from its independent course.
The Homeric heroes are of a similar type. No doubt they have their clan chieftain; but the associating bond is no fixed relation already determined by law, which enforces their submission; of their own free will it is that they follow Agamemnon, who is no monarch in the modern sense of the term. Consequently every hero volunteers his own advice, the enraged Achilles acts independently for himself in his separation, and, speaking generally, each and all come and go, act, or take their leisure as they please. In much the same independent position, that is to say, united in no fixed organization, to which they are as individuals entirely subordinate, we find the heroes of Arabian poetry portrayed, and even the Shah-Rameh of Ferdusi furnishes us with similar examples. In latter-day Christendom the age of feudalism and knighthood supplies a fertile field for the free growth of heroic enterprise and the type of individuality which belongs to it. Of such are the heroes of the round table, no less than the heroic circle of which Charles the Great is the focus. Charles is, much like Agamemnon, surrounded with independent chieftains of heroic mould, a union which as such is powerless[305].
He is consequently always compelled to take counsel with them, however much each of them may be influenced by private passions; he may bluster like a very Olympian Jupiter, and none the less find himself and his undertakings suddenly left in the lurch while his confederates are off on some adventures of their own. The Cid is perhaps the most complete example of the type. He, too, is the ally of a confederacy, the dependent of a king, and is bound to render duty as vassal; but in opposition to this obligation he is pre-eminently influenced by the principle of honour, the purely personal consideration of his own glory, nobility, and reputation[306]. And so in this case also the king can only determine a fixed line of action and make war after consulting and obtaining the consent of his vassals. If this is not given they do not fight, and, moreover, a mere majority of votes is not sufficient to compel them. Every man is independent of his neighbour, and exercises his will and steers his own course as such. We find in the accounts given us of Saracen heroes an equally brilliant picture of self-reliant and still more inflexible personality. Even the Reinecke Fuchs fable is a fresh example of this state of things. Here, it is true, the lion is master and king, but the wolf and the bear sit in council. Even Reinecke and the rest do just what they like; and when there is a general outcry, the sly fellow either gets out of the mess with his story-telling, or manages to make some particular interest of king and queen work to his own advantage, and in his own cunning way talks over his sovereign somehow.
In those days such an act was not a crime at all. He only returned a blow after being vigorously attacked. But the stranger was his father. Œdipus further marries a royal lady. His wife is his mother. Without knowing it he commits an act of shame. On learning the truth he acknowledges such enormities to their full extent, inflicts a punishment on himself as murderer of his father and a man of incest, and this although he was entirely ignorant of the true nature of these acts, or had any intention of doing them. The self-reliant stubbornness and entirety of the heroic character refuses to parcel out responsibility and knows nothing of such distinctions as personal intention and the objective act and its consequences. In the evolution and ramification of an action as we moderns regard it these opposed points of view constantly recur, and guilt is thrown into the background as far as possible. No doubt our view of the matter is more in accordance with _ethical principle_, in so far as the condition of a personal knowledge of the particular circumstances, or the consciousness of an object good in itself, in short, generally the intent of an act, is what materially assists us in our judgment. But in the heroic age, where we find the individual essentially indivisible and the objective act proceeding from himself as entirely his own, each person claims absolutely all that he may do, and refuses to surrender one jot or tittle of responsibility therefor.
To an extent equally minute the heroic figure is separated from the ethical whole, to which he belongs, and his self-consciousness is bound up wholly in substantial unity with that whole. According to the views in vogue now we draw a line of distinction as private individuals between objects which are wholly personal and those which affect the community. The individual acts in all that he does from his own private personality as distinct from others, and views even his actions rather as relative to this than as part of all that is farmed out by the organic whole to which he belongs. We consequently make a distinction between individuals and their families. Such is unknown in the heroic age. The guilt of ancestors adheres to their descendants, and an entire family will suffer for the original defaulter. Men inherit the fatality of guilt and transgression. A condemnation such as this appears to us unjust as an irrational subjection to a blind fate.
With us the achievements of ancestors reflect no more honour on children and descendants than the punishments and crimes of such contaminate those that follow after them, and least of all is their private character thus affected; nay, modern opinion is already close to the view that the confiscation of family property is a punishment which violates the profounder conception of liberty. But in the ancient and more plastic totality the individual is not so isolated, but rather a member of his family and race. For this reason the character, action, and fortunes of the family continue to be the private affair of each member of it; and so far from denying the actions of his parents, each man voluntarily accepts them as his own; they live in him, and he is just that which his fathers were, suffered, or transgressed. This appears to us a hardship, but that which we replace it with, this standing alone on our own possessions[307], and the more subjective self-stability thus acquired is also from another point of view only the abstract self-sufficiency of each. The individuality of heroic times is none the less of a more ideal type, because it does not declare itself as satisfied with the mere form of freedom and infinity, but remains in unalterable and immediate unity with all that is most substantial in the relations of spirit which it of itself endows with living actuality. In such an individuality the substantial is immediately individual, and the individual thereby himself essentially substantive.
He has, it is true, also historical memories, out of which he must mould a content conformable to the universal; but the picture of the Past possesses, as already observed, an advantage, taken simply as a picture of greater universality, while the manifold texture of mediating condition and circumstance, interwoven as it is in the entire framework of finite existence which surrounds it, offers him material ample enough to prevent his hand obliterating the individuality, which is essential to his work of art. The more closely we consider it, the clearer will be our conclusion that a heroic age has the advantage over later and more civilized times in that the isolated character and personality generally in such an age does not as yet find what is substantive either in the sphere of ethical custom, or moral obligation opposed to itself in the necessary embodiment of legal institution, and thereby presents immediately to the poet all that the form of the Ideal requires. Shakespeare has, for example, selected much material for his tragedies from chronicles and earlier romances, framed upon a condition of life which has not as yet received the impression of a fully articulated social order, but in which the energy of individuals, as emphasized in personal resolve and achievement, is still the prevailing characteristic. His genuine historical dramas have, on the contrary, a vein of historical substance running through them in the strictest sense, and for this reason lean farther away from an ideal exposition, although here, too, both circumstances and actions are made to fall in with, or are removed to suit, the unyielding self-sufficiency and wilfulness of particular characters. No doubt this characteristic remains for the most part in their case a purely formal self-inclusion, whereas if we contrast it with the self-subsistency of heroic characters we find that here the essential _content_ of all such have proposed to accomplish is bound up therewith.
It is on account of this contrast that we should find a reason for repeating the general thesis in connection with the Ideal, to the effect that the _Idyllic_ is exceptionally adapted for its expression, inasmuch as where that is presented the cleavage between what is determined by legal necessity and the living person is wholly absent. To this we must reply that, however simple and original idyllic situations may be, however far removed they may be from the artificial prose-existence of society, such simplicity, if we consider the nature of its content, has, in fact, too insignificant an interest to satisfy the most substantial and essential requirements of the Ideal. Material of this sort fails entirely to include the most weighty motives of heroic character such as Fatherland, moral and family problems, and their development; it is a kind of treatment which is apt to select as the very core of its subject such a fact as the loss of a single sheep or the falling in love of a girl. In this way the Idyllic not unfrequently becomes merely the resource and recreation of our hearts, to which poets such as Gessner, for example, will add their dose of sickly sweetness and sentimentalism.
The idyllic aspect of the days we live in have, further, this defect, that this _naïveté_, this domesticated or rural atmosphere in the emotional aspect of love or the enjoyment of a good cup of coffee in the open and things of that sort are not likely to awake much interest, when we find in them nothing but the country parson flavour--find them cut off, that is to say, from all wider relations with the outside world, and not a trace of the profounder web of purposes with which that world is interwoven. It is precisely here that we have reason to admire the genius of Goethe, when he concentrated his poetic talent on material of this kind in his poem of "Hermann and Dorothea." It is true that he selects from the life of the Present a particular theme of very limited extension, but at the same time he unfolds before us as the background and atmosphere of the picture in which his characters are portrayed the great interests of the revolution and his own native country, and, in short, associates with a subject-matter necessarily narrow in its range facts of world-history of the widest and most potent significance.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.