The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
A. THE BEAUTY OF NATURE AS SUCH
1. In the world of Nature we must distinguish between the modes according to which the notion becomes existent reality in order to be part of the Idea. (_a_) In the _first_ place the notion is absorbed so immediately in pure objectivity, that, in its character of subjective and ideal unity, it wholly fails to assert itself, and passes over instead as a thing without a soul into the raw _materia_ presented to sense. The purely mechanical or physical bodies in their isolated singularity are of this order. A particular metal is, for example, essentially no doubt a manifold of mechanical and physical qualities; every part of it, however, has such qualities equally in itself. Such a body not merely fails to possess any entire articulation of its parts in the sense that every one of its different parts receives for itself a particular material existence, but even the negative ideal unity of such differentiation is absent, which might assert itself as animating principle[201]. The difference here is a purely abstract multiplicity, and the unity posited the indifferent equilibrium of identical qualities. This is the first mode of the existence of the notion. The differences here receive no independent existence, and the ideal unity is not found as ideality. For this reason such isolated bodies are essentially defective and abstract existences.
Such a material existence of the ideal unity of the notion is still very defective; for whereas on the one hand we have this unity posited in its reality only as the relation or material connection between the severally independent bodies, on the other we have it posited as a body which belongs to that system, whose unity, in opposition to its real differences, it essentially represents. The sun, in short, which we take to be[202] the soul of the system, has itself an independent entity apart from the members which form the explicit content of this soul. It is itself only _one_ particular mode or phase of the notion, that, namely, of unity in its _difference_ from the actual separation of the several parts, a unity which remains outside itself, and is consequently abstract. For however much the sun by virtue of its physical quality is plainly a principle of unity, the illuminating body as such, this is after all merely an abstract identity. For light is simple, undifferentiated appearance and nothing more. We find therefore in the solar system the unity of the notion indeed objective, and the totality of its differences explicitly realized, each body making visible _one_ particular phase[203] of the notion; but here, too, it lies absorbed in its objective reality, and it fails to assert itself in such material as is truly inherent and explicit ideality. The form of its existence which here prevails remains the independent segregation of its particular phasal units[204].
It is, however, essential to the true existence of the notion, that the _differences_ of the objectively real, the reality, that is to say, of the separate independent parts and the equally independent unity that is therein objectively realized, should as such be together brought back into unity. Only thus such a totality of innate differences can make wholly explicit either the notion as the realized differentiation of its characteristics, or at the same time release each particular that belongs to it from the element of isolated independence which it cancels by enabling the ideality, in which these differences recover their subjective unity, to assert itself fully as the universal principle of their animated being. In that case they become no longer _parts_ hanging loosely to one another by a bond that still leaves their particularity unaffected, but genuine _members_ of one body. They no longer possess an existence in their isolated singularity, but retain such truly in the ideal unity which binds them together. Only in such an organic articulation the ideal unity of the notion is present to the parts thus integrated. It is at once their support and immanent soul; here for the first time the notion is not overwhelmed in objective reality, but passes over into actual existence as the inward identity and universality, which it essentially is.
In other words, we must recognize the body and its members as the objective existence of the notion itself in systematic articulation, which in the members of the living organism, secures an objective existence for its determinate features, analogously no doubt, if on a higher plane, to the facts presented by the solar system. Within this real existence the notion asserts itself in like manner as the ideal unity of all these determinate parts. This ideal unity is the soul. The soul is the substantive unity and interfused universality which is no less a simple relation of self-determining than it is ideal Being-for-itself or self-coherent totality. This is the higher view of the union between soul and body. To put it in other words both are not merely distinct aspects set side by side; they are one and the same totality of identical determinants. Just as the Idea generally can only be grasped in its explicit reality as the notion evolving itself as such[208], in which conception the differentiation and unity of both sides, that is both the notion and its objective reality, are inseparably present, in the same way Life must be conceived as the unity of both soul and body.
And further, the subjective no less than substantive unity of soul within the body is presented us and exemplified in Feeling. The feeling of a living organism is, that is to say, not merely an independent product of a particular member, but it is also this ideal and simple unity of the entire organism. It is carried through every member of the body is felt throughout in more than a hundred places at once; and indeed, to put it shortly, rather than saying there are many thousand sensitive points[209] in a single organism we should more justly say there is but one, namely, the subject of consciousness. And inasmuch as the animating principle of organic Nature includes in itself this distinction between the real existence of the organic members, and the abstract or simple self-coherence within such parts, which we call the growing soul, mediating between them both by virtue of its inherent unity, such a principle of Life stands on a higher plane than that of inorganic Nature. Only with Life is the Idea existent, and only thus is the Idea truth. No doubt even in the organic world this truth can be extinguished. We find the body unable to perfect its essential ideality and animating energy. Such is the case in disease. Here we find the notion deprived of its controlling sovereignty, and other powers are potent with it. Such a life is, however, defective and crippled: it merely continues, because the inadequacy of reality to the notion has not reached the point of absolute contradiction; it is still only relatively valid. Once assume that all harmony between the two sides is broken, that all genuine articulation of the members of the body and their true identity has dropped away, and life is dissolved in death. The several members are now mere appendages to each other, with no principle of Life to hold them in unsevered unity.
This affirmation and resolution of the contradiction which obtains between the ideal unity and material juxtaposition of the members, constitutes the appointed _process_ of life itself. And Life is simply _process._ And this process of life includes an activity which has two distinct functions. On the one hand it has continually to affirm the material existence of the physical distinctions[210] among the members of the organism thus determined; on the other, just in proportion as such distinctions grow obdurate in their independent particularity, and tend to remain fixed in absolute separation from each other, it has to make good once more that universal ideality, which is the principle of their life. This is the idealism of Life's process. Philosophy is not the only idealism; far from it. Nature herself in her domain of actuality creates in the life-process just that which the philosophy of idealism completes in the world of contemplative thought. Only where we have these two aspects of one activity, that is, the constant realization of the corporeal definition of the organism no less than the synthetic affirmation of such material presentment in the ideal unity, which it is as one with the notion[211], then and only then we have the completed process of Life, whose more primitive forms[212], however, this is not the place to discuss.
Through this unity of Life's energy in both its branches all the members of the organism are up held in their integrity, and continually flushed anew with the ideality of their life. This ideality is furthermore declared by the organic parts in the fundamental law of their being, that this unity of Life is not so much an accidental quality as, on the contrary, the substance of it. In this alone they are able to preserve their specific character. This it is which precisely constitutes the difference between the part of a mere conglomerate and the member of an organism. The particular parts of a house, for example, the stones, windows, and so forth, remain just what they are, whether they form part of the structure of a house, or whether they do not. Their relationship to one another is quite indifferent, and the conceptual notion remains in their case a purely external form, which possesses no life in these parts raising them to the ideality of a subjective unity.
The members of an organism have, it is true, an external reality, but for all that it is the notion of Life which constitutes the inward, nay, the characteristic being of such reality, a reality which is not expressed through one external form uniting them, but in the ideal coherence of their parts in one living whole. For this reason the limbs have no such reality as belongs to the stones of a building, or the planets, moon, and comets in the solar system. Their reality is one wholly within the content of the organism, and all appearance to the contrary is, as such, ideally imposed on them. Dissever the hand from the body and it loses its independent existence as a member of the organism which made it what it was. Its activity, form, and colour, all that constitutes it, is at once changed; it enters the process of corruption, and ultimately ceases to exist[213]. Consistent character it only possesses as a limb of organic life, reality only in constant reunion with that ideal unity which sustains it. And that is just the superior mode of reality which the living organism possesses in itself. The real or positive is for ever being set up as both the negation of itself and withal the ideal resumption of itself, such ideality constituting, in fact, both the maintenance and specific character of the mode under which each of the separate parts of the bodily presence are associated together.
If we inquire further in what manner the Idea is manifested within the actual life of such living individuals our survey will be as follows: _first_, this principle of Life will be realized as the totality of an organism possessing bodily shape; _secondly_, this physical shape is not presented as a rigid product[222], but as a continous process of ideal generation, in which a living soul asserts itself. _Thirdly_, the changes and determinations through which this totality passes are not imposed externally to it, but are changes of form which are evolved from its inherent nature, imposed on itself and for itself, in a process wherein it stands self-determined as the subjective unity no less than the ultimate end of its being.
This free self-subsistence of the subjective principle of life is especially exemplified in the spontaneous motion of a living organism. The inanimate bodies of inorganic Nature are fettered to the conditions of Space, which limits them to one place, or they are only moved from it by external forces. The motion, in short, does not originate in themselves; and, when it is visible upon them, it appears as an energy which is foreign to them, to remove which the only force they exert is that of reaction. And if the motion of the planets with similar phenomena appear to be otherwise produced, such are at least wholly fettered by natural laws and their abstract necessity. The living animal, on the contrary, in its freedom of motion, negatives this enforced limitation to one spot by virtue of its own activity. It is through such self-determination the continuous liberation of itself from the material isolation. And for the same reason it is in this freedom of motion, if only in a subordinate degree, the release of itself from the former abstractness referable to the particular modes of motion, their direction and their speed. Under a yet closer view, moreover, the animal, regarded by itself in its organism, presents the same sensuous matter that is moved; and here, too, life is as before a freedom of motion within this organic reality, evidenced in the flow of blood and the movement of the limbs.
Motion, however, is not the only expression of animated life. The free tones of the voice of animals, which are unknown in the inorganic world, where bodies merely roar and clatter through the blow of objects external to them, these already present to us the higher expression of animated subjectivity. The most intimate and vital expression of such ideal activity is, however, brought before us when we find the living individual able to concentrate itself as individuality over against the objective world, while at the same time it appropriates and transfigures that world _for its own._ And this is accomplished in part through observation by means of vision, and partly for practical purposes, in so far as such an individual brings the outer world into subjection to himself, utilizes the same, assimilates it as a means of nourishment, and in this manner continually reproduces his individuality in that objective _alterum._ Such a process, of course, as it ascends through stronger organisms, assumes more and more emphatic degrees of unsatisfied desire, assimilation, satisfaction, or satiety. Such, then, are the activities, in which the notion of animated life makes itself apparent. Moreover, the principle of Ideality thus rendered visible is not merely the result of _our_ reflection; it is _objectively_ real itself in the living subject, whose existence consequently we may go so far as to call an objective idealism. And it is the soul, as before stated, which, as this ideal energy, brings about its own manifestation[223], always reducing the _purely_ external reality of the body to an appearance, and thereby affirming itself as objective totality in that very bodily shape.
2. Now it is as the Idea made objectively visible to the senses that the animated life of Nature is _beautiful_; in so far, that is to say, as the truth or the Idea, presented in the form of Nature, where under it first appears, in other words life, is immediately given in the particular shape of reality adequate to it. Owing, however, to its sensuous immediacy the living beauty of Nature is neither beautiful _for itself_ nor is the beauty strictly that which is _the outcome_ of itself, a product, that is, of its purely objective appearance. The beauty of Nature is only beautiful for another, that is _for us_, the consciousness that apprehends its beauty. The question therefore arises in what way and by virtue of what characteristics the principle of life appears to us beautiful in its _immediate_ existence.
We shall rather find that neither the sensuous perception of single haphazard appetites, arbitrary movements and efforts towards self-satisfaction, nor the fanciful consideration of the animal organism as one directed by purpose will present to us purely animal life as a part of the beauty of Nature. The beauty consists in the appearance of individual form, both in repose and motion, quite apart from the relation of its self-gratification to any purpose thus subserved, as it is apart from the entirely isolated contingency of self-imposed movement[226]. Such beauty is related to the _form_ alone, because it is only as such that it is the external appearance, in which the objective idealism of the principle of life makes itself known to us as a thing perceived and contemplated upon through the senses. Thought apprehends this "objective idealism" in the medium of its notion, appropriating the same in the element of _universality_ which belongs to it, albeit the contemplation of its beauty is inseparably bound with its _phenomenal reality._ And this reality is the external form of the articulated organism, which is, in our view of it, quite as much determinate particularity as it is a semblance, namely, that of the physical manifold of the separate members, which can only form part of the concrete totality of the _living form_ under the guise of phenomenal appearance.
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 instructive[231] 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.
In this way "Sense" is related on one side to the immediate externality of existence, and on the other to its inward or essential nature. A sensuous perception of that existence in fact preserves both sides in unity, or rather in one direction so presents the aspect that is opposed to it in the immediate sense vision as to include therein both the essence and notion of the object. But for the reason that it combines these opposed determinations in unfractured unity, the notion is not presented as such to consciousness, but is rather to be dimly foreshadowed there[234]. We accept, for example, as a determinate fact the existence of three realms of Nature, which we define as that of the mineral world, that of plants, and finally that of animals; we can conclude from this, as already foreshadowed by its truth regarded as a process rising from plane to plane, that there is an inward necessity inherent in the notional articulation of its divisions, and do not confine ourselves only to the purely imaginative conception of it as a world conforming on its exterior side only to a final end.
In the same way when confronted with the variety of the external presentment in each of these realms, the sense-perception surmises a controlling unity intelligible to mind, a progress subject to laws of thought, visible no less in the formation of mountain ranges than in the orderly succession of plant-life and of the animal races. The same tendency is presupposed when, after an examination of the form of any particular animal organism, an insect's, for example, as subdivided into head, body, abdomen, and extremities, we conclude the correlation of such parts to be based on a rational principle, and are confident that though, at first blush, it may appear quite accidental that we are in possession of five senses, we shall discover a true bond of relation between that number and the notion therein asserted. Of just this type is Goethe's method of observing and accounting for the innate reason of Nature and her phenomena. With an extraordinary intuitive sense he directed his attention directly to[235] the objects of experience, entirely convinced of the ideal bond of unity which explained their interconnection. History may be written with a like object. The narration of facts and individual lives is given in such a way as indirectly to throw a light on the essential significance which such events or persons contributed to the period in which they are necessarily bound together in one organic whole.
3. Consequently we may affirm that Nature generally, regarded as the sensuous manifestation of the concrete notion and the Idea, is to be considered an object of beauty in so far as by such a sensuous perception of natural forms some kind of foreshadowing of the notional unity consonant to them is surmised, and we are able through the channels of sense to discover not merely their form, but somewhat of the inner necessity which binds together all their parts. Further than this incomplete surmise of the notion the sensuous contemplation of Nature as beautiful is not carried. This way of comprehending things, for which the separate parts, despite their appearance of independent freedom among themselves, nevertheless reveal to the sight the harmony that exists there either in the characteristics of _their form_, or detached portions of it or their motion and so forth, remains for all that _indefinite_ and _abstract._ The inward unity is not open to external sense, nor can it appear in its ideal and concrete form to such perception[236], whether imaginative or no; such at most acquiesces generally in the universality of a law of connection inherent in every living thing.
Here, for the first time, reality is in possession of a form adequate to the notion; or rather the notion sets itself up as its own opposite, makes itself objectively real and finds its own realization in that objectivity. The animal life, on the contrary, is only _potentially_ such a unity as that in which reality as bodily form is other than the ideal unity of soul. In self-consciousness we have this unity realized, whose opposing factors are constituent elements of one transparent ideality. And it is as this concrete totality of self-consciousness that the Ego is manifested to others. The forms of animal life merely enable us through imaginative perception to divine the soul's existence. Such only possess the troubled semblance of a soul, betrayed to us through the breath or exhalement which permeates the whole, gives some unity to all the members, and reveals in the entire instinctive life the first germs of an independent character. Herein lies the primary defect of the beauty of Nature, even when taken at its point of culminating form: and it is precisely this defect which will introduce us to the necessity of _the Ideal_ as the beauty of art. But before we consider at length the nature of this Ideal, there are two determinations involved as the most immediate result of this inherent defect in natural beauty, which invite our attention.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.