G.W.F.

Hegel - Encyclopdie Philosophie des Geistes Translated from the third edition of 1830 From Hegel: Theologian of the spirit edited by Peter C. Hodgson ? A. ART . 556. This knowledge, as immediate, (the moment of finitude of art) takes shape [Gestalt] [in two ways]. , . On the one hand, it breaks up into a work of external everyday determinate existence [Dasein], into the subject that produces the work / and the subject that perceives and venerates (audience) [it]. , , , . On the other hand, it constitutes the concrete intuition [Anschauung] and representation [Vorstellung] of implicitly(an sich) absolute spirit as the ideal. , /? . [This = immediate knowledge is] the concrete shape, born of subjective spirit, in which its natural immediacy [is] only a sign [Zeichen] of the idea, for the expression of which (idea) the informing spirit works such a transfiguration that the shape shows it (idea) and it (idea) alone the shape of beauty. informing ? ?

imi. 557. The sensuous externality of the beautiful the form of immediacy as such is at the same time its determinacy of content. Alongside its spiritual character, divinity [der Gott] has at the same time the character of a natural element or determinate existence it contains the so-called unity of nature and spirit, i.e., the immediate form, that of intuition. This is not the spiritual unity in which the natural is posited only as ideal, as sublated, and the spiritual content would be related only to itself; it is not the absolute spirit that enters this consciousness!! . / But, burdened [=finitude] as it is with immediacy, the freedom of the subject is only a matter of custom = finite character of sign / lacking the infinite inward reflection and subjective inwardness of conscience. This determines also the further development of devotion and worship in the religion of fine art. , .

Subjective side of the community / objective side of the community ? . 558. To arrive at the intuition it has to produce, art needs not only an external given material, including also subjective images and representations; for the expression of spiritual import, it also needs the given forms of nature with a signification that art must divine and possess. Of all such configurations the human is the highest and the authentic one because only in it can spirit have its corporeality and thus its intuitable expression. This disposes of the principle of the imitation of nature in art, in respect to which no agreement in possible on the basis of such an abstract opposition [in other words] so long as the natural is taken only in its externality and not as the characteristic, meaningful natural form signifying spirit. . 559. Absolute spirit cannot be made explicit in such single shapes. The sprit of fine art is therefore a limited folk sprit [Volksgeist] whose implicit universality breaks down into an indeterminate polytheism as steps are taken to further define its richness. With the essential limitedness of its content, beauty in general achieves only an imbuing of the intuition or image by what is spiritual. It achieves something formal, so that the content of the thought or representation, [together] with the material it uses for its devising, can be of the most varied and even inessential kind, yet the work itself can still be something beautiful and a work of art. . 560. The one-sided nature of immediacy on the part of the ideal involves the opposite onesidedness ( 556) that the ideal is something made by the artist. The subject is the formal element in the activity, and the work of art is only an expression of divinity when no sign of subjective particularity is found in it, but rather the import of the indwelling sprit has been conceived and has issued forth without admixture and unspotted by the contingency it involves. But since freedom extends no further than thought, the activity filled with this indwelling import, the enthusiasm of the artist is like an alien power within him under which he is bound and passive. [Artistic] production has on its part the form of natural immediacy; it belongs to the genius as to this particular subject and is at the same time a labor concerned with technical understanding and mechanical externalities. The work of art is therefore just as much a work of free and arbitrary will, and the artist is the master of the god. . 561. In being thus fulfilled, reconciliation initially appears in such a way that it is accomplished immediately in subjective self-consciousness, which is thus self-confident and cheerful, but lacking in depth and in awareness of its antithesis to the being that subsists in and for itself. / Beyond the accomplishment of beauty in classical art that occurs in such reconciliation, lies the art of sublimity, symbolic art, in which the configuration suited to the idea is not yet found. Rather thought is portrayed going outside itself and wrestling with the shape as a negative attitude toward it, yet at the same time seeking to mold itself to it. The purport or content thereby shows that it has not yet reached infinite form, is not yet known and known to itself as free spirit. The content exists only as the abstract god of pure thinking or a striving toward it, a striving that throws itself around restlessly and unreconciledly in all manner of shapes, incapable of finding its goal.

. 562. The other way in which the idea and the configuration are mutually unsuited, however, is that the infinite form, subjectivity, is not, as in the first extreme, merely superficial personality but its innermost element; and divinity is known not as simply seeking its shape or contenting itself in an external shape, but rather as finding itself only within itself and so giving itself its adequate shape only in the spiritual. In this way romantic art abandons the idea of showing divinity as such in its external shape and by means of beauty; it presents it as only condescending to appearance and as inwardness in an externality from which it at the same time disengages. Thus the external can appear here as contingent in relation to its meaning. Philosophy of religion has the logical necessity, in the progressively determinate features that belong to the being that is known as the absolute, to discover to which features cultic practices initially correspond. It has also to discover how wordly self-consciousness, consciousness of what is the highest human vocation, and consequently the nature of a peoples ethical life, the principle of its right, of its actual freedom and its constitution as well as of its art and science how all of this corresponds to the principle that forms the substance of a religion. That all these elements in a peoples actuality constitute one systematic totality, that one sprit creates and informs them this is an insight that provides the bases for the further insight that the history of religions coincides with world history. Regarding the close connection between art and the religions, it may be especially noted that fine or beautiful art [die schne Kunst] can only belong to those religions in which concrete spirituality is the principle spirituality that has become inwardly free but is not yet absolute. In those religions in which the idea has not yet become manifest and is known in its free determinacy, the need for art does indeed make itself felt in order to bring the representation of essential being [Wesen] to consciousness in intuition and fantasy. Indeed art is the sole organ in which the abstract content, inwardly unclear and made up of a confused mixture of natural and spiritual elements, can seek to bring itself to consciousness. Yet this art is defective. Because it content is so defective, the form is defective too, for it is by reason of the content that the content does not contain the form immanently within itself. Its portrayals have an aspect of tastelessness and spirit-less-ness because its inmost element is still contaminated with a lack of spirituality and thus lacks the power freely to transmute the external part into significant shape. Fine art on the contrary is conditional on the selfconsciousness of free spirit and thus on the consciousness of the dependence of the sensuous and merely natural upon spirit; it makes the natural wholly into the expression of spirit. Thus it is the inner form that gives utterance to itself alone. This involves the further, more profound consideration that the advent of art portends the decline of a religion that is still bound to sensuous externality. At the very time it seems to give religion the highest degree of clarity, expressiveness, and brilliance, it has raised it above its limitedness. In the sublime divinity to which the work of art succeeds in giving expression, the genius of the artists and of the spectator finds itself at home with their own sense and sensibility, satisfied and set free; the intuition and consciousness of free spirit is vouchsafed and attained. Fine art has for its part accomplished the same as philosophy spirit has been claeased of its lack of freedom. That religion in which the need for fine art, and just for that reason, is first generated, contains in its principle an other-worldly element that is lacking in thought and is sensuous; the images that are venerated [by it] are the hideous images of idols, regarded as wonder-working talismans that point to an other-worldly, spiritless objectivity

and bones perform a similar or even better service than such images. But fine art is only a stage in liberation, not the supreme liberation itself. Genuine objectivity, which obtains only in the element of thought, the element in which alone pure spirit is for spirit and liberation is accompanied by reverence, is also lacking in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, and still more in that external, hideous sensuousness. . 563. Fine art (like the religion peculiar to it) has its future in authentic religion. In and for itself the limited content of the idea passes into the universality that is identical with infinite form. Intuition, the immediate knowing that is tied to sensuousness, passes into the knowing that mediates itself inwardly, into a determinate existence that is itself knowing into revealation. In this way the content of the idea has for its principle the characteristic of free intelligence, and as absolute sprit is for spirit.