LITMIR.BIZ

      I. The Position of Art Relatively to Finite Reality, Religion, and Philosophy

       Table of Contents

      The conclusion of the introduction brings within sight the more methodical exposition of our subject. It will in the first place be useful as a point of departure for a true philosophy of the beautiful to sum up shortly the position of Fine Art in its general relation to the Real, no less than to emphasize the salient features which distinguish the philosophy of Fine Art from other philosophical inquiries.

      (a) With this object in view we will first enumerate the diverse attempts which have been made to apprehend the beautiful in thought, placing each in the order which will best assist a critical verdict. We have already contributed something to this in our introduction. And, moreover, we may add that the mere inquiry what others have contributed either rightly or wrongly to our subject, at least with the hope of ascertaining something really instructive to an exposition which claims to be wholly scientific, will not assist us much. So far from this being so we must preface our remarks with the admission that, in the opinion of many, the beautiful, for the very reason that it is the beautiful, does not admit of such intellectual apprehension, is, in short, no object intelligible to human thought. To such a thesis we must for the present—in our response to those who at this time of day contend that all Truth is ultimately incomprehensible, and only the finiteness of the phenomenal and the contingent matters of temporal existence is within our mental grasp—reply that it is precisely Truth, and Truth alone, which is to be thus comprehended, and for this reason that it possesses the absolute notion, or, more succinctly, the Idea for its basic support. Now beauty is no other than a particular determination under which the True is expressed and revealed to us; and it lies open to the fullest comprehension of thought in so far as such can equip it with the armoury of the concrete notion. It is quite true that no idea has suffered more severely in our own time from misconceptions than this which we call the notion in its fullest explication. One is only too often misunderstood to mean a determination which is abstract and one sided, or at least a conception of the analytical understanding. As thus understood neither the totality of Truth nor the idea of beauty as a concrete whole can be brought home to a thinking consciousness. But the idea of beauty, as we have already observed, and shall seek to make more intelligible as we proceed, is no such abstraction of the mind: rather it may be defined as the absolute notion in its self-evolved concreteness, or still more specifically defined, the absolute Idea.

(b) And, further, we cannot more succinctly define the absolute Idea, in the above use of the expression, than by saying it is mind (Spirit): and we may add that the mind thus referred to is not mind regarded as finite, that is, subject to the conditions and limitations of sense-perception, but the universal and absolute Intelligence175, which, out of its own free activity, determines Truth in the profoundest signification of the term. To the ordinary consciousness of everyday life the object of perception, no doubt, breaks away from mind, as though our thought stood in opposition to Nature, which receives from us a validity equal at least to the consciousness which perceives it. But in this way of looking at Nature and the conscious subject as two neighbours set over against one another in territories equally self-subsistent it is only the finite and limited mind, not that which it is as an infinite substance and in its notional truth, which is apprehended. Nature is not thus to be set over against absolute Mind, either as conjoint with a sphere of the Real of equal worth, or as an independent boundary thereto. Rather the aspect which Nature appears to hold in this respect is that which mind or spirit itself sets up, and of which it becomes the product as a Nature in which limit and boundary are themselves determining constituents. In fact, Mind in its absolute or infinite substance can only be apprehended as this free activity, which is manifested in self-development through differentiation. This object, this other, through which such differentiation proceeds, is regarded in such opposition as Nature, but as the object of intelligence it is quite as much indebted to Mind for the free gift and fulness of its own essential substance. We must therefore conceive Nature as herself containing in potency the absolute Idea. She is that Idea in apparent shape, which mind, in its synthetic power, posits as the object opposed to itself. She is so far a product, a creation. The truth of Nature therefore is simply the determination by mind of its own substance, its ideality and power of determination, through a process which no doubt begins with a separation of itself into two factors which apparently negate each other, but which, by the very activity of such negation and separation, passes beyond the contradiction it implies to a unity which heals the fracture. Instead of finding our-elves opposed to a limit and a barrier we have a totality in which the parts which opposed each other are fused together by the free universality of mind. This ideality, in other words this infinite power of determination176, is that which constitutes the profound notion of Mind's subjectivity. As subjectivity mind is, in the first instance, merely Nature, Mind, or Spirit that is not explicitly unfolded, mind which has not arrived at the grasp of its true notion. Nature is here set up in opposition to Mind, not as an object which itself has created, but as one whose limits it fails to overcome, an object, moreover, which, as assumed to be already subsisting in independence, Mind remains alongside of in the internal seclusion of knowledge and volition, and is only able to constitute the other side of Nature. The finiteness of scientific theory, no less than that of practical life, is to be, found in this limited mode of consciousness, where intelligence is restricted to the use of finite categories and the formal "ought" in the realization of ethical perfection177. We find here,

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