The Philosophy of Fine Art, Volume 2

EVOLUTION OF THE IDEAL IN THE PARTICULAR TYPES OF FINE ART

All that has hitherto been the object of our examination in the first part of this inquiry referred to the reality of the Idea of the beautiful as Ideal of art. In whatever direction, however, we developed the notion of the ideal art-product, we throughout applied to it a meaning of purely general signification. But the idea of the beautiful implies a totality likewise of essential differences, which as such must in veritable form assert themselves. These differences we may broadly describe as the particular modes of art, as the evolved content of that which is implied in the notion of the Ideal, and which secures actual form through art. When, however, we speak of these forms of art as of distinct species or grades of the Ideal, we do not accept the term in the ordinary usage of it as though we found here in external guise particular classes of objects related to and modifying the Ideal respectively as their common genus. Species in the sense used here simply expresses the various and continuously expanding determination of the idea of the beautiful and the Ideal of art itself. The universality of the ideal representation is in the case posited not determined on the side of external existence, but is assumed to be the closer determination of itself in the explication of its own notion; or, in other words, it is the notion itself which unfolds itself in a totality of particular types of art.