The Philosophy of Fine Art, Volume 3

THE SYSTEM OF THE PARTICULAR ARTS

The objects treated by our science in the first part were the general notion and the reality of beauty in Nature and art, in other words beauty in its truth, and art in its truth, the Ideal in the as yet undeveloped unity of its fundamental principles, independent of its specific content and its distinguishing modes of envisagement.

This essentially genuine unity of the beautiful in art, in the second place, unfolded itself within its own resources in a totality of art-forms, whose determinate structure defined at the same time the content which the art-spirit was impelled to fashion from itself in an essentially articulate system of manifestations of beauty under which the Divine and human is envisaged to the world.

What still is absent from both these spheres is the reality that is present within the elementary substance of the external phenomenon itself. For although both in our examination of the Ideal as such, and in that of the specific modes of symbolic, classical, and romantic art, we throughout referred to the relation or complete mediation which obtains between the significance conceived as an ideal principle and its embodiment in the external or phenomenal materia, yet this realization merely retained its validity as that which was still exclusively the ideal art-activity in the sphere of general world-impressions of beauty, in and through which it is diffused. Inasmuch, however, as the fundamental conception of beautiful implies, that it make itself objective for the immediate vision, that is to say for the senses and sensuous perception as an external work of art, so that what is beautiful becomes only then itself through such a definite form appropriate to itself explicitly united with the beautiful and the Ideal, we have in the third place to review this territory of the art-product as actually self-realized in the entirely sensuous medium. For it is only through this final configuration that the work of art is truly concrete, an individual entity which is at once real, self-contained, and singular. The Ideal can only constitute the content of this third sphere of our aesthetic philosophy for the reason that it is the idea of the beautiful, in the collective totality of all its world presentments, which is thus self-realized in objective form. For this reason the art-product is still, even up to this point, to be conceived as a totality articulated in itself, nevertheless as an organism, whose organic parts, which—while in the second part of our inquiry they were differentiated under a collective concept of essentially disparate world-aspects—now fall asunder as isolated members, every one of which becomes independently a self-subsistent whole, and in this singularity is capable of bringing into display the totality of the different art-types. Essentially and in accordance with its notion it is quite true that the collective result of this new reality of art belongs to one single totality. Inasmuch, however, as it is a portion of the realm of the sensuous present, in which the same is made real to itself, the Ideal is now resolved into its phasal states as a process, and confers on them an independent and self-subsistent stability, albeit they are capable of coming into juxtaposition, essential relation, and reciprocal reintegration with one another. And this real world of art is the system of the separate arts. Just as then the particular types of art, regarded throughout as totality, expose intrinsically a process, an evolution, that is, of the symbolical to the classical and romantic types, we find also, on the one hand, a similar advance in the particular arts, in so far as it is the very art-types themselves which receive their determinate existence through these specific arts. From another point of view, however, the particular arts have also themselves within them a process, a progression, independently of the art-types to which they attach an objective reality, a process which in this its more abstract relation is common to all. Every art possesses its spring-time of perfected elaboration as art, and on the one side or the other a history that precedes or follows this period of full-bloom. For the products of the arts collectively are spiritual products, and consequently are not at once to hand in their own specialized province respectively, as are the forms of Nature, but are subject to a beginning, progression, completion, and termination, a growth, a blooming, and a decay.