Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/236

Rh 218 .ESTHETICS to engraft art upon Ms curious system of transcendental idealism in a manner which can only be faintly indicated here. In Schelling s metaphysical system the relation of subject and object is conceived as identity. Each exists, yet not independently of the other, but identified in a higher, the absolute. They may be conceived as two poles representing different directions, but yet inseparably joined. All knowledge rests on this agreement. Either nature, the object, may be conceived as the prius, and the subject con structed out of it; or the subject may be taken as thep?^us, and the object constructed from it. These are the two poles of knowledge, and constitute the philosophy of nature and the transcendental philosophy. The latter, like Kant s philosophy of mind, is based on a threefold conception of the powers of human nature. It consists of (1.) Theoretic philosophy, dealing with perception; (2.) Practical philo sophy, discussing the will and freedom; and (3.) The philo sophy of art. The aim of the last is thus expressed : The ego must succeed in actually perceiving the concord of sub ject and object, which, is half disguised in perception and volition. This concord is seen within the limits of the ego in artistic perception only. Just as the product of nature is an unconscious product like a conscious one, in its de- signfulness, so the product of art is a conscious product like an unconscious one. Only in the work of art does intelligence reach a perfect perception of its real self. This is accompanied by a feeling of infinite satisfaction, all mystery being solved. Through the creative activity of the artist the absolute reveals itself in the perfect identity of subject and object. Art is therefore higher than philo sophy. Schelling thus sets the beauty of art far above that of nature. As to the form of the beautiful he is very vague, leaning now to a conception of harmony in the totality of the world ( Wdtall and now to a Platonic conception of primitive forms (Urbilder) of perfection. He has a very intricate classification of the arts, based on his antithesis of object and subject, reality and ideality. A curious feature of Schelling s theory is his application of his one fundamental idea to tragedy. The essence of tragedy is, he thinks, an actual conflict of liberty in the subject with objective necessity, in which both being conquered and conquering, appear at once in the perfect indifference. Antique tragedy he holds, accordingly, to be the most per fect composition of all arts. Passing over Solger, whose aesthetic doctrine is little more than a revival of Platonism, we come to Hegel. His system of philosophy falls into three parts, all based on the self-movement of the idea or absolute : (1.) The logic discussing the pure universal notions which are the logical evolution of the absolute, as pure thought; (2.) Philosophy of nature the disruption of thought, the idea, into the particular and external; (3.) Philosophy of the spirit the return of thought or the absolute from this self-alienation to itself in self-cognisant thought. Just as the absolute, so has spirit a series of three grades to traverse (a.) Subjective spirit or intelligence, relating itself to the rational object as something given; (6.) Ob jective spirit or will, which converts the subjectivised theoretical matter (truth) into objectivity; (c.) Absolute spirit, which is the return of the spirit from objectivity to the ideality of cognition, to the perception of the absolute idea. This again has three stages (1.) Art, in which tin absolute is immediately present to sensuous perception; (2.) Religion, which embodies certainty of the idea as above all immediate reality; and (3.) Pliilosophy, the unity of these. According to this conception, the beautiful is defined as the shining of the idea through a sensuous medium (as colour or tone). It is said to have its life in shining or appearance (Schein), and so differs from the true, which is not real sensuous existence, but the universal idea contained in it for thought. He defines the torm ot the Beautiful as unity of the manifold. The notion (B(yrilf) gives necessity in mutual dependence of parts (unity), while the reality demands the appearance or semblance (Schein) of liberty in the parts. He discusses very fully the beauty of nature as immediate unity of notion and reality, and lays great emphasis on the beauty of organic life. But it is in art that, like Schelling, he finds the highest revelation of the Beautiful. Art makes up the deficiencies of natural beauty by bringing the idea into clearer light, by showing the external in its life and spirit ual animation. The various forms of art depend on the various combinations of matter and form. In Oriental or symbolical art matter is predominant, and the thought is struggling through with pain so as to reveal the ideal. In the classical form the ideal has attained an adequate existence, form and matter being absolutely commensurate. Lastly, in the romantic form, the matter is reduced to a mere show, and the ideal is supreme. Hegel classifies the individual arts according to this same principle of the rela tive supremacy of form and matter (1.) The beginning of art is architecture, in which as a symbolic art the sensuous material is in excess. (2.) Sculpture is less subjected to matter, and, as representing the living body, is a step to wards a higher ideality. (3. ) Painting, which is the romantic art KO.T efox^v, expresses the full life of the soul. By the elimination of the third dimension of space, and the employment of a coloured plane, painting rids itself of the coarse material substrate of sculpture, and produces only a semblance of materiality. (4.) In music, which employs pure tone, all the elements of space are suppressed, and hence its content is the inner emotional nature (GemutJi). Music is the most subjective of the arts. (5.) Poetry has the privilege of universal expression. It contains all the other arts in itself, namely, the plastic art in the epos, music in the ode, and the unity of both in the drama. Several systems of aesthetics, more or less Hegelian in Dialect! character, can only be referred to in passing. Weisse of the defined aesthetics as the science of the idea of beauty, and He = elia: explained the Beautiful as the entrance of the universal or of the essence into the limited and finite, that is, the cancelling or annulling of truth (die aufgeholene Wahrheit By thus recognising an internal contradiction in all beauty, he sought to develope, by a curious dialectical process, the ideas of the Ugly, the Sublime, and the Ludicrous. He treats each of these three in immediate contrast to beauty. Ugliness is the immediate existence of beauty. It appears as the negative moment in the Sublime, and in the Ludicrous this negativity is again cancelled and resolved into affirmation so as to con stitute a return to the Beautiful. A like attempt to deter mine the relations of the Ugly, Comic, &c., as moments of the self-revealing idea was made by several Hegelians. Thus Ruge, in his Abhandlung iiber das Komische, teaches that sublimity is the aesthetic idea striving to find itself, together with the satisfaction of this striving. If, how ever, the idea lose itself, sinking away in a kind of swoon, we have the Ugly. Finally, when the idea recovers from the swoon, its new birth is attended with a feeling of amusement (Erlieiterung and then we have the effect of the Ludicrous. Ilosenkranz, in his sEsthetik des Hdss- lichen, conceives the Ugly as the negation of the Beautif ul. or as the middle between the Beautiful and the Ludicrous, and seeks to trace out its various manifestations in form lessness in nature, incorrectness in artistic representation, and deformity or the disorganisation of the Beautiful in caricature. Schasler, again, seems to hold that the Ugly is co-ordinate with the Beautiful, being the motor principle that drives the Beautiful from the unconditioned rest of the Platonic idea, from the sphere of empty abstractness to actuality. This fundamental contradiction reveals itself