Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/156

 has given to his work, is external only; it is not the absolute form of what knows itself, of self-consciousness. Subjectivity, in its complete form, is wanting to the work of art. This self-consciousness belongs to the subjective consciousness, to the perceiving Subject. In relation to the work of art, therefore, which in itself is not something having knowledge, the element of self-consciousness is the Other, but an element, too, which belongs to it absolutely, and which knows the object represented, and represents it to itself as the substantial truth. The work of art, since it does not know itself, is essentially incomplete, and (since self-consciousness belongs to the Idea) it needs that completion which it acquires by the relation to it of what is self-conscious. It is in this consciousness that the process takes place by which the work of art ceases to be merely object, and by which self-consciousness posits that which seems to it as an Other, as identical with itself. This is the process which does away with that externality in which truth appears in art, and which annuls these lifeless relations of immediacy, and it is through it that the perceiving subject gives itself the conscious feeling of having in the object its own essence. Since this characteristic, which is a going into itself out of externality, belongs to the subject, there exists a separation between the subject and the work of art; the subject is able to contemplate the work in a wholly external manner, to take it to pieces, or he can make smart, æsthetical, and learned remarks upon it; but that process which is the essential one for perception, that necessary completion of the work of art, in turn does away with this prosaic separation.

In the oriental idea of the substantiality of consciousness, its unity with the one Absolute Substance, this separation has not yet been reached, and therefore art-perception is not brought to a perfect state either, for this last presupposes the higher freedom of self-consciousness, which is able to place its truth and substantiality