CHAPTER XIII

HEGELIANISM AND ESTHETICS

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LITERATURE. - A. Briefly, in the Philosophy of Mind (Mr. Wallace's translation), where Art is expounded. The fuller Lectures on Esthetics are represented by "three partial reproductions . . . . in English, namely, Mr. Bryant's translation of Part II.-New York, Appleton & Co.; Mr. Kedney's short analysis of the entire work -Chicago, Griggs & Co., 1885; and Mr. Hastie's translation of Michelet's short 'Philosophy of Art,' prefaced by Hegel's Introduction, partly translated and partly analysis." A fourth is furnished by Mr. Bosanquet's translation—with an introductory essay and some notes-of Hegel's Introduction [“ Phil. of Fine Art"]; the above sentence is a quotation from Mr. Bosanquet's preface.

B. The Lectures themselves and some sections in the Phenomenology ("die Kunst Religion," etc.).

C. Mr. Bosanquet's History of Esthetics; Professor W. P. Ker's essay on The Philosophy of Art-in Essays in Philosophical Criticism --vivid and luminous.

ESTHETIC theory is little in favour in our land of common-sense. Mr. A. J. Balfour, who criticises other manifestations of "Transcendentalism," does not consider that its theories of the beautiful are worthy of more than a contemptuous footnote. His own analysis of the perception of beauty is purely sceptical and destructive. He doubts whether any such thing as beauty can be proved to exist. He feels certain that most of our supposed æsthetic admirations are due to

the concealed working of imitation and the love of fashion. One expects Mr. Balfour to dismiss the whole æsthetic fact or idea as a fraud, when suddenly "like a man in wrath his heart stands up and answers, I have felt," and we are astonished to learn that, athwart the perverse workings of natural causes, a manifestation of the Divine glory reaches our souls in beauty, more particularly in the beauty of nature. Never was there a clearer case of Credibile est quia ineptum est; certum est quia impossibile. Others must hold that very imperfect attempts at a philosophy of the beautiful are better than such a blending of sceptical analysis with credulous assertion.

We are prepared by Kant's grouping for Hegel's method of treatment. According to Kant, beauty is a realisation of Final Cause [which perhaps means less that "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," than that beautiful objects are systematic wholes, all of whose detail subserves the unity]. In contrast with scientific knowledge of nature, which never can be completein contrast with morality, where the law of reason bridles but cannot transform the workings of passion, or, where at the best the good is struggled after-art or beauty is the ideal in the sensuous; unity attained; system realised. Only, whereas Kant regards this preeminent triumph of unity as vitiated in a special sense by man's subjectivity-since beauty cannot be shown to be a necessary feature in a world of orderly processes

his characteristic scepticism is no less characteristically set aside by Hegel. To Hegel, beauty is a revelation of the nature of things, or—which for Hegel has almost the same meaning-a revelation of the power of thought. Just as he believes that in the

humblest piece of mechanism there is somehow latent the spirit of Reason or of wholeness-whose presence manifests itself in the emergence, soon or late, of a contradiction, vitiating even the most "self-evident" explanations which treat a part as if it were an isolated whole so he believes that in beauty this union with the whole takes visible shape and sensuous embodiment. Much more than every mechanism does every beautiful object throw light upon the whole of things. Mechanisms show that they are imperfect apart from a wider whole; beautiful objects exhibit the perfection of the whole embodied in a single significant image. Hegel seeks a proof of this by means of the assertion that beauty [art beauty] exhibits the power of thought to deal with an absolute content. Art for him belongs to the nature of religion. Religion" is the general name which he gives to the "Absolute Spirit”—that region where we deal with the whole as a whole, with the perfect as perfect, or with thought as thought. In art, he tells us, we have the idea objectified sensuously and immediately; in religion proper we have it subjectively, in emotion and in Vorstellung-thought; in philosophy we have it in the form of true thought, which is both more fully subjective than any emotion or any Vorstellung, and more truly objective than any natural sensuous object.

Hegel's Philosophy of Art receives a twofold praise from Mr. Bosanquet. Partly, as already noted, he commends its excellent remarks in detail; this is to praise Hegel as an essayist. But partly also he admires the book because it may serve as a good introduction to Hegel's system. Such praise as this gives one pause. Is it not significant if a Hegelian philosophy

of art teaches at least as much regarding philosophy proper as regarding art proper? Certainly Hegel, here as always, keeps his general principles fully in view. In the first place, he is anxious to show that the Idea ("Totality") is found embodied in the beautiful. In the second place, he is anxious to show that the various phases of art arrange themselves in a regular sequence of contrasts. And that is all. Whether art or beauty adds anything to our conception of the Absolute, he does not inquire. His conception of thought as not simply the predominant partner but the universal essence in existence, robs the phases of the Philosophy of Spirit of most of their interest. Yet surely we ought to learn from them something fresh? Of course beauty is not set aside by Hegel any more than he sets aside goodness. There are forms of art, just as there are moral institutions, which gain his respect as actualities. On the other hand, when we come to consider religion, we shall find it hard to verify in religion as such-and as contrasted with philosophical thought -any value for Hegel. There are ethnic religions, but they are "creeds outworn"; and, while Christianity is politely described as "absolute religion," the absolute religion, when distilled into pure thought, scarcely resembles historical Christianity, which latter is of service only to the unthinking popular mind. Yet surely even the most and the best that Hegel says for the realisations of the idea is inadequate. It is hardly

1 Or is it the peculiar glory of ethics to serve as a literal revelation of absolute truth? And may we permit beauty and all else to be indefinitely transmuted in the Absolute, so long as we know with assurance that God is good?

2 See below, Chapter XV.

enough to be told, they are phases, or to be told further that their own subordinate phases with the help perhaps of a little judicious pressure-pack neatly together in the recognised way.

The beauty of nature is dismissed by Hegel somewhat brusquely. In the Introduction he remarks that nature stands lower than the lowest manifestations of [human] mind, and that natural beauty is therefore essentially inferior to art. This is surely a case of ignoratio elenchi. In perceiving nature to be beautiful, we transcend the point of view from which nature can be described as merely natural. It becomes to us a manifestation of mind and a work of God. Mere nature is an unreal abstraction-the reality is nature as a manifestation of spirit. Hegel knows this well; in fact, it is his own teaching; but the ground of his confidence in regarding "nature" as an abstraction is mainly that we are here. His Theism on the most favourable view is too thin and too vague to allow him to regard nature as a work of mind independently of the human mind. His God is too little objective to have His presence traced when He is not obviously working through the finite spirit of man. But since the days of Wordsworth it has been common property that we get closest to nature's spiritual meanings when the distracting influence of our fellow-men is least. Hence, while art beauty is of less significance in a spiritual religion, the beauty of nature has become profoundly important in these latter days to all religious minds.

Returning a little later in a special section to the subject of natural beauty, Hegel places his disparagement of nature upon somewhat different grounds.