The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
into sin, because art makes repentance look so beautiful, and you must first sin before you can repent. The doctrine of moral improvement, however logically carried out, is not merely satisfied that a moral should be conceivably deducible from a work of art through interpretation; on the contrary, it would have the moral instruction clearly made to emerge as the substantive aim of the work101; nay, further, it would deliberately exclude from art's products all subjects, characters, actions, and events which fail to be moral in its own sense. For art, in distinction from history and the sciences, which have their subject-matter determined for them, has a choice in the selection of its subjects.
In order that we may be in a position to estimate this view of the moral end of art on the basis of principle, we ought above all to raise the question as to the precise standpoint of the morality which is recommended for our reception by this view. If we examine more closely the standpoint of morality such, as is submitted us to-day under an enlightened interpretation102, we soon discover that its conception does not immediately coincide with that which we describe in a general way as virtue, respectability103, uprightness, and so forth. To be a respectable honest man is not sufficient to make a man moral in the sense under discussion, for morality in this sense implies reflection and the definite consciousness of what is consonant with duty, and the acts which issue from such a consciousness. Now duty is itself the law of the will, which man, however, freely establishes out of himself, and thereon is taken to determine himself to this duty for duty's sake and its fulfilment's sake; in other words he only does good as acting under the conviction already secured that it is the good. This law—the duty which is selected and carried into effect for duty's sake to be the rule of conduct out of free conviction and the inner conscience—is, on its own account, the abstract universal of the will, which is the absolute antithesis to Nature, the impulses of sense, selfish interests, the passions and all that is commonly described collectively as emotional life and heart. In this opposition the one side is regarded as negating the other; and for the reason that both are present in the individual in their opposition, he is compelled, as determining himself from his own identity, to adopt the choice of one to the rejection of the other. Such a decision and the act carried out in accordance with it merely become moral from the standpoint now considered on the one hand in virtue of the free conviction of duty, and on the other by reason of the victory secured not only over the particular will, the natural motives, inclinations, passions and so on, but also in virtue of the noble feelings and higher impulses. For the modern ethic starts from the fixed opposition between the will in its spiritual universality and its sensuous natural particularity; it does not consist in the perfected mediation of these opposed aspects, but in their mutual conflict as opposed to one another, which carries with it the demand, that the impulses in their antagonism to duty ought to yield to it.
An opposition of this nature is not merely present to mind in the restricted confines of moral action; it asserts itself as a fundamental severation and antithesis between that which is actual essentially, and on its own account, and that which is external reality and existence104. Apprehended in entirely formal terms it is the contrast exposed by the universal, in so far as it is fixed in its substantive independence over against the particular, as the latter is also on its part rigidly exterior to it. In more concrete form it appears in Nature as the opposition of the abstract law to the wealth of particular phenomena, each of which possesses its specific characteristics. It appears in mind as that between the sensuous and spiritual in man, as the conflict of spirit with the flesh; it is that of duty for duty's sake; of the cold imperative with particular impulses, the warm heart, the sensuous inclinations and impulses, in a word with man simply as individual. Or it appears as the harsh antagonism between the inward freedom and the external necessity of natural condition, and, lastly, as the contradiction of the dead, essentially emptied, concept, when confronted with the fulness of concrete life, in other words, of theory and subjective thought as contrasted with objective existence and experience.
Such are antithetical points of view, the discovery of which is not to be ascribed either to the ingenuity of reflective minds, or the pedantry of a philosophical cult. They have in all ages, if in manifold guise, occupied and disquieted the human consciousness, although it is our more modern culture which has emphasized their opposition most deliberately, and forced it in each case to the keenest edge of contradiction. Intellectual culture, or rather the rapier edge of the modern understanding, creates in man this contrast, which converts him into some amphibious animal. He is compelled to live in two worlds mutually contradictory; and in this divided house consciousness, too, wanders aimlessly; tossed over from one side to the other it is unable to discover permanent satisfaction105 for itself in either one side or the other. For, on the one hand, we see mankind confined within common reality and earthly temporal condition, oppressed by necessity and want, in Nature's toils, entangled in matter, in sensuous aims and their enjoyment, dominated and whirled away by impulse and passion. On the other hand he lifts himself up to eternal idea's, to a realm of thought and freedom. As Will he legislates for himself universal laws and destinations106, he disrobes the world of the life and blossom of its reality; he dissolves it in abstractions, that the mind may vindicate its right and intrinsic worth by this very dissolution of Nature's rights and such maltreatment, a process in which he brings home to her again the necessity and violence he has experienced at her hands. Such a cleavage of life and mind is, however, accompanied for modern culture with the demand that a contradiction so deep-seated should be dissolved. The mere understanding of abstract reflection is unable to disengage itself from the obstinacy of such contradictions. The solution consequently remains here for consciousness a mere ought, and the present and reality is merely moved within the continuous unrest of a to and fro, which seeks for that reconciliation it is unable to find. The problem therefore arises whether such a many-sided and fundamental antagonism, which is unable to pass beyond the mere ought and postulate of its solution, can be the essential and wholly expressed truth, and107, indeed, the final and supreme consummation. If the culture of the civilized world has fallen into such a contradiction it becomes the task of philosophy to dissolve the same, in other words to demonstrate that neither the one side or the other, in its one sided abstractness, should be held to possess truth, but that they contain within themselves the principle of their dissolution. The truth only then comes before us in the reconciliation and mediation of both; and this mediation is no mere postulate, but is, in its essential nature, and in its actual presence the at the same time accomplished and self-accomplishing. And, in fact, this view agrees directly with unwitting108 faith and will, which always has before its conscious life this contradiction in its resolution, and in action accepts it as its aim and carries it into effect. All that philosophy achieves is to contribute the insight of thought into the essence of such cleavage. It demonstrates, or seeks to demonstrate, how that which truth really is is simply the resolution of the fracture, and, be it added, not in the sense that this antagonism and its alternative aspects in any way are not, but in the sense that they are there109 in reconciliation.
(d) When discussing moral improvement as the ultimate end accepted for art it was found that its principle pointed to a higher standpoint. It will be necessary also to vindicate this standpoint for art.
Thereby the false position to which we have already directed attention vanishes, namely, that art has to serve as a means for moral ends and the moral end of the world generally by means of its didactive and ameliorating influence, and by doing so has its essential aim not in itself, but in something else. If we therefore continue still to speak of an end or goal of art, we must at once remove the perverse idea, which in the question, "What is the end?" will still make it include the supplemental query, "What is the use?" The perverseness consists in this that the work of art would then have to be