An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

powers that were in conflict.”^24 It shows that each power or set of values

requires the other in order itself to be further developed within ongoing

social life. Without families and piety there are no cultivated individuals

formed by family and religious training to enter into the life of the political

community; without positive political authority, there is no stable frame-

work within which family life and religious training might be carried on.

The oppositions between abstract law, duty, and responsiveness to reason

(itself capable of attaching to either civic life or family life, among other

things), on the one hand, and the abundance of phenomena, natural neces-

sity, and sensuous inclinations and impulses, on the other, are real ones that

human beings face and seek to overcome in experience.

These are oppositions which have not been invented at all by the subtlety of

reflection or the pedantry of philosophy; in numerous forms they have always

preoccupied and troubled the human consciousness, even if it is modern

culture that has first worked them out most sharply and driven them up to the

peak of harshest contradiction.^25

In modernity, people care about this and that as natural inclinations move

them, within the bustle of divided labor and the framework of class antagon-

isms, typically without noticing or understanding what many others do. But

though these oppositions are sharp, they can nonetheless be worked

through. Their“mediation,”Hegel claims,“is no mere demand, but what is

absolutely accomplished and is ever self-accomplishing.”^26 Art–and espe-

cially art that is collectively produced and culturally central –matters

because it expresses sensuously an initial sense of the possibility of this

mediation and a direction for its development.

Hegelthenarguesthat fineart’sinitial,sensuousexpressionofthepossibility

of a life of cultural freedom declines in importance with the advent of new,

more adequate forms of expression of this possibility: Christian religion

and Hegelian philosophy.“Art, considered in its highest vocation is, and

remains for us”–we moderns–“a thing of the past.”^27 The Symbolic

form of art, for example the pyramids of Egypt, gave mute and inchoate

expression to this possibility, abstracted from any effective development of

cultural life.^28 Classical art–preeminently Greek sculpture of the gods in

(^24) Ibid., vol. II, p. 1216. (^25) Ibid., vol. I, p. 54. (^26) Ibid., p. 55. (^27) Ibid., p. 11.
(^28) On symbolic art, seeibid., pp. 76–77.
84 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art