128 music, philosophy, and modernity
as an epistemological argument has other historical dimensions, and
these point to more problematic aspects of modernity that put the role
of philosophy in Hegel’s sense into question.
TheLectures on the Philosophy of Artand theAestheticsanalyse forms
of art in terms both of their objective material manifestation, as build-
ings, sculptures, sounds, etc., and of the development of the conceptual
grasp of the subject which relates to that manifestation. The result is
a dialectic of the external and the internal involving a hierarchy of
relationships between inert, objective matter, such as stone, and the
ways in which this matter is transcended by being animated by thought.
The dialectic culminates at the point where the objective matter that
art requires becomes the one remaining restriction on thought that
only pure thinking – philosophy rather than art – can overcome. Hegel
gives an example of this dialectic when he discusses how talking about
a bereavement can objectify someone’s emotional pain: ‘by making
it objective the inner comes out and stands opposite the person exter-
nally’ (Hegel 2003 : 28 ). The same is the case with writing a poem about
one’s passion, which makes it less ‘dangerous’. The ‘final purpose of
art’ is ‘to reveal the truth, to present what moves in the human breast,
but concretely, in the form of images’ (ibid.: 30 ). This dependence
on sensuous images means that art has to give way to philosophy. The
history of art is of a changing relationship between form and content,
subjective and objective. In ‘symbolic art’, the two are not fully unified,
so the constitution of the object involves a ‘striving’: ‘the image con-
tains in itself more than that whose meaning it is to present’ (ibid.: 119 ).
The external object therefore dominates the internal idea: symbols are
ambiguous, because the same empirical object can mean any number of
different things. ‘Classical art’, exemplified by Greek sculpture, realises
the union of internal and external by presenting the human form as
an object, but as one in which the particular body represented gains a
universal human significance as the ‘mirror of the spirit’ (ibid.: 157 ).
A Greek sculpture is an objective manifestation of the truth of the sub-
ject. This truth emerges via the artist’s grasping the objective natural
form of the human body and imbuing natural material with this form,
in order to make something which has a more general significance for
the community. Moreover, this form excludes ‘pain and death, because
in it the spiritual and the natural are united’ (ibid.: 181 ), and so does
not confront the temporality that will be essential to ‘romantic art’.
The development of romantic from classical art is summed up in the
following: ‘The meaning of Greek [classical] art is that subjective spirit