this power so as to make within nature, itself partly hostile and partly
beneficent, a cultural world in which they can in general act according to
shared reasons, not only according to the brute demands of survival or in
response to coercion, and so come to feel themselves to be at home in joint
life according to reason.
Collectively produced, culturally central works of art are ways of articu-
lating and furthering this ambition in sensuous form. Any such work will
embody a strategy for anticipating and promoting freedom within cultural
life. It will express a sense of what is worth caring about and worshiping, will
express a sense of the point or purpose of human life and practice. Therefore
any such work will be comparable with other such works, as embodying such
a strategy. Strategies of cultural freedom are hence of inherent interest to
human beings in any cultural situation, as they struggle to live more freely.
“The universal need for art...is man’s rational need to lift the inner and
outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object [Gegenstand: object of
experience] in which he recognizes again his own self.”^22
Art’s vocation is to unveil thetruthin the form of sensuous artistic
configuration, to set forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned [viz. that
between abstract law, duty, and responsiveness to reasons, on the one hand,
and the abundance of phenomena, natural necessity, and sensuous
inclinations and impulses, on the other], and so to have its end and aim in
itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling.^23In art, that is to say, and especially in collectively produced, culturally central
works of free or fine art, a sense of what human rational activity isforis
articulated and embodied, thence to be further worked through, as our
understandings of ourselves and our possibilities of cultural life advance.
For example, Sophocles’Antigone–written by Sophocles, but developing a
conflict central to Greek culture–presents an opposition between the value
of positive, human political authority, embodied in Creon, and the values of
family piety and respect for the gods, embodied in Antigone. Both sets of
values legitimately have authority over us, and here they come into tragic
conflict. Yet althoughAntigoneis a tragedy, it also further presents“the
vision of an affirmative reconciliation and the equal validity of both the
(^22) Ibid., p. 31.
(^23) Ibid., p. 55; see pp. 53–54 for Hegel’s specification of the terms of the opposition.
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