Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

The Abstract Work of Art 719 conscious life. The form of the gods retains, therefore, within it its nature-element as something transcended, as a shadowy, obscure memory.

The utter chaos and confused struggle amongst the elements existing free and detached from each other, the non-ethical disordered realm of Titans, is vanquished and banished to the outskirts of self-transparent reahty, to the cloudy boundaries of the world which finds itself in the sphere of spirit and is at peace.

These ancient gods, first-born children of the union of Light with Darkness, Heaven, Earth, Ocean, Sun, earth's aimless typhonic Fire, and so on, are supplanted by forms and shapes, which do but darkly recall those earlier titans, and which are no longer things of nature, but spirits clarified by the ethical hfe of self-conscious nations.

This simple form has thus destroyed within itself restless endless individuation, the individuation both in the hfe of nature, which operates with necessity only qua universal essence, but is contingent in its actual existence and process ; and also in the hfe of a nation, which is scattered and broken into particular spheres of action and into individual centres of self-consciousness, and has an existence manifold in action and meaning.

All this individuation the simphcity of this form has abolished, and brought together into an individuality at peace with itself. Hence the condition of unrest stands contrasted with this form ; confronting quiescent individuahty, the essential reahty, stands self-consciousness, which, being its source and origin, has nothing left over for itself except to be pure activity.

What belongs to the substance, the artist gave entirely along with his work ; to himself, however, as a specific individuahty there

720 Phenomenology of Mind belongs in his work no reality. He could only have conferred completeness on it by reUnquishing his particular nature, divesting himself of his own being, and rising to the abstraction of pure action. With the first and immediate act of production, the separation of the work and his self-conscious activity is not yet healed again.

The work is, therefore, not by itself really a spiritual entity ; it is a whole only when its process of coming to be is taken along with it. The obvious and common element in the case of a work of art, that it is produced in consciousness and is made by the hand of man, is the aspect of the notion existing qua notion, and standing in contrast to the work produced.

And if this notion, qua the artist or spectator, is unselfish enough to declare the work of art to be fer se absolutely spiritual, and to forget himself quxi agent or onlooker, then, as against this, the notion of spirit has to be insisted on ; spirit cannot dispense with the moment of being conscious of itself.

This moment, however, stands in contrast to the work, because spirit, in this its primary disruption, gives the two sides their abstract and specifically contrasted characteristics of " doing " something and of being a " thing " ; and their return to the unity they started from has not yet come about. The artist finds out, then, in his work, that he did not produce a reahty Hke himself.

No doubt there comes back to him from his work a consciousness in the sense that a wondering multitude honours it as the spirit, which is their own true nature. But this way of animating or spirituahsing his work, since it renders him his self-consciousness merely in the form of admiration, is rather a confession that the work is not

The Abstract Work of Art 721 animated in the same manner as the artist. Since the work comes back to him in the form of gladness in general, he does not find in it the pain of his self-disciphne and the pain of production, nor the exertion and strain of his own toil.

People may, moreover, judge the work, or bring him offerings and gifts, or endue it with their consciousness in whatever way they Hke — if they with their knowledge set themselves over it, he knows how much more his act is than what they understand and say ; if they put themselves beneath it, and recognise in it their own dominating essential reahty, he knows himself as the master of this.

The work of art hence requires another element for its existence ; God requires another way of going forth than this, in which, out of the depths of his creative night, he drops into the opposite, into externahty, to the character of a " thing " with no selfconsciousness. This higher element is that of Language — a way of existing which is directly self-conscious existence.

When individual self-consciousness exists in that way, it is at the same time directly a form of universal contagion ; complete isolation of independent self-existent selves is at once fluent continuity and universally communicated unity of the many selves ; it is the soul existing as soul.

The god, then, which takes language as its medium of embodiment, is the work of art inherently spirituahsed, endowed with a soul, a work which directly in its existence contains the pure activity which was apart from and in contrast to the god when existing as a " thing. In other words, self-consciousness, when its essential being becomes objective, remains in direct relation with itself. It is, when thus at home with VOL. II.— X