He notes that when the artist represents something
really given, such as a portrait or a landscape, he renounces freedom of
production and adheres to the real. In the artist is a double tendency,
toward the perfection of the type and toward the representation of
natural reality. He should not fall into the abstraction of the type,
nor into the insignificance of empirical reality. Schleiermacher feels
all the difficulty of such a problem as whether there be one or several
ideals of the human figure. This problem may be transferred to the
sphere of art, and we may ask whether the poet is to represent only the
ideal, or whether he should also deal with those obstacles to it that
impede Nature in her efforts to attain. Both views contain half the
truth. To art belongs the representation of the ideal as of the real, of
the subjective and of the objective alike. The representation of the
comic, that is of the anti-ideal and of the imperfect ideal, belongs to
the domain of art. For the human form, both morally and physically,
oscillates between the ideal and caricature.
He arrives at a most important definition as to the independence of art
in respect to morality. The nature of art, as of philosophic
speculation, excludes moral and practical effects. Therefore, _there is
no other difference between works of art than their respective artistic
perfection (Vollkommenheit in der Kunst)_.
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