If we could correctly
predicate volitional acts in respect of works of art, then we should
find ourselves admiring only those works which stimulated the will, and
there would thus be established a difference of valuation, independent
of artistic perfection. The true work of art depends upon the degree of
perfection with which the external in it agrees with the internal.
Schleiermacher rightly combats Schiller's view that art is in any sense
a game. That, he says, is the view held by mere men of business, to whom
business alone is serious. But artistic activity is universal, and a man
completely deprived of it unthinkable, although the difference here
between man and man, is gigantic, ranging from the simple desire to
taste of art to the effective tasting of it, and from this, by infinite
gradations, to productive genius.
The regrettable fact that Schleiermacher's thought has reached us only
in an imperfect form, may account for certain of its defects, such as
his failure to eliminate aesthetic classes and types, his retention of a
certain residue of abstract formalism, his definition of art as the
activity of difference. Had he better defined the moment of artistic
reproduction, realized the possibility of tasting the art of various
times and of other nations, and examined the true relation of art to
science, he would have seen that this difference is merely empirical and
to be surmounted.
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