Chapter 53 (b) living works of art

A nation that approaches God through the worship of art and religion is an ethical nation that knows that its country and its actions are its own will and achievement.This spirit, as opposed to a self-conscious nation, is therefore not a god of light, which is selfless and does not contain within itself the certainty of individual selves, but is only the universal essence of individual selves and the disappearance of individual selves in The ruling power in it.Hence this simple, formless and essential religious worship, on the whole, pays its adherents only that they are the people of the god in whom they believe.The gods can only give them general persistence and simple substance, but not their actual selves, which are rather blotted out by the gods.Because they only worship God as an empty unfathomable thing, not as a spirit.But on the other hand the religious cult of art does not have the abstract simplicity, and therefore the abstract sophistication, of the essence, but the essence, which is immediately united with the self, is in itself spirit and The knowing truth, though not yet the truth of being known or knowing itself in its own depth, because here the essence has the ego within itself, so its manifestation is friendly to consciousness, not alien. Externally, in worship, consciousness acquires not only the general assurance of its permanence, but also its own conscious existence within the essence.In the same way, conversely, the essence is not found in an abandoned, despised people whose substance is only (formally) recognized, with only selfless reality, but in such a In a nation the self of the nation is recognized as active in its substance.

Thus, from the cult, the self-consciousness that is satisfied in the essence (or god) is released, and the god that enters the self-consciousness seems to enter its own proper sanctuary.This sanctuary is, in itself, the night of substance, or the pure individuality of substance, but no longer the tense individuality of the artist, that is, personality not yet reconciled to its essence in the process of objectification , but the satisfied substance or night, which has its own pathos within itself and seeks nothing outside, since it returns from intuition, from sublated objectivity. —This mood itself is the essence of the sunrise [Oriental god of light], but this essence has now sunned or perished in itself, and contains its extinction, [its negation,] self-consciousness in itself, It thus contains specific being and reality within itself. — Here the essence undergoes its self-realizing movement.Degraded from its own pure essence into an objective force of nature and its expression, it becomes something for the other, for the self, and is annihilated or superseded by the other or the self.The quiet essence of nature without selfhood acquires as its fruit the stage in which nature itself provides the conditions of preparation and the material to be digested for life with selfhood.Nature reaches its highest perfection by being used, that is, by providing the material to be eaten and drunk.Because it naturally has a higher possibility of existence and is close to spiritual existence. —The Erdgeist, in its process of metamorphosis, becomes on the one hand a silent and powerful entity, but on the other hand becomes a spiritual ferment; Self-motivating masculine principle of self-aware being.

In this enjoyment, the true nature of the Eastern god of light is revealed: enjoyment is the mystical experience of the god of light.For the mystical does not hide secrets or be inexplicable, but contains the ego itself knowing that he is one with the essence, and thus the essence is revealed.However, only the ego reveals itself, or what is revealed is only in the immediate certainty of the ego.But in this immediate certainty the simple nature of worship is established.This essence, as a useful thing, not only has an actual existence that can be seen, felt, smelled, tasted, but is also the object of desire, and becomes one with the self through practical enjoyment, so that the essence is fully revealed to the self. And revealed to self. —When one speaks of something and says that it has been revealed to reason, to the heart, it is in fact still secret, because it lacks the actual certainty of its immediately specific existence; It also lacks the certainty of enjoyment, which in religion is not only the unthinking immediate, but at the same time the purely knowing certainty of the self.

① See the translator’s note on page 188. - translator What is thus revealed to the self-conscious spirit within itself by religious worship, which on the one hand enters consciousness upwards from the obscurity of its night, as an entity silently cultivating consciousness, is the essence of simplicity. On the other hand, he is also sunk in the night of the underworld, in himself, and only looks forward to the upper world with a silent longing to return to his mother's arms.But the pure impulse is the oriental god of light with many different names, and its stumbling, ascending life, after likewise detached from its abstract existence, manifests itself at first in the objective existence of the fruits of the earth, Then pins itself on the way of self-consciousness, and in self-consciousness attains its real reality,--now it dances like a crowd of mad women, as nature in the form of self-consciousness, unrestrained drunkenness carnival ②.

But what is revealed to consciousness here is still only the absolute spirit as this simple essence, not as spirit itself, that is to say, only the immediate spirit, the natural spirit.The self-conscious life of this simple essence is therefore expressed only in the mystical cult of bread and wine, in the mystic worship of Ceres and Dionysus, and not in the mysticism of other, really higher gods. In the individuality of these higher gods already contains self-consciousness itself as the main link.So spirit as self-conscious spirit has not yet dedicated itself to that simple essence, and the mystic cult of bread and wine is not yet a mystical cult of blood and flesh.

①As in the mystic worship of Dionysus. - translator ②Refers to the state of carnival in the worship of Dionysus; the large group of women in the carnival refers to the female believers and priestesses participating in the mysterious worship of Dionysus, see Euripides: "The Companion of Dionysus". - translator This unsteady and long-lasting ecstasy in the ritual had to be fixed in the form of an object, and the ecstasy which had not reached consciousness had to produce a work of art—a work which had the same relation to the ecstasy as the previous stage. The statue is still the same as a finished work in relation to the artist's inspiration, but to consciousness not as an inanimate thing but as a living self. —Such religious worship is a celebration of man's own special glory, but it has not yet been given an absolutely essential meaning.For what is first revealed to man is only the essence, not the spirit—

Not yet a being that essentially takes human form.But this cult lays the groundwork for this spiritual revelation and unfolds the various aspects of the spiritual revelation one after the other.So here we obtain the abstract moment of the living corporeal embodiment of the Essence (God), just as in the previous stage we obtained the unity of the two moments in the unconscious fanaticism.Man then replaces the statue with himself as perfectly free movement attained to the cultivated, cultivated image, just as the statue signifies perfectly free stillness.When each individual at least as the bearer of the torch knows how to express himself, one of them will emerge prominently, this person is the embodiment of this movement, the smooth unfolding and flowing force of all its members, He is a living work of soul, a work of art as beautiful as it is powerful; and to such a man [major] adornment is given to him as a tribute to his great power and glory, as [on the former in that religion] make statues to honor him, and ascribe to him such glory among his people,—not as a god of stone, but as the supreme body of the essence of the whole nation Performance.

In the expressions of the two art religions that have just emerged, there is already a unity of self-consciousness and spiritual essence; but there is still a lack of balance between the two.In the carnival enthusiasm of Dionysus worship, the self is outside itself, but in the corporeal embodiment of beauty, the spiritual essence is outside itself.The ignorant consciousness of the former [Dionysian worship] and its fanatical vague language must absorb the immanence of the former.The element of perfection, in which the immanent is equally external, and the external equally internal, is still language.But the language spoken of here is neither the oracular language whose content is extremely accidental and individual, nor the emotionally charged hymn to individual gods, nor the vague and indistinct content of the fanatical Dionysian worship. clear language, but a language that has acquired a clear and universal content; a language that has a clear content because the artist has risen from the previous ecstasy of substance to create himself as a [clear] image, This image is unique to himself, and in all his activities is permeated by the conscious soul, and is a specific being with which he lives;—it has a universal content because in the pomp of worship ( The celebration of this pomp marks the disappearance of the one-sidedness of those statues which contained only one national spirit and embodied only one particular character of the god.The beautiful statue of the warrior is indeed the glory of his particular nation; but he is only a corporeal individuality, in which rich, serious meaning and spirit (the spirit here contains the particular life, desires, needs, and customs of a people) )'s inner character is lost.In this process of externalizing itself into fully concrete form, the spirit discards the particular trace and tone of its own nature as the actual spirit of the nation which it contains within itself.Therefore, what its nation realizes in this spirit is no longer its particularity, but rather the abandonment of its particularity and the universality of human specific existence.