Zhu Guangqian's History of Western Aesthetics
Hegel believes that art is a spiritual activity of unity of opposites between universal concepts and perceptual images, and between content and form. But the complete coincidence of these two opposites is only an ideal. In fact, they can only have different degrees of coincidence. Therefore, art can be divided into three types: symbolic, classical and romantic. And each category can be divided into several categories, such as architecture, sculpture, painting and so on. Every different historical period has different art types and categories.
Hegel: Three Types of Art
Symbolic:
At this stage, people can't express their hazy rational ideas with appropriate perceptual images, so they can only use mysterious symbols instead. The reason for the emergence of symbolic art is that the content of human spirit itself is still abstract, and the thought has not yet reached the unity of subject and object. Its general feature is to use strange and cumbersome things to symbolize ideas, which often produces a sense of loftiness, rather than the aesthetic feeling of harmony and unity of content and form. In primitive times, most of the images created by people with wood and stone implied some thoughts, such as totem symbols, primitive worship and early totem art.
Classic type:
At this stage, the spirit has reached the unity of subject and object, the spiritual content and material form are perfectly matched, and the concept of rationality can be clearly expressed through perceptual images. In terms of content and form, classical art is the most perfect art. The typical classical art is Greek sculpture. The gods represented by Greek sculptures are not as abstract as symbolic art, but always expressed in the image of human beings, because human beings are self-sufficient and the most appropriate expression of ideas. In the human image, the universality of God is transformed into individuality, but God still needs to maintain its universality, that is, "static". Therefore, the greatest feature of classical art is silence and joy, "pure nobility, silence and greatness". Sculpture is the best way to express this silence, because sculpture only shows static but not action.
Romantic type:
Because the spirit is infinite and the human body is limited, this leads to the disintegration of classical art, and the limited material form can no longer fully express the spirit, so the spirit returns to the spiritual world. It and symbolism art are two extremes: symbolism art is the spirit of material overflow, and romanticism art is the spirit of material overflow, which returns to the imbalance of content and form at a higher level. The typical romantic art is the Christian art in modern Europe. Because the spirit returns to the spiritual world, that is, people return to themselves, romantic art is very subjective, mainly reflecting individual will and desire, expressing people's inner conflicts, and it is an impulse of action and emotion. Contrary to the silence of classical art, romantic art expresses a divided soul, so the pain, ugliness and sin that classicism tries to avoid have become the main content of romantic art, and the typical representatives of romantic art are painting and poetry. This also implies that poetry has a very high position in Hegel's philosophy system.
Summary:
With the development of art, there are fewer and fewer material factors and more and more spiritual factors. With the continuous development of the spirit, it can't be expressed by the concrete image of art at first. So art should give way to philosophy, that is, to understand ideas through the form of concepts. However, Hegel also believes that art is not absolutely doomed, and novel is a new art form with infinite vitality. The progressiveness of Hegel's view of art history lies in affirming the development of art and its connection with the general social situation, but its limitation lies in treating the development of art as a process in which the spirit overcomes the material, with a narrow nationalist view, such as the East preparing for the West and the West preparing for Prussia.
In this way, it should be clear now what kind of art and type Michelangelo's David statue belongs to. The statue of David has become one of the representatives of Hegel's classical art with the matching of form and content, and the more typical one should be the statue of laocoon and his son, because the representative admired by Hegel is the sculpture of ancient Greece.