mere show and a cruel deception
in a far stricter sense than in the case of art. Only beyond the
immediacy of sense and of external objects is genuine reality to be
found. Truly real is but the fundamental essence and the underlying
substance of nature and of spirit, and the universal element in nature
and in spirit is precisely what art accentuates and makes visible. This
essence of reality appears also in the common outer and inner world, but
it appears in the form of a chaos of contingencies, distorted by the
immediateness of sense perception, and by the capriciousness of
conditions, events, characters, etc. Art frees the true meaning of
appearances from the show and deception of this bad and transient world,
and invests it with a higher reality, born of the spirit. Thus, far
removed from being mere appearances, the products of art have a higher
reality and a more genuine being than the things of ordinary life.

THE CONTENT AND IDEAL OF ART

The content of art is spiritual, and its form is sensuous; both sides
art has to reconcile into a united whole. The first requirement is that
the content, which art is to represent, must be worthy of artistic
representation; otherwise we obtain only a bad unity, since a content
not capable of artistic treatment is made to take on an artistic form,
and a matter prosaic in itself is forced into a form quite opposed to
its inherent nature.

The second requirement demands of the content of art that it shall be no
abstraction. By this is not meant that it must be concrete, as the
sensuous is alleged to be concrete in contrast to everything spiritual
and intellectual. For everything that is genuinely true, in the realm
of thought as well as in the domain of nature, is concrete, and has, in
spite of universality, nevertheless, a particular and subjective
character. By saying, for example, that God is simply One, the Supreme
Being as such, we express thereby nothing but a lifeless abstraction of
an understanding devoid of reason. Such a God, as indeed he is not
conceived in his concrete truth, can furnish no content for art, least
of all for plastic art. Thus the Jews and the Turks have not been able
to represent their God, who is still more abstract, in the positive
manner in which the Christians have represented theirs. For in
Christianity God is conceived in his truth, and therefore concrete, as a
person, as a subject, and, more precisely still, as Spirit. What he is
as spirit a