Question

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of
things, but their inward significance.
-Aristotle justify it​

Answer 1

Answer:

The form of romantic art is determined, as has been the case every time in our treatment hitherto, by the inner essence of the content which art is called upon to represent, and so we must in the first place endeavour to make clear the distinctive principle of the new content which now, as the absolute content of truth, comes into consciousness in the shape of a new vision of the world and a new artistic form.

At the stage of the beginning of art the urge of imagination consisted in striving out of nature into spirit. But this striving remained only a quest of the spirit, and therefore, not yet providing the proper content of art, the spirit could only assert itself as an external form for meanings drawn from nature or for impersonal abstract ideas drawn from the substantial inner life, and it was these which formed the real centre of this form of art.

The opposite, secondly, we found in classical art. Here although the spirit could only struggle on to independence by annulling the natural meanings, it is the basis and principle of the content, while the external form is the natural phenomenon in a corporeal and sensuous shape. Yet this form did not remain, as it did at the first stage, purely superficial, indeterminate, and not penetrated by its content; on the contrary, the perfection of art reached its peak here precisely because the spiritual was completely drawn through its external appearance; in this beautiful unification it idealized the natural and made it into an adequate embodiment of spirit’s own substantial individuality. Therefore classical art became a conceptually adequate representation of the Ideal, the consummation of the realm of beauty. Nothing can be or become more beautiful.

Yet there is something higher than the beautiful appearance of spirit in its immediate sensuous shape, even if this shape be created by spirit as adequate to itself. For this unification, which is achieved in the medium of externality and therefore makes sensuous reality into an appropriate existence [of spirit], nevertheless is once more opposed to the true essence of spirit, with the result that spirit is pushed back into itself out of its reconciliation in the corporeal into a reconciliation of itself within itself. The simple solid totality of the Ideal is dissolved and it falls apart into the double totality of (a) subjective being in itself and (b) the external appearance, in order to enable the spirit to reach through this cleavage a deeper reconciliation in its own element of inwardness. The spirit, which has as its principle its accord with itself, the unity of its essence with its reality, can find its correspondent existence only in its own native spiritual world of feeling, the heart, and the inner life in general. Thereby the spirit comes to the consciousness of having its opposite, i.e. its existence, on and in itself as spirit and therewith alone of enjoying its infinity and freedom.