At the beginning of his second volume of The Philosophy of Nature Hegel writes of the nature of sunlight. Arguing against the view that sunlight is the product of material (chemical) combustion – and thus any sense of an association to terrestrial fire – Hegel suggests that sunlight is aligned more closely with ideality. Sunlight is in his view cold and abstract. His evidence for this is not only logical-philosophical but also empirical – he notes that the air becomes cooler the higher one ascends up a mountain. In this manner Hegel not only unsettles the materiality of sunlight but provides empirical evidence for its ideality.
My interest here is less in any sense of contradiction that this entails than the way in which it projects a rich, complex and ultimately uncertain relationship between materiality and ideality. It would seem to me that this is also what art enables.