The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I think by the words kunst wieder hervorzurufen Hegel rather means to call up art as it was previously cultivated than merely to "stimulate art production." The latter is, however, Professor Bosanquet's translation.

13. Subjective apparently in the sense of being wholly personal to the writer or philosopher in so far as the form of his treatise deals in classification and arrangement peculiar to himself and so external, if not entirely arbitrary.

14. I agree with the note of Professor Bosanquet (Trans., p. 21) that the word element refers here to the mental constituents of art, as contrasted with the sensuous medium.

15. That is to say, the essential formative process involved in its necessity.

16. There must be a misprint or oversight in Professor Bosanquet's rendering of this passage (p. 21). As the sentence now stands it does not appear to me to make sense.

17. Von ihm. The pronoun, I take it, must refer here to das Andere rather than the subject of the verb.

18. "Makes itself an alien to itself" perhaps expresses the German better.

19. That is, the work of art.

20. Haltpunkte. Points of arrest in essential ideas necessary which restrain this tendency to purely arbitrary caprice.

21. I do not think the first part of this sentence ironical. Hegel admits that a general knowledge is a legitimate feature of modern culture. But he points out that people are only too ready to confuse such a general knowledge with real art scholarship. To bring out this I have translated rather freely.

22. Detail of historical fact and artistic observation.

23. It is historical, first, regarded as a survey of historical condition, and, secondly, because facts are collected whether in relation to ancient or modern art as a historian collects his facts.

24. Lit., the inmost or most ideal (meaning).

25. Vollkommen. Complete or rather completely articulate and rounded in itself. It is not easy to select the English word that exactly corresponds.

26. Bestimmte Individualität. The definition may, as Hegel says, be more significant, but it is for all that not very clearly expressed. Professor Bosanquet translates the words "determinate individual modification."

27. My view is that what Hegel means to say is that in caricature ugliness is emphasized and made more (näher) a part of the content than belongs to the true nature of the characteristic of which it is (in Hegel's opinion) no essential determinant or property. The view stated in the sentence is therefore a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Professor Bosanquet's translation appears to me to leave it doubtful whether the view stated is a just one or not. He translates näher by "closely," not the comparative. In my view Hegel agrees that caricature may be characteristic, but he does not agree that it is a genuine property of the characteristic where it is pressed to the excess of ugliness.

28. Bestimmung.

29. That is, in Hegel's view.

30. Das Wahre.

31. Den denkenden Begriff. It is possible that the "notion of thought" would express Hegel's meaning, as it would be a less strange expression. But I have retained the more literal translation as the reference may be to the self-evolution of Thought in its own dialectical process, thought or the Idea thinking out itself in the Hegelian sense. Professor Bosanquet seems to assume this, as he translates "the thinking Idea."

32. Kunstschönen. I have translated this by the expression "fine art" because Hegel in the opening of the introduction makes the expression interchangeable with schöne kunst. At the same time it must be recollected that the emphasis here is even more on "beauty" than the fact that it is the beauty of human art. And it is for this reason, I presume, that Professor Bosanquet translates it here "artistic beauty." The only objection I have to make to this, apart from Hegel's words I have referred to, is that the expression "artistic beauty" is sometimes used to signify beauty that is capable of being expressed by art. Of course that is excluded from Hegel's use of the term; he means the beauty of artistic work.

33. Subjektiven.

34. Independent, that is, of the consciousness of any particular individual. Hegel does not necessarily mean independent of consciousness altogether. He has, no doubt, generally in his mind the kind of scepticism which received its most logical exposition in Hume.

35. This appears to me the meaning of zufälliger Sinn. Professor Bosanquet translates it "accidental sense." By that I presume he understands the meaning to be "a sense of beauty that is entirely personal to the recipient," it may be possessed by one man, but not by another. Hegel's illustration hardly supports this, so it seems to me.

36. I do not know the exact translation of lemmatisch, and by a curious slip the sentence is omitted from Professor Bosanquet's translation. The general sense is plain enough. Every particular science accepts its subject-matter as a datum. It starts from the empirical fact. Whether it admits the assumption or not, it does assume such facts. It is obvious that Hegel's adoption of this standpoint is only relatively true.

37. Hegel means, I presume, mainly in the introduction. After that he does in a qualified degree discuss the profounder import of the Idea of Fine Art. His statements are not perhaps wholly free from inconsistency, because he has previously said that apart from an encyclopaedic consideration of all the sciences, it was not possible to do so, and also some of His statements seem to imply that he does not intend to do so.

38. That is, in the first Part of the entire treatise.

39. What Hegel means by the die letzte einleitende Betrachtung I am not quite sure. I presume he means the introduction to the first Part. The whole of this paragraph is not very clear.