The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

or spiritual in its quality, which in part to all appearance proceeds from the enjoyment we derive from the images excited (I presume he means ethical or spiritual ones)188, and in part from the pleasure which the mere activity of an intelligent appreciation infallibly brings with it."

      Such are the principal factors according to which this undoubted connoisseur of art defines his subject relatively to the beautiful. It may very possibly pass muster with a certain type of uncritical reader. It is, however, very unsatisfactory regarded from the philosophical standpoint. For what does it at bottom amount to but this, namely, that the sense of vision or spiritual sense, we may add the understanding itself, are moved pleasurably, or excite a feeling which results in awakened pleasure. The entire argument hinges on this one aspect of awakened gratification. This reduction, however, of the activity of the beautiful to terms of feeling—that which pleases and charms us—has been disposed of once for all by Kant. His exposition has already left far behind the feeling for the beautiful.

      We will direct our attention now from this polemical tractate to a further consideration of the Idea its hostility has failed to weaken. In this, as already stated, is comprehended the concrete unity of the notion and its objective realization.

(a) Now, first, we will observe, in directing our attention more closely to the essential nature of the notion, that it is no purely abstract unity opposed to the differences of phenomenal reality; rather, as the notion, it is already the unity that integrates those relations, and by doing so is concrete totality. The abstract conceptions such as man, the quality blueness, and their like, are not notions as such at all, but rather should be called abstract general concepts, which are only raised to the dignity of the notion, when we have demonstrated that they contain opposing factors in unity, and, in such a way, that this self-related nexus of unity constitutes their notional truth. For instance, the concept "blueness" as a colour receives such a notional value when it is grasped as the unity, and, indeed, the specific unity of light and darkness189. In the same way the concept "man" contains within it the opposing factors of sense, life, and reason, body and mind (spirit); but a particular man is not to be regarded as a whole consisting in some way of these two aspects of his personality placed in a relation of indifference side by side as constituents of the same. Rather, in virtue of the notion, such a whole contains these constituents in concrete and mediated190 union. Add to this that the notion is so completely the absolute bond and unity of its differences, that independently they cease to exist, they are unable to assert the particularity, in virtue of which they might escape from such a union. For this reason the notion includes all its determining constituents in the form of its own ideal unity and universality, which constitute its subjective character in contradistinction from the real as the object of sense-perception. For example, gold is, as a particular object, of specific weight, definite colour, and placed in a certain relation to specific acids. Such are varied characteristics of gold, and yet are invariably found in a unified whole. The smallest speck contains them all in inseparable union. By analysis or abstraction we indeed separate them, but in their notion they are inseparably one. The inability of the differences, which the notion in its truth essentially possesses, to stand alone in their isolated self-identity is of a similar nature. A still more apposite illustration is presented by the unique concept of the self-conscious Ego in its universality. For that which we call soul, or more appositely the Ego, is the notion itself in its free existence. The Ego contains a congeries of most distinct concepts and thoughts in itself; it is a world of ideas; yet none the less this infinitely complex content, in so far as it lies within the Ego, remains without a vestige of substantiality or materiality packed within this ideal unity, as the pure and throughout fluid transparency of the Ego itself reflected to itself. And this is precisely the way in which the notion retains its varied determinations in ideal unity.

      The determinants of the notion which are most cognate to the notion as such are the universal, the particular, and the single. Every one of these determinate qualities taken by itself is a mere abstraction. As thus regarded, however, abstract, that is to say, from one another, they are not present in the notion: that is rather their ideal unity. The notion is therefore the universal, which, on the one hand, negates itself to a condition of relativity and particularization, but, on the other, this riving asunder, in so far as it is negation of the universal, is itself again annulled. For the universal as present in the particular, which itself is only the particular aspects of the universal itself is present in no particular absolutely, but rather in that very particular reaffirms once more its essential unity as universal. In this return upon itself the notion is infinite negation; negation, I mean, not as against another, but self-determination, in which alone it subsists in its positive and correlative unity. In this way it is singularity in its truth; it is the universal nexus which shuts itself up with itself in its particulars. As the highest example of this property of the notion we would refer back to what we have already, if in a summary way, said about the essential activity of Spirit.

      Through this infinite capacity of return upon itself the notion is already, by virtue of its intrinsic wealth, totality. It finds the unity of itself in the being of another, and for this reason possesses a free activity, being, however, negation as self-determination, not as the alien limitation of its own substance through something other than itself. But regarded as such totality the notion is already in potential possession of all phenomenal reality, and is that which mediates and restores the unity of the Idea. And whoever ventures to think that in the Idea we have presented to us something totally different and apart from the notion, has as little knowledge of the nature of the Idea as he has of the notion. At the same time there is, no doubt, a difference between the notion and the Idea, and it is this: in the former the particularization is only an abstract particularization, for this reason that in the notion the determinate relations are alone coherent in its transparent medium, that is to say, in its unity and ideal universality. The notion, therefore, itself remains subject to the one-sidedness of its particular material, and is hampered with the defect that although in its own nature it is a totality, yet it is only in the aspect of it as unity and universality that it is entitled to free self-development. But inasmuch as this defect in its completeness is foreign to its own essential form, the process of its activity is to remove it. It negates itself as this very ideal unity and universality and allows that which is enclosed in the barren chamber of ideal subjectivity to flow forth freely into real and substantive objectivity. In other words, the notion through its own activity posits itself as objective reality.

(b) Objectivity is therefore, truly apprehended, the real existence of the notion. It is, however, the notion under the mode of self-substantive particularization and of a differentiation of all antithetical phases191 of reality, whose ideal unity the notion in its subjective capacity constituted.

But inasmuch as it is the notion, and only the notion, whose function it is to endow objectivity with its determinate existence and reality, so too it is only through objectivity that the notion is unveiled in its actuality. The notion is, however, the mediating and ideal unity of all its particular antitheses. Within its differentiated reality this ideal unity, effective throughout particularity in modes adequate to the notion, has to establish itself in them, precisely in a way similar to that in which the realized particularity of their unity, as thus mediated to the point of ideality, has also to exist in them192. This is the might of the notion, which refuses to surrender or forfeit its universality among the disjecta membra of the objective world, but rather reveals its essential unity through such reality and within it. For it is nothing less than the very life of the notion to preserve its unity in the material which is offered it. Only by so doing is it real and veritable totality.

      (c) This totality is the Idea. The Idea is not simply the ideal unity and subjectivity of the notion. It is quite as much its true and objective reality; it is, however, an objectivity which does not confront the notion as an opposing factor,