The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, but is rather that in which the notion itself is self-determined. In whichever aspect we contemplate the notion, whether as subjective to our apprehension, or as objectively real, the Idea it manifests is a totality. But it is more than this. It is the unity which for ever is mediating between and bringing into more perfected harmony the two totalities. Only as thus apprehended is the Idea truth and indeed all truth.

      2. All that exists, then, has only truth in so far as it is a definite existence of the Idea. For the Idea is alone the truly real. The truth of the phenomenal is not derived from the fact that its particular existence is of an inward or external character, and as such is in a general sense reality; it is so wholly in virtue of the fact that such reality is adequate to the notion. Then alone is determinate existence real and true. And the truth, to which we here refer, is not a subjective interpretation of it, namely, that a particular existence is accordant with my own conception of it. It is truth in the objective sense that the reality of the Ego, or of any external object, action, or circumstance actually contributes to the realization of the notion. If this identity is not established the existence remains purely phenomenal. Instead of the objectification of the notion in its completeness what obtains is purely a detached aspect of it; and with regard to this, whatever self-subsistence it may appear to have in opposition to the unity and universality of the notion, such can only work to its final confusion by setting it in hostility to the true notion itself. Our conclusion, therefore, is that only the reality which adequately expresses the notion is truly reality, and the reason it is so is that therein the Idea manifests itself as existence.

      3. We have maintained that beauty is Idea. It follows that beauty and truth are, in one aspect of them, identical. In other words, beauty must itself in its intrinsic being be true. A closer investigation will further show to us that truth must be distinguished from beauty.

The idea is true in the sense that it is so by virtue of its essential being and according to its fundamental principle193, and as such truth it is thought194. It is not its sensuous and external existence, but the universal Idea of thought as present in this. At the same time the Idea is driven to seek its realization in external and objectively determined existence, both in the sphere of Nature and that of Mind. The true, in the absolute sense, also exists. And in so far as, in this its external existence, it is immediately apprehended by consciousness, and the notion rests in immediate unity with its external appearance, the Idea is not only true, but is also beautiful. The beautiful may therefore be defined as the sensuous semblance195 of the Idea. For the sensuous condition and the objective world generally maintain no real self-subsistence in beauty, but have merely to surrender the immediacy of their being. In beauty such are posited simply as the determinate existence and externality of the notion, and as a form of reality, which itself manifests the notion in unity with its external appearance in this its particular objective existence. For this reason it can only pass as the semblance of the notion.

(a) Accordantly with this it is impossible for the understanding196 alone to grasp the significance of beauty. For inasmuch as objective reality is apprehended by this faculty as something at least quite other than ideality, sensuous perception, as something very different from the notion, the external object as something that is anywhere rather than within world of the conscious self, to that extent it cannot fail to emphasize the contradictions implied in such separation, rather than penetrate to the ideal unity we have above described. The understanding remains rooted in the finite, the incomplete and untrue abstraction. The beautiful is on the contrary itself essentially infinite and free.

For although the content of beauty is stamped with particularity and to that extent limited, such content is essentially in its mode of environment a totality that is infinite197 and a free existence; and it is both for the reason that it is the notion, which does not pass beyond this its objective semblance, and so fall into finite and one sided abstraction with it, but rather is immersed as a blossom with this its objectification and through the imminent unity and perfection of such inclusion is revealed as essentially infinite. With equal truth we may affirm that the notion in sealing, as it were, with a soul the real existence, in which it is part of the objective world, is itself by itself freely manifest in that world. For the notion will not suffer that external existence in the sphere of beauty to follow, as it would otherwise, the laws that therein are paramount: rather it determines out of its own riches the articulation and form of its appearance therein; and it is precisely this harmony of the notion with СКАЧАТЬ