[CHAPTER I]
THE NOTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL IN ITS GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE
We have defined beauty to be the Idea of the beautiful.
1. The Idea. By this definition is implied that we have to conceive the beautiful as Idea, and, moreover, as Idea in a determinate shape, as Ideal. Idea, as thus posited, is just this, the conceptive notion, the realization of the same, and the unity of both. The notion, as such, is not yet the Idea, although the terms notion and idea are often loosely interchanged. Idea is the notion only as presented in, and brought into coalescence with, its objective reality. This unity, however, is by no means to be regarded as the mere neutralization of notion and reality, so that the individual character and quality of either is absorbed; as, for example, where we find that in a chemical compound salt-potash and acid tend to neutralize each other in so far as they have weakened their opposition. In this unity, on the contrary, the notion is retained as the commanding factor. It is already implicitly, in virtue of its own nature, this very identity. Out of its own wealth it evolves the reality as part of itself, by means of a process which, being no other than that of development, surrenders nothing of its own nature, but brings into more concrete actuality the riches of the notion, and for this reason continues in unity with itself and its objective realization. Such a unity of the notional concept and its realization is the Idea defined in abstract terms. The word idea is, of course, frequently used by authors of works dealing with the theory of art. It must, however, be admitted that many connoisseurs of high standing are particularly severe upon its employment. The latest and most interesting example of this polemical attitude is to be found in Herr von Rumohr's "Italian investigations." This work is based on the practical interest that the arts excite, and is wholly unconcerned with that which for brevity we may call the Idea. The truth is that this writer, who appears to have no knowledge of the development of philosophy in modern times, freely confuses the expression as above defined with the undetermined conceptions of the phantasy, or the abstract and characterless Ideal of well-known art theories or schools of art, ideas which present a lean contrast to the clearly defined and richly caparisoned objects of Nature in their truth, and which this writer opposes to the idea and empty Ideal, which the artist himself evolves from his own consciousness. We have, of course, no more right to suppose that creative work can be the result of such poverty, than we can with justice assume that a thinker can think with conceptions wholly indeterminate, and persist in his thought with a content destitute of all defined relation. Such an objection, however, does not apply in any respect to the Idea in the sense we use the expression. This Idea is through and through concrete; a whole which consists of relations and is simply beautiful from being in direct union with the objective form adequate to its expression.
Herr von Rumohr has placed on record in this very book (Book I, pp. 145-46) the following assertion, that "beauty in the most comprehensive meaning of the term, and as it is understood by intelligent people of our day, includes every quality of an object, which may either stir the sense of sight with satisfaction, or through that sense attune the soul and delight the mind."
These qualities are then further subdivided into three classes as follows: "First, there is all that is perceptible through the eye; secondly, that which is apprehended by means of the peculiar, presumably innate sense of mankind for spatial relations; and thirdly, all that in the first instance works upon the understanding, and only indirectly through cognition on the emotions." This third and most important determination rests apparently on forms "which quite independently of all pleasure to the sense and the beauty of extended shape arouse in us a specific delight which is ethical 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 darkness[189]. 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 mediated[190] 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.