The Philosophy of Fine Art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
to say that would imply important qualification.
84. Begeisterung. I think this must be the meaning. Inspiration hardly makes sense. It is art that is inspired, not those who attend the celebration.
85. Im Innersten is I think here obviously to be taken with the verb, not with the substantives.
86. Ueberhaupt.
87. The meaning of in diesem Gebiete is, I presume, the actual world. But if so it is simply otiose, and I have left it out.
88. Bestimmung. The translation given appears to be the sense, though we should rather say weaken a man from the pursuit of a definite course. Professor Bosanquet, who translates the word "aim" a little lower down, evades the word here.
89. Raisonnirende here and raissonnement below have a depreciatory sense—and signify ordinary reasoning in the first instance and the methods of the popular secularist in the second.
90. A sentence omitted by Professor Bosanquet, and it seems to amount to little more than a more generalized statement of what has gone before. The end of art both directly and indirectly concerns its subject-matter, or rather, as Hegel puts it, the need of the notion or Idea of it carries us to a further end beyond the end shared in common by its particular content.
91. I follow Professor Bosanquet in his translation of the words als Allgemeines für sich zu zuerden; but I am not sure that the more literal translation is not simply as the words stand, the sense being not to be self-conscious of himself (für sich) as the universal principle, to be aware of this property, but rather as universal principle to become for himself, i.e. "independent of desire."
92. Einheit—unity to the point of fusion, identity.
93. Unmittelbaren Befangenheit. "Sunkenness" is Professor Bosanquet's translation.
94. Theoretic as a direct transcript of θεώρια, θεωρειν.
95. Gesichtspunkte. The various points of view necessary to arrive at such a general conclusion.
96. Though not entirely confident I am right in accepting the words zu bringen as a repetition of the hervorzubringen just before, the alternative of Professor Bosanquet which takes the words wird zu bringen seyn as equivalent to gebracht seyn sollte certainly appears to me no direct translation.
97. "Poets aim at utility and entertainment alike."
98. I think that Hegel in his use of erste here rather refers to the fact of past history than a fact in the individual history of nations. "Art is, in the early days of history, the instructress of nations," gives, I think, his meaning. It is the first instructress in the history of nations.
99. I venture to think if Professor Bosanquet's translation were the right one the German would be ein in sich selbst gebrochenes. I do not think in ihm selbst can be a German rendering of "in itself." But I admit the translation is tempting whether Hegel had in his mind the "house divided against itself" or not.
100. Lit., "the spiritual universal," i.e., the universal substance of its ideal content.
101. Precisely as Ruskin, for example, in his "Modern Painters" condemns both Titian and Tintoret, not because they painted the Paradise or the Assunta, to produce fine paintings, or even because they did not or did themselves believe in the truth of their subject-matter, but because they did not paint in order to make converts, an extraordinary lapse of judgment.
102. Im besten Sinne des Wortes.
103. Professor Bosanquet points out in a note on this passage (p. 101) that Sittlichkeit here, which he translates, as I have done, "respectability," is the habit of virtue, without the reflective aspiration after goodness as an ideal. Of course there is no depreciation in the use of the term. It is simply the morality of ordinary people, who do generally what their neighbours think the right thing. The word moralität and moralisch, which I have only been able to translate by a paraphrase, is the morality of the standpoint discussed, which is very much that of Kant or "Duty for duty's sake" in Bradley's "Ethical Studies."
104. That is the contingency of the world of Nature as contrasted with the essential stability of mind or spirit.
105. Lit., "To satisfy itself in its real or independent self (für sich)." It cannot identify itself with either side as its wholly real self made therein explicit. It is neither fish nor fowl.
106. Bestimmüngen may here be a reference to man's broadest spiritual characterizations as one of the human family, the race, the nation, and so forth, or, as I think, a reference to his vocation, future destiny, general welfare.
107. An und für sich Wahre.
108. Unbefangenen, i.e., the naïve outlook of ordinary life.
109. Professor Bosanquet merely translates are not and are in italic as in the text, which of course, except that he adds a comma after are, is a literal translation. But the sense, as I understand it, is that the writer says it is not in the sense that these two contradictories do not exist at all (i.e., as relative reality), but rather in the sense that in philosophical thought which grasps their essence they are not only present but present as reconciled factors of one truth. Professor Bosanquet's translation appears to me to amount to this: that all Hegel maintains is that the sense he means is not that such contradictory elements are not reconciled, but in the sense that they are reconciled. Perhaps this is his view. But if so, I fail to see the importance of the antithesis, which appears to me between gar nicht sind and in Versöhnung sind. Hegel before had expressly said that such contradictory sides were reconciled in philosophy, so I do not see why he should so emphatically repeat himself. The comma, of course, may be a misprint.