The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Georg Hegel · en
disfigurement of natural structures is not unintentional technical
inexpertness and want of skill, but intentional alteration, which
emanates from the content that is in consciousness, and is required
thereby. Thus, from this point of view, there is such a thing as
imperfect art, which may be quite perfect, both technically and in
other respects, _in its determinate_ sphere, yet reveals itself to be
defective when compared with the conception of art as such, and with
the Ideal. Only in the highest art are the Idea and the representation
genuinely adequate to one another, in the sense that the outward shape
given to the Idea is in itself essentially and actually the true
shape, because the content of the Idea, which that shape expresses,
is itself the true and real content. It is a corollary from this,
as we indicated above,[141] that the Idea must be defined in and
through itself as concrete totality, and thereby possess in itself the
principle and standard of its particularization and determination in
external appearance. For example, the Christian imagination will be
able to represent God only in human form and with man's intellectual
expression, because it is herein that God Himself is completely known
in Himself as mind. Determinateness is, as it were, the bridge to
phenomenal existence. Where this determinateness is not totality
derived from the Idea itself, where the Idea is not conceived as
self-determining and self-particularizing, the Idea remains abstract
and has its determinateness, and therefore the principle that dictates
its particular and exclusively appropriate mode of presentation, not
in itself but external to it. Therefore, the Idea when still abstract
has even its shape external, and not dictated by itself. The Idea,
however, which is concrete in itself bears the principle of its mode of
manifestation within itself, and is by that means the free process of
giving shape to itself. Thus it is only the truly concrete Idea that
can generate the true shape, and this correspondence of the two is the
Ideal.