The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
free from all admixture with anything foreign to it, and consistent
throughout in its clearness, is that which creates the beauty of tone
as immediately apprehended by our senses, and which distinguishes
it from every kind of mere noise. And we may add further it is this
which in human speech conspicuously applies to the articulation of the
vowels. A language which enunciates the five vowels with distinction
and purity, as is strongly the case in the Italian, is essentially
musical and adapted to song. The diphthongs, on the contrary, always
produce a confused tone. In literature little attention is paid to
the direct reproduction of folk-dialects; we find them rather reduced
to the simplest form of expression. In actual speech, however, this
clearness of intonation only too often entirely disappears, so that we
find, and markedly so in the case of dialects such as the South German,
Swabian, and Swiss, men actually speak with an articulation of sound
it is quite impossible to write down. We do not regard this, however,
to be necessarily a defect in human speech, but rather a reflection of
the rawness of the common folk. And here we must close our observations
upon that external aspect of art, which, from the fact that it is
external, and nothing more, is only capable of receiving an external
and abstract unity.
Now according to its more comprehensive definition it is the _concrete
individuality_ of the Ideal impregnated with reason, which takes to
itself externality as the form of its embodiment, and, moreover, in
such a way that the external semblance, which is thus the medium of
its expression, is throughout suffused with the mind inherent in this
concrete individual form. In consequence of this such modes of relation
as uniformity, symmetry, and harmony, or, in other words, the more
simple determinations of the sensuous material are no longer adequate.
This defect naturally extends our inquiry to that second aspect of the
external determination of the Ideal already stated.
2. THE COALESCENCE OF THE CONCRETE IDEAL WITH ITS EXTERNAL REALITY