Are words simply shorthand notations for the Concept (Begriff)? Is language really immediately universal? And if so, is it the phenomenon of language that is looked at that is universal, or is it also the materiality of language as it is read that is universal (even though it is a particular instance, subject to the peculiarities of a unique, non-repeatable situation)? But then how is writing as an iterable sequence of marks supposed to be seen and/or read? If it can only mark a particular case as a potential universal, can anything ever be said about a particular unless it can also be stated about other particulars (hence repeatable), and therefore, not a unique instance but necessarily a universal? How do we connect the material marks to an ideality of meanings if not through the configurations of words? Then, would this notion of fluidity, of arising and passing away, of appearing and disappearing, this ceaseless flux, flüssigkeit (¶171), not also be operative as a force between material words and their meanings? Then would one have to argue against Hegelšs reduction or denigration of words as minute particulars, or could one state that that Hegel is really "lifting" them up to a higher level of meaning by sublating them; not losing them, nor simply assimilating them, but re-marking and preserving them as necessary moments of alienation and otherness that instantiate the very process of making meanings, of apprehending and comprehending things, in short, of making the circuit, the circle and the circulation of the System possible? Hegel is very clear in the Aesthetics in the section on "Poetry" about his position on the issue of the particulars of art:
Yet despite this independence, these same single parts must still remain connected together, because the one fundamental subject, developed and presented in them, has to be manifested as the unity permeating all the particulars, holding them together as a totality, and drawing them all back into itself. . . . The connection into which the parts are brought should not be a mere teleological one. For in a teleological relationship, the end is the independently envisaged and willed universal which can bring into conformity with itself the particulars through and in which it gains existence, not these particulars it uses merely as means and it robs them of all independently free existence and therefore of every sort of life. In that event the parts come only into an intended relation to the one end which alone is to be conspicuous as valid; everything else this end subjects to itself and takes abstractly into its service. This unfree relationship, characteristic of the Understanding, is the very contrary of the free beauty of art."(Aesthetics 982-3, italics mine)[NOTE 45]
In other words, the means themselves, the particulars, mean what they do not because of the "willed universal" but because they manifest the universal in and through themselves. Art comes about through the penetration of each detail with the spirit and concept or idea of itself suffused through these particulars and not attached afterwards as an abstract schema bringing together all the disparate parts under one umbrella. The unity must come from the particulars themselves and in the multiple relations between particulars. Then how could one argue that Hegel denigrates the medium of language when one can show that it makes meaning possible by setting up a series of oppositions and by animating that movement between the poles of each dirempted proposition that allows the concept of concrete universality and dialectical fluidity to occur in the first place. Language -- not as a means to an end, but as a means to and toward meanings. In order to say what you mean, you must first say it (think it, write it), even if it is ultimately impossible to say exactly what you mean, even if (and because) language is more truthful than that.