[analytic-borders] Aesthetics 6: Hegel
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AESTHETICS 6: HEGEL
This summary is based mostly on a piece by
Michael Inwood.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) was
a German Idealist who differed from Kant in several
ways. Hegel believed that people acquire their grasp
of the world not simply through verbal thought but
also through art and religion, which he considered
ways of discovering the world (not just ways of
beautifying or sanctifying what we have already
discovered). Hegel held that our ways of making sense
of things (through art, through our fundamental
categories) change over time. Hegel was concerned
with the meaning and history of art and with
art's changing relationship with what he saw as its
successors as ways of knowing, religion and
then philosophy.
For Hegel a human being is a mind. A mind knows itself.
At any stage a mind is what it knows itself to be. A
mind cannot know itself without knowing the
external world -- it stands in contrast to the external
world. A mind incorporates parts of the external
world, especially its body. This self knowledge is
acquired gradually over time.
Human art (but not natural beauty) serves the
development of the mind. Art, even children's art,
provides material for contemplation. Art before the
Greeks, for Hegel, was "symbolic," expressing its
meaning through a material object that supposedly
had something in common with the object. A statue of
a god, for example, ought to be vast in size. The world
view that such art expresses is deficient -- it doesn't
adequately address the complexity of the world, but
the art does represent the mind of its producer,
according to Hegel.
Greek art expressed a culture at home in the world.
Hegel believed that the Greek message and medium
fit together in a way that will never happen again in art.
Where symbolic art had too little to express, Romantic
art had too much. This gave rise, Hegel claimed, to
theology and philosophy. Art lost its place as the final
authority on the absolute. The God of the Torah, Bible
or Koran cannot be portrayed adequately in art.
Romantic art loses the harmony of Greek art and points
towards hidden, unpicturable depths that can be
adequately conveyed only in theology and philosophy,
according to Hegel. (This a formula, of course, for
structuralism, the search for a deep hidden structure
beneath the surface of things, as in Plato, Marx,
Freud, Newton.)
THE END OF ART
For Hegel, art reached its peak in ancient Greece. Christian
art is not the best expression of the Christian world view.
Hegel claimed that art does not work to make bad
people into good people. Art expresses the ongoing
customs of the society it serves -- in modern times
art makes sinning look beautiful. What moderns are
good at is art history -- a task performed by the
philosophy of art. In the future art will not be a
major expression of the human spirit.
In short, art is either entertainment or it has a
serious message. In either case, we now have
better entertainments and better ways of conveying
serious messages, Hegel thought.
INWOOD'S CRITIQUE
The mind, according to Hegel, is thought. To know yourself
is to know your thoughts, and the sensory has a
limited preparatory role in thinking. The serious business
of life is now to be conducted in linguistic thought.
One counter is that someday art may again play a central
role in the development of minds.
A second counter is that the sensory may be as important
to self knowledge as cognitive thought.
A related counter is that Hegel's attempt to reduce
the sensory to the verbal -- his claim that ultimate
meaning always rests in thought and not in
sensation -- may be incorrect.
A fourth counter is that Hegel's history of art is only
one possible history of art. In fact, who today accepts
Hegel's history of art? Is it true that in ancient
Greece art occupied the place that philosophy did
in Hegel's time? Ancient Greece had some well-known
philosophers of its own, and it isn't clear that the art
of ancient Greece adequately conveyed a world view
that was darker and more complex than Hegel admitted.
HEGEL
Hegel attempted not to be one-sided, and he devised
a system that assigns each art form its appropriate
place in the growth of mind. The centrality of content,
in his view, did not exclude the idea that art was an
end in itself, too.
The aesthetic system Hegel developed has attracted
few imitators, few thinkers who wrote up a coherent
structure to account for all art. But bits and pieces
of Hegel's argument influenced Heidegger and others.
Note:
Hegelianism, transmuted by the British into
absolute idealism, became the dominant academic
philosophy in the English community until attacked
by realists, pragmatists and Russell and Moore.
Best,
Gary Goss
Attn: George W. Bush National Email Screeners
(authorized by the Patriot Act)
A village in Texas is missing its idiot.
(c) 2002 by Analytic
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