Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art Vol. II

"I would say that a great way of getting into Hegel is through the Aesthetics . For a start, it contains lots of examples of artworks, unlike Kant’s aesthetics. Hegel comments on paintings, poems, plays, works of sculpture, etc., all of which you can look up on the internet or go and see in galleries. And that is really helpful, since you can see Hegel’s thinking at work in specific cases. Hegel’s Aesthetics comprises his lectures on fine art. The question to ask is: why is art so important to him? Hegel thinks that the Logic sets out the basic truth about being and thought, then the philosophy of nature tells you about the truth of nature, and then the various parts of the philosophy of spirit tell you about what it is to be a human being, to be free and so on. But philosophy is not the only way in which we understand these truths. There are, in fact, for Hegel, three basic forms of mindedness: (i) intuition; (ii) representation; and (iii) thought. These are discussed in the philosophy of subjective spirit and they pretty much match Kant’s intuition, imagination, and thought. Intuition is sensuous for Hegel: it is the seeing, hearing and feeling of things. Representation is somewhat more inward. It’s an inward picturing, which works with images, metaphors, and analogies. Finally, thought deals in concepts. Hegel’s claim is that – ideally – the truth should be known by us in all three ways. “ Whatever your views about art may be, studying Hegel gives you a thorough aesthetic education, as he takes you through a whole array of artworks that, in his view, you should know if you’re part of the modern world. ” Philosophy knows the truth in pure concepts, in the distinctive categories of the Logic and so on. Religion knows basically the same truth, but in images and metaphors – Christianity being the principal religion for Hegel. Religion doesn’t talk about being, becoming, nothing; it talks about the ‘creation’ and about ‘God’ being the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’. But the basic story that’s contained in Christianity, Hegel thinks, is the same as that told by philosophy, namely that there is a power that is responsible for there being a world and which comes to self-consciousness in human beings. In philosophy it’s called reason, in religion it’s called God. The story of the creation, the incarnation, the resurrection, etc., is thus religion’s account of the process through which divine reason comes to fulfilment in human beings – above all, in human beings that live their lives in love and forgiveness. Hegel has more to say about religion, and about religions other than Christianity, but this is the core of his theology. In contrast to religion and philosophy, art knows the truth through sensuous intuition. Hegel holds that we need to have a sensuous encounter with and experience of the truth. In art, therefore, the human spirit articulates its basic truths in what is visible and audible. For Hegel, there is a hierarchy among art, religion, and philosophy. Philosophy and religion, if you like, get it more right than art does. And philosophy in particular knows the truth in the truest way. It is thus at the top of the pyramid. But philosophy is not for everyone. In principle it is for everyone but in practice it isn’t, partly because of the intellectual demands it makes and partly because you have to devote your life to it in a way that most people are unable to do. Religion takes up the truth in a way that anybody can understand in practice as well as in principle. Art then communicates such truths in a more direct, intuitable way, but it doesn’t speak to and enter into our inwardness in the way religion does. Religious truths in their images and metaphors become part of the life of faith and inform who we are. But art is always in some sense different from or outside us. However, art is as indispensable to us as religion and philosophy, because we need to experience the truth in each of these ways (if we can). Furthermore, there is an irreducible value to each of the distinctive ways in which art, religion, and philosophy present the truth. It’s not just that you’re getting the same truths in three different ways. The different ways have their own value. The way in which art speaks to us thus has its own distinctive value that religion and philosophy can’t match. So, actually, in some respects, philosophy is deficient with respect to art even though, in terms of pure truth, art is deficient in relation to philosophy. Hegel’s Aesthetics is, in my view, one of the greatest accounts of art we possess, and an important part of the story he tells concerns the history of art. Hegel is interested, for example, in the fact that, in earlier ages, art and religion were much more closely linked than they are now. Consider the Egyptians and the Greeks. For the Greeks, Hegel thinks, religion and art were inseparable. In fact, he even says that the poets gave the Greeks their gods. What happens as we move into the Christian period, and particularly in the Reformation, is that religion and art move apart. For medieval Catholicism, art is still crucial to religion, but not so much for Protestantism. Protestantism becomes more inward, more focused on the word, and art thus ceases to be so important to it. That has a twofold effect. Art is reduced in value in some respects and firmly located in third place in the hierarchy of absolute spirit. But it is also given its autonomy. Art gains an autonomy it never enjoyed before because in earlier ages it was much more closely tied to religion. So Hegel highlights a paradox here: after the Reformation art gains its autonomy and freedom whilst also having a reduced place in human life. “ The way in which art speaks to us thus has its own distinctive value that religion and philosophy can’t match. ” For many people after Hegel, however, that’s not the way it is. For them, art has gone to the top of the hierarchy, religion has gone to the bottom or disappeared entirely, and philosophy is somewhere in the middle. Indeed, this elevation of art above religion was already happening with the German Romantics, and Hegel was worried about it. Since Hegel’s day church attendance has gone down in many Western countries and religion doesn’t have the central importance in life that it used to have. For Hegel, that is seriously bad news. He was worried enough in his own time, but if he could see what we are going through now, he would be really worried. In Hegel’s view, once you lose religion, you don’t get it back again in a hurry. He may be right or wrong about that, but that’s the way he thinks about it. Another virtue of Hegel’s Aesthetics is that it is easier to read than a lot of Hegel’s other works. It combines a systematic structure with real richness and insight at the level of detail. Hegel’s Aesthetics tells you about art in general and about specific artworks, and it gives you a historical perspective on art. You learn about the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Medievals. You learn about the differences between architecture and painting and music. You think about concrete artworks but you also think about modernity, about what art is and should be in the modern world. Heidegger, Adorno, and Danto have all been particularly influenced by Hegel in thinking about art in modernity. With all this taken together, even if you end up being sceptical about the grand story that Hegel tells, there is a lot to learn and enjoy on the way. And you have the added benefit of having all these great artworks that you can consult too. Whatever your views about art may be, studying Hegel gives you a thorough aesthetic education, as he takes you through a whole array of artworks that, in his view, you should know if you’re part of the modern world. One thing to consider is that, for Hegel, there is both what the logic of art makes necessary and what simply happened in history. Hegel is aware of both of these. According to the logic of art, I think the safest thing to say is that there isn’t an ‘end’ of art in the sense that art stops being produced or stops mattering to us. What does occur – and maybe this could count as a kind of ‘end’ of art – is that art ceases being the highest expression of the truth, as it was for the Greeks. For the Greeks, art was the highest expression of the truth because it was coextensive with religion. As we go through the Christian and modern periods, however, art loses that status. That aspect of art therefore ends. But art itself doesn’t end. And, indeed, the importance of art doesn’t end. Art is as irreducibly necessary now as it ever was because we remain beings that need to know the truth through intuition, as well as through representation and concepts. “ …the purpose of art is not to imitate nature but to express the freedom of the human spirit in a sensuous, intuitable form. ” At the conclusion of the Aesthetics there is a different ‘end’ to art when art leads logically to religion. This occurs, interestingly, in comedy. Hegel distinguishes genuine comedy, which he finds supremely in Aristophanes, from the ridiculous, which he finds in someone like Molière. Putting it very simply, what marks genuine comedy is the ability of a character to laugh at himself. We don’t just laugh at a comic character, therefore – that would be ridicule – but we laugh with the character. In such laughter, Hegel thinks, there is an acknowledgement of one’s foibles and folly; Falstaff is one of the best examples of this. And, for Hegel, there’s an implicitly religious moment in such acknowledgement because we let go of our proud self-image. This, then, provides the logical transition to religion. So here there is a logical ‘end’ to art, which, however, many readers of Hegel ignore. There are also developments in modernity that bring with them the historical risk, though not the logical necessity, of a certain ‘end’ to art. What Hegel has in mind is, on the one hand, the process in which art becomes progressively prosaic. This leads to extreme mimesis where art simply tries to imitate nature, as in some of the naturalistic realism we see in 18th- and 19th-century art. Hegel thinks that such mimesis is a distortion of art, since the purpose of art is not to imitate nature but to express the freedom of the human spirit in a sensuous, intuitable form. We certainly need to draw on natural forms – principally the human body and face, but also landscapes and animals – in order to express human emotions, ideas and freedom. But, in Hegel’s view, we don’t need to imitate nature for its own sake, because we’ve already got nature in our gardens and the countryside. The opposite side of the coin is the extreme subjectivism Hegel finds in modern romantic irony. This, too, distorts art by failing to express deep truths about human life and freedom and instead just celebrating the power of the ironist to subvert the prevailing order. In both these cases, therefore, art ‘ends’ in the sense that it no longer does what art is supposed to do: express the richness of human life and freedom. Hegel thinks, however, that this ‘end’ can be avoided if artists imbue their naturalistic images with life, or deploy their subversive humour in the service of genuine human freedom. Furthermore, Hegel thinks that modern naturalism and irony are actually stages on the way to a new art that is liberated from all restrictions of style and content. This new modern art has what Hegel calls ‘Humanus’ as its subject matter. What modern art should now be, according to the logic of art, is thus a free engagement with and expression of human life and freedom in all its different aspects. This is close to what Danto has in mind when he talks about modern pluralism. The difference between Hegel and Danto is that, for Hegel, there is a normativity still built into the idea that human freedom should be the focus of art. So taking a set of bricks, putting them in a gallery and calling them art – which is allowed by Danto’s pluralism – wouldn’t count as art for Hegel. Modern artistic freedom, for Hegel, thus has limits imposed by the requirement that art express the richness of human life. “ I suspect that The Simpsons comes closer to true art, as Hegel conceives it, than Rothko’s grand expressions of abstract, sublime, indeterminate feeling. ” Prosaic naturalism and romantic irony do not, therefore, have to mark the ‘end’ of art. They do so, only if we get stuck there. But, for Hegel, this is not logically necessary, but rather what happens historically when abstraction takes over. So, if abstraction takes holds of naturalism or subjective irony and makes either the principal aim of art, or if abstraction in some other form becomes the essence of art, then you no longer have art in its true sense. Art is dead, and you just have artistry . Hegel makes a distinction between a work of art ( Kunstwerk ) and a piece of artistry ( Kunstst ü ck ). A piece of artistry is not a true work of art, because it doesn’t do what the latter should so, which is to express and embody the freedom, richness and life of the human spirit. It just draws well or paints well, and is able to imitate things in nature. Similarly, the subjectivism that Hegel associates with certain kinds of Romanticism also loses sight of art because it often doesn’t give determinate expression to human freedom, but aims rather at subverting such freedom through its ironic play or through highlighting the ways in which the unconscious, dreams and so on can disrupt our lives. All of this, of course, raises really interesting questions. What would Hegel do with someone like Rothko who is not subjective particularly, but produces an art of sublime abstraction? Would Hegel consider Rothko’s paintings to be true art, or to be mere pieces of artistry that fail to express the richness of human life and experience? As for me, I’m a fan of The Simpsons . And what do you get in The Simpsons ? You get real humanity, real warm, and comic genius. For that reason, I suspect that The Simpsons comes closer to true art, as Hegel conceives it, than Rothko’s grand expressions of abstract, sublime, indeterminate feeling. But there is a debate about this. Robert Pippin thinks that modern abstract, non-representational art is Hegelian. In Pippin’s view, Hegel is a philosopher of modernity, for whom the modern freedom of self-determination is not bound by nature. So what is the appropriate artistic expression of a freedom that is not bound by nature? Well, it’s abstract, non-naturalistic, non-representational art. This is a powerful view, but I don’t think it’s right. In my view, Hegel thinks that art is essentially the sensuous expression of human life and freedom, and the most appropriate expression of the latter is provided by human beings themselves (in drama) or by images of human beings (in painting and sculpture). And so, true art has an intrinsically representational character. Obviously not in music and architecture, but in the other arts. Yet true art is not representational for its own sake. Such art is not trying to be mimetic. It is representational because it has human life and freedom at its core. So my Hegel looks conservative; he is someone who would not consider the work of, say, Jackson Pollock to be genuine art. But this is not because Pollock avoids imitating nature. It is because he does not express and celebrate the richness of human life in the way Rembrandt or Shakespeare do. But even if your taste tends more towards Pollock than Rembrandt and you think Hegel is a crusty old conservative, the Aesthetics is well worth reading. Hegel has a profound and insightful account of tragedy, and he illuminates the other arts, too. You’re not going to agree with all his judgements, but they are often pretty good, and the aesthetic principles that underpin them are always worth thinking about. Some people who work on Hegel’s aesthetics say that this is not aesthetics as Kant does it, and I agree. Hegel’s work is very different from that of Kant. Kant’s aesthetics is much more about our response to beauty – beauty in nature as well as in art. More specifically, it examines the difference between the judgement ‘I like this’ and the judgement ‘this is beautiful’. Kant thinks that there is a claim to objectivity in the judgement that something is beautiful which is not made when I say ‘ I like it’ , and yet there isn’t a concept of beauty. So if I say something is beautiful, I expect you to see that it’s beautiful too, and in this way I appeal to a common aesthetic sense in both of us. Yet there’s no concept available to spell out what the beauty of an object consists in, whereas the pre-Kantian rationalists believed that there is (e.g., harmony or perfection). This is very interesting and thought-provoking, but it is different from Hegel’s concern in his aesthetics. Hegel’s approach is in a way more like Heidegger’s. His aesthetics is a philosophy of art. Hegel is interested in what art does and how art works. Absolutely, he’s worth it. Having spent my adult life studying Hegel and encouraging others to do so, what else am I going to say? There is one principal reason why he is worth it and that is that he provides so many rich insights into the complexities of being, nature and human life. In particular, he highlights the dialectical element of human life. This is the intrinsic necessity that structures the way we behave and the things we do, and that turns anything one-sided into its very opposite. It’s not only exhilarating to understand this but we need to understand it. Hegel is of the view that actions have consequences and either you learn about them and live in accordance with them, or you suffer them. There is no escaping them. That’s his claim. Of course, this idea of dialectical consequences has been picked up by people like Marx, though there are significant differences between Hegel and Marx. One difference is that Hegel thinks that a modern economy based on production and exchange is redeemable, whereas Marx thinks it isn’t. Despite this difference, however, Hegel is well aware that a society built on maximising (rather than optimising) growth will lead to huge discrepancies between the rich and the poor, and to the impoverishment of many, and he explains in detail why this is the case in his Philosophy of Right . That’s where Marx gets it from. Hegel was interested in writers like Adam Ferguson at the end of the 18th century who were grappling with the problem of poverty in rich modern societies, and in Hegel’s view modern societies produce poverty when they encourage unrestricted competition between people in the economy. In contrast to Marx, however, Hegel thinks that such poverty can be avoided within an exchange-based economy if economic activity is carried out in the context of mutual recognition and respect. If we have a genuine, and institutionally guaranteed, concern and respect for one another, then we will not always seek to outdo one another, with the attendant risk that we will fall into poverty if we cannot keep up. This is perhaps one of the reasons why you don’t get as much poverty in less competitive and more cooperative societies, such as Norway and Sweden, as you get in the United States and Britain. For Hegel, you can accept this logic and adjust the way you view the world accordingly, or you can suffer the possibly tragic consequences of being stubborn. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Unreconstructed capitalism, for both Hegel and Marx, leads tragically to poverty and alienation. In Marx’s view, famously, the only solution is a revolution in which capitalism is abolished and production taken into public ownership. In Hegel’s view, by contrast, if we embed our economic production and exchange within a system of mutual recognition and concern, we can avoid both revolution and the tragic, dialectical consequences of unrestricted capitalist competition. “ You approach these thinkers with a sensitivity to distinctions and paradoxes that is hard to acquire without studying Hegel. ” Hegel’s thought is thus the source of important insights about our social and political lives. I also think one gains insight into aspects of personal life from Hegel. He’s a great psychologist with an acute understanding of the paradoxes of human desire. And studying Hegel also enriches our study of other philosophers. The value of Hegel’s thought thus lies not just in what you get out of it, but also in what you then bring to the study of, say, Kant or Aristotle. You approach these thinkers with a sensitivity to distinctions and paradoxes that is hard to acquire without studying Hegel. Not everyone is going to have the time to read Hegel and that’s a shame. It’s a shame, too, that most people won’t have the time or perhaps the energy to study Aristotle , Kant or Heidegger . Philosophers such as Kant and Hegel are hugely rewarding, but not everyone is going to be able to read them. You can’t just pick up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel’s Logic in an evening after having spent all day at the office and think you’re going to make much headway with it. It’s hard. But if you have the time and are willing to make the effort, studying these works can be hugely rewarding."