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Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). New York, 1989.
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand (1928). Westport, Conn., 1969.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York, 1981.
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925). New York, 1992.
McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem (1928). Boston, 1987.
McKay, Claude. Banana Bottom (1933). New York, 1974.
Schuyler, George S. "The Negro-Art Hokum." Nation 122 (1926): 662-663.
Thurman, Wallace, ed. FIRE!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro
Artists (1926). Westport, Conn., 1970. VanVechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. New York, 1926. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington, Ind.,
1995-
KennkthW. Warrkn
HAUTE COUTURE. See Fashion.
HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH. [To
clarify the significance of Hegel's philosophy for both aesthetics and art history, this entry comprises three essays: Survey of Thought Hegel on the Historicity of Art Hegel's Conception of the End of Art The first essay is a survey of Hegel's philosophy in general, which provides the theoretical context of his aesthetic theory. The other essays concern two topics that link aesthetics (or, more accurately, the philosophy of art) and art history, a linkage that was internal to Hegel's own thought: art's "historicity" (that is, the idea that art is essentially historical) and "the end of art," that is, the argument that art has achieved its historical "end" in the sense of "full self-realization" or the complete historical embodiment of its concept. For related discussion, see Essentialism; Kant; and Marxism.]
Survey of Thought
Hegel (1770-1831), German Idealist philosopher. Not only have most of the major philosophical positions of the last 150 years—including Marxism, Soren Kierkegaard's existentialism, John Dewey's pragmatism, Bertrand Russell's logical atomism, Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics, and Derridean deconstruction—been developed in response to Hegel's thought (or in response to what was perceived to be "Hegelian" thought), but many of Hegel's own claims (for example, that human civilization develops historically, that philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought, and that the modern age is defined by the demand for freedom) have become a familiar part of the common stock of modern ideas. Hegel's thoughts on art and beauty are no exception in this regard. Many of the most important aesthetic theo-
rists of the twentieth century—including Benedetto Croce, György Lukäcs, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno—have been profoundly influenced by Hegel's aesthetics, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich has even gone so far as to call Hegel the "father" of art history.
Hegel was born in Stuttgart into the family of a civil servant in the employ of the Duke of Württemberg in southern Germany. From 1788 to 1793 he studied theology and philosophy at the theological seminary or Stift in Tübingen, where he became close friends (indeed, shared a room) with Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who would become one of the greatest of German poets, and with Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854), who would become the most important philosopher of nature of his generation. After working as a house tutor for three years in Bern, Switzerland, and for four years in Frankfurt am Main (where he was again in close contact with Hölderlin), Hegel became a Privatdozent or unsalaried lecturer at the University of Jena in 1801. In the same year, he published his first book, Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling, and in 1802 he founded the Critical Journal of Philosophy with Schelling, who had been called to a professorship of philosophy in Jena in 1798. In 1807, shortly before he left Jena for Bamberg to edit the Bamberger Zeitung, Hegel's illegitimate son, Ludwig Fischer, was born to the wife of his landlord, and in the same year his monumental Phenomenology of Spirit was published, a work that sets out his understanding of the development of human consciousness and that contains extended and justly famous discussions of Greek tragedy (especially Sophocles' Antigone) and the Greek "religion of art."
In 1808, Hegel took over as rector of the Aegydiengym-nasium in Nuremberg, where he stayed until 1816. The years in Nuremberg saw his marriage in 1811 to Marie von Tucher (b. 1791), the birth of his two sons, Karl (1813) and Immanuel (1814), and the publication of his Science of Logic (1812-1816). In 1816, Hegel was called to a full professorship at the University of Heidelberg, where he published the first edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817) and first gave lectures on aesthetics. In 1818, he accepted an offer of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he taught until he died in 1831 of cholera. During his time in Berlin he published the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), the second and third editions of the Encyclopedia (1827 and 1830), and several articles (including one on Karl W. F. Solger and one on Johann Georg Hamann) in the Yearbooks for Scientific Criticism. By the time he died, Hegel had become, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's view, "the most famous modern philosopher." He had been appointed rector of the University of Berlin in 1829, had been awarded the Red Eagle (Third Class) by King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1831, and had become well acquainted with many of the literary and philosophical luminaries of the time, including Goethe, August
362     HEGEL, G.W. E: Survey of Thought
Wilhelm von Schlegel, and Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
In the years after Hegel's death, criticism of his philosophy proliferated and intensified, and after the 1830s Hegelianism never again recovered its position as the leading philosophy in Prussia or Germany. The profound influence of Hegel's thought, however,—both directly, through his own texts and edited lectures, and indirectly, through the writings of such figures as Karl Marx and Kierkegaard—continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, there are signs—for example, in the emergence of neo-Hegelian social and political theory, in the growing interest in post-Kantian philosophy, and in Jacques Derrida's claim that his own thought occupies a position of "almost absolute proximity to Hegel"—that Hegel's thought is once more moving toward the center of philosophical concern.
Hegel wrote no book titled Lectures on Aesthetics. He did, however, hold lectures on art and beauty at the University of Heidelberg (in 1818) and four times at the University of Berlin (in the winter semester of 1820-1821, the summer semesters of 1823 and 1826, and the winter semester of 1828-1829). The text now known as lectures on Aesthetics (or Lectures on Fine Art) was compiled by Hegel's student, H. G. Hotho, from Hegel's manuscripts and from transcripts of the 1823, 1826, and 1828-1829 lectures made by several of Hegel's students, including Hotho himself, K. G. J. von Griesheim, M. Wolf, and D. Stieglitz. The first edition of this text appeared in 1835, the second in 1842.
Even though Hegel did not produce a completed text on aesthetics to compare with the Science of lx)gic, this does not mean that he relegated art and beauty to the periphery of his philosophical system. Indeed, Hegel's aesthetic theory lies at the heart of his system, and can only be properly understood from the perspective of that system (though it should be noted that the lectures on aesthetics are much more accessible than other texts or lectures of Hegel and actually serve well as an introduction to his system).
In his Science of Logic, Hegel sets out his understanding of the fundamental character of being. At the end of that text, it becomes clear that being is not to be thought of as simple existence, or blind necessity, but as self-determining, developing reason, or what Hegel calls "Idea." Such self-determining, developing reason is, for Hegel, the ultimate— "divine"—source of all significant change and progress in the world. Such absolute, divine reason is not to be understood, however, as transcending creation and governing it, as it were, from the outside; rather, it is to be thought of (in the manner of Spinozist substance) as constituting nature itself—specifically, nature developing into more and more complex forms of organized matter (including life).The culmination of this development, Hegel claims, is the emergence of human consciousness and freedom. Hegel thus understands human consciousness and freedom not just to be
an accidental product of blind natural forces, but to be the result of the process whereby reason-as-nature develops into free, conscious existence and so becomes spirit or Geist.
Consciousness itself is understood by Hegel to be developing throughout history toward full se//"-consciousness and .^'//"-understanding. True self-understanding is thus not something that can be acquired through individual self-scrutiny at any time in history, but is something that has to be acquired by humanity as a whole through a long process of historical development. Hegel thinks that there are three main forms in which human beings come to understand themselves and their essential nature, and that each of these forms of self-understanding undergoes historical development.
The first of these forms is philosophy in which, Hegel thinks, we come to form a clear conception of our own nature as freely self-determining, conscious beings and of the process whereby being itself, or absolute reason, leads to the emergence of such freely self-determining, conscious beings. The second of these forms is religion, in which that process is represented or pictured in faith and worship as (for example, in the case of Judaism) the process whereby God "creates" human beings in his own image, or (in the case of Christianity) the process whereby God becomes incarnate as Jesus Christ and comes to be Holy Spirit in the community of believers constituting the church. The third form of human self-understanding Hegel identifies is art, in which the nature of human freedom and the indebtedness of human beings to God (or absolute reason) is brought before our minds by means of sensuous, external material, such as stone, paint, or sound. In art, therefore, natural objects, sounds, and colors are transformed by the creative talent of human beings into the expression of human character and freedom and of the relation between humanity and God (or the gods).
A number of things follow from this that make Hegel's account of art distinctive. Most important, perhaps, it is clear that Hegel does not regard art as a purely human phenomenon. Human beings give expression to the way they understand themselves and their world by painting pictures, writing poems, or composing music, but in so doing they fulfill the rational drive within being itself toward self-consciousness. In human self-consciousness, including the self-consciousness that human beings achieve through art, being itself becomes self-conscious. There is thus for Hegel, as there is for the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, a metaphysical drive within the very fabric of the world to produce art (though Nietzsche will claim that through art the world seeks to draw an Apollonian veil over the terrors of existence and dissolve individuality in Dionysian self-forgetfulness, rather than come to self-consciousness). [See Nietzsche.]
It is also clear from what has been said that Hegel does not see it as the primary purpose of art to give pleasure, but
HEGEL, G.W. E: Survey of Thought 363
to enhance our understanding of ourselves and our world. Hegel certainly acknowledges that we take sensuous pleasure in the colors in a painting or in the sounds in a symphony, and he agrees with Kant that we take pleasure in the free play of the imagination and the understanding that the beautiful form of an object affords. [See Kant.] But, like Aristotle and unlike Kant, he locates the main value of art in its disclosure of truth. Hegel's aesthetic theory thus concentrates less on the effect that a work of art might have on a subject (on the emotions it might arouse or the delight it might cause) and more on the way in which art itself communicates and articulates truth. [See Truth.]
The truth that art has to communicate, according to Hegel, is that human beings are fundamentally free, self-determining beings, that this freedom is realized and furthered by certain institutions such as the family and the state, and that such freedom is ultimately the result of the work of absolute reason (or the Idea) in and as nature and history. In contrast to many other aesthetic theorists, therefore, Hegel believes that there is a distinctive content that art has to present in order to count as genuine art, and that artistic talent or genius does not just consist in the formal ability to represent or imitate accurately and skillfully whatever the artist happens to encounter in the world (such as, in Aristotle's famous example, corpses). Hegel recognizes that the ability to represent things accurately in stone, paint, or words is an important skill for an artist to have, but he does not think that by itself such skill makes one into a true artist. For that, one must have a profound appreciation for human freedom and a perceptive understanding of its historical and ontological (or "divine") ground. This is why Hegel thinks that the greatest works of art, such as Aeschy-lus's Oresteia or Sophocles' Antigone, portray the conflict between noble, heroic individuals who freely promote the values of the state or the family, and the interaction between such individuals and the gods who stand behind those institutions.
Of course, not all genuine works of art depict the divine, either in the form of the Greek gods or of the Christian God incarnated in Jesus Christ. Hegel also sees it as the role of art to present human freedom by itself in all of its manifold forms, and he finds some of the most satisfying examples of such art in the supremely secular works of seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen, and in Bartolome Esteban Murillo's paintings of beggar boys (in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich), which, he says, give expression to an exuberant feeling of inner freedom, well-being, and delight in life even in the midst of poverty. Nevertheless, much of what Hegel regards as genuine art (rather than mere decoration or formal artistry) does involve depictions or descriptions of the divine, and this clearly indicates the close proximity in Hegel's mind between art and religion.
Whether the subject matter of art is divine freedom (or love) or secular human freedom, art is distinguished from philosophy and religion by the fact that it presents such freedom in the form of sensuous, material externality—for example, in wood, stone, paint, or sound—rather than in abstract concepts or in inner faith and feeling. The distinctive role of art is thus not to use sensuous material to point to or "symbolize" in an allegorical fashion an idea that is articulable in abstraction from its external, sensuous expression, but to express its content in the line of the stone or the arrangement of colors itself and so in the very physical forms that such colors and sculpted stone present. The distinctive character of art as art thus yields a criterion for judging what is to count as the best art: art achieves its perfection when the content expressed is indeed harmoniously fused with the material (and mode) of expression. This perfect harmony of human or divine freedom with the sensuous material of expression is what Hegel understands by beauty. Beauty is thus, as Hegel puts it, the "sensuous shining of the idea"(das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee). [See Beauty.]
Beauty does not, however, just lie in the formal harmony of a "spiritual" content and the external, sensuous material of expression, but consists in the sensuous expression of a content that is in itself in harmony with sensuous, material externality, in particular with the physical body. This is because only a form of freedom and spirit that is in itself in harmony with the realm of the sensuous can be given direct sensuous expression. For this reason, Hegel thinks that the forms of freedom that are most suited to aesthetic, beautiful expression are those found in classical Greece (in which, according to Hegel, freedom is explicitly conceived as the perfect harmony of the spirit and the body) and in Christianity (in which, according to Hegel, the inward freedom of Christian love is understood to be incarnated in, and to transform from within, the physical body). By contrast, the spiritual freedom that Hegel associates with Islam and that he takes to abstract from all bodily incarnation is judged by him to be incapable of genuinely beautiful expression.
Hegel by no means denies the importance of dissonance, negation, and pain in art; however, he thinks that the dominant tone of a work of art should always be that of harmony and reconciliation. Where there is pain, therefore, there should always be "smiling through tears." This "classical" preference for harmony and beauty in art, which puts Hegel at odds with those twentieth-century aestheticians who wish to "emancipate" art from beauty and harmony, is clearly influenced by the classicism of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). But it also derives directly from Winckel-mann's systematic conception of art as the external, sensuous expression of human freedom, and so as the harmonious fusion of sensuous, material form and of a "spiritual" content that is itself in harmony with sensuousness. (Besides Winckelmann, other important influences on Hegel's
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aesthetic theory are Johann Gottfried von Herder, Gotthold Ephraim, Lessing, Kant, and Friedrich von Schiller.)
Hegel regards art as a mode of human self-understanding, and he believes that, like the human self-understanding expressed in philosophy and religion, art undergoes development in history. The earliest art, Hegel argues, gives expression to a spirituality that is still seeking to free itself from nature and sensuous form and that is thus not yet reconciled with natural sensuous externality. Consequently, such art either has to distort natural forms in order to intimate through such forms the presence of nonnatural powers (as, for example, in Hindu depictions of the god Siva with multiple arms), or it has to employ images that seem to point to spiritual meanings that remain hidden and mysterious (as Hegel believes is the case in Egyptian art). In either case, such art does not directly express its spiritual content in its sensuous material and form, but rather intimates or points to its content through its sensuous material and form, and so is understood as symbolic art.
The art of the Greek period gives expression to a spirituality that is itself in perfect harmony with the physical and the sensuous, and so achieves what Hegel regards as the height of classical beauty, above all in fifth- and fourth-century sculpture and in fifth-century tragic drama (in which Hegel believes the great tragic characters have a "sculptural" quality). Because Greek spirituality is so perfectly suited to aesthetic expression, there is, according to Hegel, the closest connection between religion and art among the Greeks; indeed, it is in their art that Hegel thinks the Greeks come to know and understand their gods (and themselves) most fully.
The spirituality of the Christian era is marked, according to Hegel, by a profound inwardness that finds its fullest expression in religious feeling and love and, ultimately, in philosophy. Such a spirituality withdraws out of the realm of the natural and the sensuous into the realm of inward faith and devotion, and so, unlike the spirituality of the Greeks, does not find its most perfect expression in the sensuous externality of art. Yet, Christian inwardness and love are also understood to be incarnate inwardness and love and, to that extent, such inwardness can be represented sensuously in art, as, for example, in Raphael's many paintings of the Madonna and child. (The aesthetic expression of incarnate inwardness finds its secular counterpart, for Hegel, in portrait painting, particularly after the Reformation.)
In the Christian era, art becomes the sensuous expression of inner freedom and love—just as the face gives concrete, visual expression to the character and spirit "behind" it— and is called romantic art. Yet, art also ceases to be the highest expression of truth, as Hegel understood it to be for the Greeks. This does not mean that Hegel thinks that art dies during the Christian era. "One can certainly hope," he says, "that art will always rise higher and perfect itself"; it is just
that, however fine we judge artistic representations of Mary and Jesus to be, "we bow our knee no longer."
Hegel's lectures on aesthetics end with his account of the five major arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and linguistic art or poetry. Hegel understands architecture to be fundamentally a symbolic art, but he claims that it reaches perfection in Greek architecture and he was one of the first to acknowledge the distinctive merits of Gothic architecture. Sculpture, for Hegel, is the art most suited to the sensuous, material expression of freedom and so to classical beauty, whereas painting and music are clearly the most inward, romantic arts. Hegel regards poetry (including epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry) as the universal art that flourishes in various periods of history.
Hegel's is the last grand systematic theory of art and, in a culture that has grown suspicious of philosophical system building, it has found many detractors in the years since his death, even among those who have been most strongly influenced by it. Hegel's theory remains significant today, however, for five main reasons. First, Hegel shows that art provides a distinctive form of aesthetic freedom and experience that is not simply subservient to the pursuit of political and social goals (yet that can and does play an important role in the religious life of many cultures). Second, Hegel explores the expressive possibilities of different arts and forces us to consider whether particular arts may not be better suited to the expression of certain kinds of subject matter than others. Third, Hegel emphasizes the importance of a historical approach to art and is one of the first aesthetic theorists to take a serious interest in non-Western art. Fourth, unlike Kant (and some noted twentieth-century aesthetic theorists), Hegel always tries to breathe life into his ideas about art and beauty by showing how they are exemplified in individual artworks with which he is familiar (works by artists as varied as Sophocles, Aristophanes, Raphael, Michelangelo, John Milton, Rembrandt van Rijn, Goethe, Amadeus Mozart, and Gioacchino Rossini, though not, strangely, his contemporary, Ludwig van Beethoven). Hegel thus demonstrates that it is possible— indeed, essential—to integrate one's concrete experience of actual works of art into any systematic aesthetics. Fifth, not only is Hegel eclectic, but his theory of art offers, together with important philosophical insights, interpretations of individual artworks and artistic styles that have become some of the most famous and influential in history. Most notable, perhaps, are his interpretations of Greek tragedy, Gothic architecture, Dutch painting, and German Romantic drama and prose. Even if it were only because of his interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone (as presenting the clash between the ethical realms of the family and the state), Hegel's lectures on aesthetics would always remain essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the nature of art and beauty.
[See also Irony; and Romanticism, article on Philosophy and Literature.]
HEGEL, G.W. F.: Hegel on the Historicity of Art 365
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Hegel
Aesthetics: lectures on Vine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford, 1975. English translation of Hotho's text of Hegel's lectures.
Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. In Werke in zwanzig Bänden, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vols. 13-15. Frankfurt am Main, 1970. A modern edition of Hotho's text of Hegel's lectures.
Vorlesung über die Ästhetik: Berlin 1820-1821: Eine Nachschrift, vol. I, Textband. Edited by Helmut Schneider. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1995. Transcript of Hegel's lectures of 1820-1821 made by Wilhelm von Ascheberg, but not used by Hotho.
Other Sources
Bungay, Stephen. Beauty and Truth:A Study oj Hegel's Aesthetics. Oxford and New York, 1984.
Gollenberg, Bernadette. "Hegels Konzeption des Kolorits in den Berliner Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst." In Phänomen versus System: /.um Verhältnis von philosophischer Systematik und Kun-slurleil in Hegels Berliner Vorlesungen über Ästhetik oder Philosophie der Kunst, edited by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, pp. 91-164. Bonn, 1992.
Desmond,William. Art and the Absolute:A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics. Albany, N.Y., 1986.
Donougho, Martin. "Remarks on 'Humanus heisst der Heilige'." Hegel-Studien 17 (1982): 214-225.
Donougho, Martin. "The Woman in White: On the Reception of Hegel's Antigone." 'The Owl of Minerva (Biannual Journal of the Hegel Society of America) 21.1 (fall 1989): 65-89.
Etter, Brian. "The Sounds of the Ideal: Hegel's Aesthetic of Music." The Owl of Minerva (Biannual Journal of the Hegel Society of America) 26.1 (fall 1994): 47-58.
Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Ästhetik. Bonn, 1984.
Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, and Otto Pöggeler, eds. Welt und Wirkung von Hegels Ästhetik. Bonn, 1986.
Henrich, Dieter. "The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel's Aesthetics." In Hegel, edited by Michael Inwood, pp. 199-207. Oxford and New York, 1985.
Houlgate, Stephen. Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics. Cambridge and New York, 1986. See chap. 8, "Hegel and Nietzsche on Tragedy."
Houlgate, Stephen. Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy. London and New York, 1991. See chap. 4, "Art and Human Wholeness."
Kaminsky, Jack. Hegel on Art: An Interpretation of Hegel's Aesthetics. Albany, N.Y., 1962.
Pöggeler, Otto, ed. Hegel in Berlin:Preussische Kulturpolitik und idealistische Ästhetik: /.um i;o. 'Todestag des Philosophen. Berlin, 1981.
Pöggeler, Otto, and Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, eds. Kunsterfahrung und Kulturpolitik im Berlin Hegels. Bonn, 1983.
Winlield, Richard Dien. Stylistics: Rethinking the Ariforms after Hegel. Albany, N.Y., 1996.
Stephen Houlgate
Hegel on the Historicity of Art
That a particular art should come to be thought of as even having a history—a past, and perhaps a novel future—is itself a historical achievement, J. G. Droysen remarks in his Historik. Still more radical was the launching of art as such
into the flux of history. That step was taken by the Romantic generation (Johann Gottfried von Herder, Friedrich von Schiller, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis), which was Hegel's own, and which discovered— or better, invented-—not just the classical tradition but also the normative traditions before and after. The preclassical Hegel borrowed from his friend Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1856) the name "symbolic," while following then current usage in calling the third worldview "romantic." This nomenclature dates from Hegel's Berlin lectures; in the 1828-1829 series, it appears in the second general division, between universal Ideal and singular arts. Yet, as Otto Poggeler and others have shown, the triadic articulation goes back to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, where it is framed as stages of religious consciousness and cultic activity. In the Aesthetics, this larger segmentation overlays the historical development discerned within each art (all save music, for some reason). Hegel suggests that the expressive capacity of each medium correlates with a particular world-view: architecture would be symbolic in its typical form and content, sculpture (and epic) would be classical, music (and lyric) romantic. Then lastly, art forms, individual arts, as well as particular artworks, are all understood by Hegel as signifying—if no more than obliquely—a truth about the culture in which they are embedded. Indeed, art is taken as offering privileged access to the meaning of a culture or society, a line of thought that may be traced in Karl Marx as well as in much subsequent history writing.
So pervasive has Hegel's influence been that it is difficult to discern how far the historicizing of art was itself a historical process. When the art historian E. H. Gombrich goes "in search of cultural history," it is in response to both orthodoxy and what is seen as the "crumbling" of its Hegelian foundations (Gombrich, 1969, p. 6). The revolt against Hegel as "the father of art history" (Gombrich, 1977) may offer no positive alternative, but it is at least clear about the father's ideological sins. These include "aesthetic transcendentalism," even if secularized as art worship; "historical collectivism," or making the work stand for the H>/£;"historical determinism" and its twin, "metaphysical optimism," that is, construing history Whiggishly as inevitable progress; and "dialectic relativism," or taking art to express a deep spiritual value. It is easy to trace them in the outline just given: art expresses ideas, progresses necessarily in a quasi-natural evolution, and is measured holistically against competing world-views. Yet, Gombrich lodges his complaint specifically against the movement called "historism" (Historik), which came to rule historiography; and in fact it proves difficult to sort out historically the roles played by Romantic aesthetics and by Hegelian philosophy. [See Gombrich.] Let us nevertheless try to get some perspective on events.
Around 1800, "the time was ripe" for art to become his-toricized, on at least two counts. First, various institutional
366     HEGEL, G.W. E: Hegel on the Historicity of Art
formations such as the museum, the concert hall, indeed, "literature" proper (now taken as something more than "literacy"), became part of the social fabric, ingredients in the so-called public sphere of civil society. Hegel's lectures respond to the thriving "art world" in Berlin. But this was not merely aesthetic appreciation or a nascent "high culture": what was on display in the art world was the artistic past. For example, a lecture (dated by the editor H. G. Hotho as 17 February 1829) takes note of Karl Friedrich Schinkeľs new museum built just across from Hegel's own house, saluting its galleries for having made visible the historical evolution of painting. Hegel was present too at the first modern performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion, invited by its conductor Felix Mendelssohn (an enthusiast of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics). Of course, the concert did not simply aim at putting the artwork back into history: it was an occasion at once religious, nationalistic, and celebrating a repeatable "classic." Yet the general point remains: in details and overall, this newly historicist art world informs Hegel's approach to his subject.
A second fundamental shift making possible the histori-cizing of art is more conceptual: baldly put, it is art itself. Only now might Art as such present itself as a unified practice under a systematic description, whereas previously "art" would have been used distributively, or as one of the "fine arts." Both as conceptual theory and as institutional practice, therefore, this singular Art could be taken to epitomize the creative potential of human imagination and culture. Art is henceforth systematically analyzable in a threefold way: within a new metaphysic of form—or rather of forming—as formalist, and as self-reflexive in character. Traits such as originality, creativity, or expressivity are simply beyond the reach of classical form or poiěsis (i.e., production according to given rules, the deliberate informing of given matter, via determinable means to given ends). In Romantic aesthetics, artistic activity becomes formah'si as well as formative: it imitates or articulates no essential content (perhaps the first to make explicit the radical autonomy of the artwork being Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's friend Karl P. Moritz). At its extreme, formalist autonomy verges on self-reflexivity. It falls within the broad shift during the late eighteenth century from assigned values and hierarchical structures to what Niklas Luhmann has called the "functional" operations of self-beholden systems. (History itself is one such system, alongside society, state, literature, and art generally.) Given the threefold semantic shift resulting from Romantic aesthetics, one may ask how it bears on Hegel's conceptualizing of art. But before that, one should ask how the Romantic transcendentalizing of art—Art as supreme value, once other norms have become relative—can be squared with its historicity; for an autonomous creativity seems on the face of it to operate outside of time altogether. How does Hegel manage to historicize a post-Romantic conception of Art?
Some Romantics tended to romanticize or monumentalize past ages, consecrating them as self-creating organic-wholes: Herder, for example, but equally the youthful Hegel in his Grecomanic phase. A subtler transformation occurs when the historian frames his own belatedness as opening up a truth that is no longer ours. Thus, Johann Joachim Winckel-mann advocated the superior value of imitating the Greeks where they had imitated nature.This self-reflective constitution of the past opens up three conceivable paths. One may (with Schiller or Friedrich Schlegel) trace out a narrative of declension, when irony becomes the end point, ambivalently inside and outside the historical stages it observes. Or one can propose that the historicist perspective is itself aesthetic, not just because it offers, as it were, imaginative picture galleries of the past, but also in operating under the aegis of artistic unification—the speculative stance of Friedrich Wil-helm von Schelling's "identity philosophy" around 1800, which saw the artwork as having fused together unconscious nature and cultural reflection. Hegel at first endorsed this position, though in his own manner: he brought out the communal basis of the work of art as well as its ethical and religious resonance (the Natural Imw essay of 1802, the 1803 ethical system). By the time of the Phenomenology, however, Hegel had found still another way, one that (with modifications) he kept to for the rest of his life. It attempts to explicate history—including the history of art—philosophically and to situate philosophy historically, without, however, reducing one to the other (Gethmann-Siefert, 1984, p. 188).This attempt acknowledges the claims of historical ironism, on the one hand (the view that the historian is himself part of the process viewed), and, on the other, the demands of speculative system, discerning reason at work in cultural phenomena. From this complex position there follows a series of paradoxes. Paradox dissolves the conventional picture of Hegel's Aesthetics as beholden to a classical Ideal, or as forcibly "sublating" artistic intuition (Anschauung) into the eternal verities of an overriding Reason or some insistently dialectical machine, and so on.
First paradox: essential pastness. By that is not meant the notorious verdict of the end of art (talk about which seems never ending). Art is necessarily past, because subsisting only in retrospect. Hegel suggests (in a passage from the Phenomenology emblematic for the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer or Paul Ricoeur) that the works of the muses
are now what they are for us—beautiful fruit picked from the tree. A friendly fate presents them to us, as a maiden might offer that fruit. It does not give the actual life of their existence—the tree that bore them .... fate does not give us their world along with the works of that art . . . but only the veiled recollection [Erinnerung] of this actuality. (i977, P- 455)
Considered as cultic practice within the life-world, art is "always already" past; to paraphrase, it comes about only at the
HEGEL, G. W. F.: Hegel on the Historicity of Art 367
falling of dusk, when a shape of life has grown old. Moreover, it is the artist who shapes and commemorates that world of substance, in bestowing the Judas kiss of his subjectivity (ibid., p. 426).The products of this complex transaction then become subsumed as "great art"—are dusted off and preserved philologically, celebrated ideologically, or interpreted philosophically. In all this, "our act," as Hegel puts it, remains purely external. Yet, in a further twist, fate prompts the reintegration of the disjecta membra of culture: not via the reviving touch of aesthetic "de-differentiation" or conscious "application" to our own situation, as Gadamer proposes, but through their cultural internalizing or recollection (Erin-nerung) in the unifying pantheon of the museum, the university, and so on.
Indeed, the retrospective birth and rebirth of artworks answers Barnett Newman's citizen's complaint that a science of aesthetics affects the artist about as much as ornithology is "for the birds" (Newman, 1990, p. 247). Hegel admits the difficulty philosophy faces in saying anything about this most empirical field of inquiry, and admits that its conceptual talk cannot be justified, only taken up "lem-matically, so to say" {Aesthetics, vol. 1, pp. 24, 42), from an encyclopedic frame of reference. It is plausible to understand such resort as analogous to the "thinking approach" (die denkende Relrachtung) with which the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History characterize "philosophical history," accommodating specialist studies (with their mix of contingent fact and search for structure), while repudiating the Romantic projections of comparative historiography. But here one glimpses another resort, predicated on the assumption that art is itself a cultural construct or interpretation. Art is already a reflection on the past, including its own; art reflexively defines itself, by historical self-differentiation. One cannot deny that the process is drastic; it would be of little comfort to the birds that they are mounted under glass, in a museum culture. But works of culture are different: they speak to us, according to Hegel, in our own terms.
Second paradox: the Ideal. Hegel presents beauty as a symbiosis of human and divine, finite and infinite, a Gestaltung of sacred powers operative in the saeculum of history. Human shape mirrors divine, and art (more especially sculpture) reveals the transfiguration. Yet the secular is not the divine. As Hegel analyzes the "Ideal"—which the Aesthetics understands as the essential content of artistic presentation—the exemplum of its peculiar theomorphism is the category of "action" (Handlung), whether as performed deed or as narrated plot. While action is a simultaneous structure, it occurs sequentially; it embodies norms (for the deed should carry its ethical meaning on its face) while undercutting them (for it enacts the ambiguity by which opposing laws constitute the Law). In his Theory of the Novel (1971), Gyorgi Lukacs captures the defining irony whereby epic unity has no outside
and discerns no horizon, whereas drama operates as self-delimiting, and hence confers meaning. Put another way, Hegel's Ideal comprises a union of union with disunion, of beauty with the sublime, as Schiller conceived of them: both the "shining forth" (Scheinen) of truth, and what must go unsaid, namely, an ethical value beyond sensuous shape (Schein). (That is why Hegel's sublime appears in the Aesthetics shorn of its Kantian, transcendental aura, as a mere figure of speech filed away under the rubric "Conscious Symbolics.") A dialectical tension pervades all aspects of an Ideal commonly (but wrongly) taken to be Hegel's own ideal. One need only think of Hegel's theorizing of Greek tragedy as at once a drama of reconciliation of opposite social norms, and a false—indeed, misrepresented—unity: tragic semantics and pragmatics just do not match. Already in 1806, in the Gesammelte Werke, Hegel could write of beauty as "the veil that hides the truth rather than its presentation [Darstel-lung]" (1976, p. 279).
Hegel's Ideal owes much to Winckelmann, not merely its divine status, but more subtly too its four-step development from rigid via "high" to "beautiful" styles, then degeneration into pleasing imitation. But where Winckelmann projected a natural, organic progression, Hegel's is also one of progressive reflexivity, as if each stage considers—at least to later eyes and ears—the conceptual viability of the previous. [See Winckelmann.]
Third paradox: (neo)classicism. Hegel, so often typed as a proponent of the ancient Greeks, in fact thinks little of their cold pastoral. More beautiful one cannot become—but nostalgia has no place in philosophy, he claims. Instead, Hegel's Berlin lectures display not merely his wide reading, but also a growing interest in both "symbolic" and "romantic" cultural forms. It is as if the classical Ideal exists only as a vanishing point in the historian's view from nowhere: something that can only be surmised between a before and an after. It might be thought that the classical still rules from its grave, as when Gadamer appeals to its authority, or formalism posits its parodic repetition. But Hegel thinks differently. As a supreme fiction, the classical is flattered with an ironic perspective: its economimesis (Jacques Derrida's term, whereby art imitates nature, which imitates art, etc.) is refigured as Romantic creativity. In philosophical retrospect, "we" can see that mimetic poiesis is in fact creativity in disguise. Subjectivity is staged as in fact staging the entire show; and yet—Hegel's dialectical corrective—it is not Schlegelian irony that prevails. Whether as so-called "Romantic" irony or as the "beautiful soul," subjectivism appears on the stage of history—which leads to the most challenging paradox of all.
Fourth paradox: ideality. In Berlin, Hegel battled on two fronts. He distanced himself from Karl W. F. Solger, his predecessor at the University of Berlin, and equally from his academic rival, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Both offered
368     HEGEL, G.W. F.: Hegel's Conception of the End of Art
courses on aesthetics, but (in different ways) assumed a Romantic worldview that Hegel was concerned to keep in its historical place. Yet, Hegel had also to avoid the opposite danger, the empiricism exemplified by another Berlin contemporary, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (i785-1843), often called the first scientific art historian. Rumohr polemicized against all "spiritualizing" tendencies, in particular the Neo-platonic allegorizing that he detected in Winckelmann and his school. For Rumohr, style was a purely formal colligation of empirical traits. Hegel in turn argued against this professed materialism, and its reduction of meaning to sensuous form. Scholars have barely begun to chart the shifts and accommodations made by the widely read Hegel between the several lecture series at Berlin, obscured as they may be in Hotho's editing. Yet, Hegel is constant in championing "the Idea" and its normative power. This constitutes the supreme paradox of Hegel's aesthetic idealism: he his-toricizes and so ironizes the Ideal, yet, in a further ironic shift, he defends the ideality of art, at one remove, so to speak. As one of the shapes of absolute spirit, Art escapes the finite measures of state and history (Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences 1817, Section 552). Nevertheless, state and society legitimate it as historical display—in the museum or its cultural equivalents.
Turning from the speculative overview of the past to current prospects—from museum curator to artist-critic—one might well ask what normative standards remain once full self-reflexivity is achieved and there is no longer any occulted content to be divined and presented. Dieter Henrich (1979) has argued that Hegel's diagnosis of art's loss of religious content prefigures humanist tendencies in modernism. Yet, if it is to avoid parody or else some kind of conceptual art, what shape does its productive activity assume? Others advocate muting Hegel's systemics in favor either of the promise of a "new mythology" found in Hegel's earlier thinking (Gethmann-Siefert), or of Utopian protest against a prevailing "prose of life" (Theodor W. Adorno). Another possibility would see art as a communal epigram (see the remarks on this transitional figure in Aesthetics, pp. 608-609): it puts a spiritual mark on the shared objectivity of the past. But it is an open question whether and how the post-Hegelian artist could attain a speculative tour d'horizon of world art analogous to the Hegelian philosopher's perspective on past philosophy.
In general, much remains to be done in thinking through, on Hegelian terms, the status of art qua institution, that is, as part of society or the public sphere while nevertheless professing autonomy. Art and the arts reflect this divided heritage still: both in history and yet not wholly of it. Like Schinkel's museum, Art for Hegel serves the state and answers social interests, while supposedly escaping into an absolute empyrean.
[See also Historicism, article on Historicism and Philosophy.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Hegel
Aesthetics: lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford, 1975.
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Hamburg, 1976.
Natural Law. Translated byT. M. Knox. Philadelphia, 1975.
Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford, 1977.
Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. In Werke in zwanzig Bänden, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vols. 13-15. Frankfurt am Main, 1970.
Other Sources
Gombrich, E. H. In Search of Cultural History. Oxford, 1969.
Gombrich, E. H. "The Father of Art History" (1977). In Tributes: Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition, pp. 51-69. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984.
Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Ästhetik. Bonn, 1984.
Henrich, Dieter. "Art and Philosophy of Art Today: Reflections with Reference to Hegel." In New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Fssays, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, Translated by David Henry Wilson et al., pp. 107-133. Princeton, N.J., 1979.
Lukäcs, Gyorgy. 'The Theory of the Novel:A Hislorico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
Newman, Barnctt. Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by John P. O'Neill. New York, 1990.
Szondi, Peter. Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie, vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main, 1974.
Martin Donougho
Hegel's Conception of the End of Art
Perhaps no aspect of Hegel's aesthetic theory is as well known, yet so frequently misunderstood, as his pronouncement that art has reached its end (Hegel, 1972, vol. 13, pp. 25, 142).Two potential misconceptions concerning this claim can be put aside straightaway. First, Hegel was not the first to hold the view that art had reached its limit. Im-manuel Kant also held that art had progressed as far as it was capable (Akademieausgabe vol. 5, p. 309), but Kant's view lacks the inherent support that Hegel's receives from his teleological metaphysics and thus seems more an opinion than a philosophical position. Second, though often assumed to be a doctrine to which Hegel adhered throughout his career, the idea that art has realized its essential purpose is actually of relatively late vintage. The conceptual framework for the assertion that art has come to an end, in the sense that Hegel means, is not firmly in place until he develops his account of Absolute Spirit, which does not occur until the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences of 1817 and the Lectures on Aesthetics delivered in the 1820s.
Hegel locates the end of art in the transition from the "classical" to "romantic" epochs of art. This claim that art has reached its end flows directly from his belief that classical art, at its pinnacle with Attic sculpture, is the histori-
HEGEL, G.W. E: Hegel's Conception of the End of Art 369
cal period in which art is the most adequate expression of the self-consciousness of Geist. Because Hegel defines art as the purely sensuous appearance of Geist to itself, his claim is that the Greeks most fully realized the essential purpose of art—that is, its essence as a mode of self-consciousness. The content of the claim must be considered in the light of Hegel's general interpretation of the differences between the place of art in Athenian and Christian cultures. In some ways, Hegel's understanding of the Greeks is a function of his time—the cult of things Greek was prominent in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germanophone culture and, as such, was an idealized portrayal of Greek civil and cultural institutions. But, unlike some of his contemporaries (whose views he shared in his youthful Jena period), Hegel is not uncritically nostalgic about the ancients. In fact, he held modern, Christian (that is, German Protestant) culture to be superior to ancient life. The inferiority of Greek culture consists in its alleged comparative lack of reflective self-awareness. Specifically, Hegel felt that the Greeks lacked the highly developed, subjective sense of self indicative of the modern Christian era (which he claims began with Roman Stoicism). But this deficit is also the source of Greek art's aesthetic superiority. Unlike the modern iworld, engaged in ever-deepening representational and conceptual awareness of the self, Greek self-consciousness is organized aesthetically. This Greek aesthetic mode of life involves not only what would be retrospectively identified as the production and appreciation of art objects, but also religious customs and political institutions. In this connection, it is often remarked that the Greek to kalon, usually translated simply as "beauty," has an expanded meaning for the Greeks. For the Greek, beauty is a term that includes within its meaning other important sorts of excellences: physical, moral, and theoretical, as well as artistic (the Latin pulchrum also has something of this plasticity). Simply put, Hegel thinks that aesthetic awareness afforded the most exhaustive self-expression possible for the Greeks, given their particular level of self-consciousness.
Not so in the Romantic epoch: here art is no longer the most advanced vehicle for Geist's self-consciousness. Religion and philosophy are in turn ascendant—which is to say that our self-conception has progressed to the point where we recognize ourselves as possessed of a quality of subjectivity that is representationally and, finally, conceptually comprehensible. The Romantic art aesthetically reflects this greater level of self-awareness. But the heightened abstract and subjective nature of Romantic self-understanding is only imperfectly modeled sensuously. Thus, Romantic art demonstrates its own limitations in its attempts to represent the definitive features of modern self-consciousness. The three arts that Hegel takes to achieve their perfection in the Romantic stage of art—painting, music, and poetry—all attempt to embody this increased subjectivity. Hegel inter-
prets these arts as progressive stages in the attempt to present what is known to be abstract conceptual matter by reducing the "physicality" of the artistic medium: from three-dimensionality characteristic of sculpture to the two-dimensionality of painting, the entire lack of spatial dimension in music, and the attempt to marry the two in poetry. Poetry, and particularly German poetry and novel writing of Hegel's time, is deemed to be the limit of the Romantic artistic expression of Geist. Because Hegel believes this poetry to be the final form of the sensuous expression of Geist's self-consciousness, it would not be incorrect to say that art has a second "end" at the conclusion of the Romantic era (1972, vol. 14, pp. 231-242).
Thus, art of the Romantic age is inferior to that of the classical epoch, when considered as the state-of-the-art expression of Geist's self-consciousness. It is superior to earlier art in terms of the level of self-awareness it attempts to express, however. Romantic art is, from the viewpoint of religion and philosophy, superior to classical art. Hegel speaks of postclassical art as art "set free" from its aim, implying that postclassical art is free in a way that classical art is not. It is reasonably easy to state in what this freedom consists— Romantic art, and particularly its most developed poetic form, no longer shoulders the burden of being the primary mode of our self-consciousness and, therefore, need not function as an organizing mode of self-consciousness. Art of the Romantic era is open to mere reflection and the aesthetic theories characteristic of modernity—particularly those such as Kant's that attempt to identify an autonomy for aesthetic reflection divorced from other modes of assessing an object's value or nature—are results of this evolution. For Hegel, then, there is a definitive character, not only of art, but also of its criticism, that is only possible at the end stage of art.
Questions concerning the nature of the "art world" at the end stage can be divided into two groups: those having to do with the experience of past art and those concerning the production and assessment of current (and future) art. Let us first address the question of the relation of end-state consciousness to the experience of artworks of prior stages of consciousness. Hegel defines beauty as the sensuous appearance of truth, marking beauty as the canonical quality of art in terms of which aesthetic valuation proceeds. Any understanding of what is beautiful about a work of art is determined by the critical conception available at any stage of self-consciousness. This holds true for the critic positioned at the end state as well. We cannot judge classical art in the same way as a fifth-century Athenian. True, we can philosophically reconstruct that classical culture experienced art in the way that it did, but we cannot aesthetically recoup how that art was experienced in the culture. Our critical practice is committed to a set of attitudes about art that foil any attempt to inhabit the art world of another era aesthetically. To do so would be to inhabit an earlier
370     HEGEL, G.W. E: Hegel's Conception of the End of Art
(and inferior) self-conception of Geist, so to speak "from the inside out." That cannot be accomplished for the simple reason that having such a (for us, limited) self-conception would require us to ignore the advances in our self-realization and this ignorance itself could not be part of the prior self-conception that we were attempting to inhabit.
Let us now turn to the question of what Hegel considers the final form of art to be. Hegel thinks that the art of his present is essentially romantic. It is often assumed on Hegel's behalf that, because we have reached an end state of self-consciousness, there will be no further development of art. Hegel need not think this, nor does he. In fact, he states that there can always be hope for progress in art (ibid., vol. 13, p. 142). Of course, he does not mean by this that there will be essential progress in art, but he does seem to allow that further refinements in the artistic expression of truth are possible. The fact that we have achieved perfect conceptual self-knowledge does not entail that there be advances in expressing this fact sensuously. Of course, such expressions will always be inferior to religious and philosophical thought, but the point is that Hegel's account permits him to say that there is in principle some further novelty, perhaps even perfectibility, in art. One does get the overall impression, however, that such novelty or perfectibility will be had in terms of the type of art that Hegel considers the aesthetic state of the art and the philosophical end state. For the sake of convenience, and in keeping with Hegel's own division of art, one can term this "late-Romantic." Such art will be, broadly speaking, "poetic" and have as its defining feature what Hegel calls "objective humor."
Although Hegel is far from specific about what objective humor consists in, one can glean some understanding of the meaning of the term by considering what he has to say about what he takes to be objective humor's main competitors for aesthetic allegiance in late-Romanticism: "subjective humor" and irony. Hegel associates subjective humor almost exclusively with the writings of Jean Paul Richter (ibid., vol. 14, pp. 229-231), although he also mentions Jo-hann Georg Hamann as a practitioner (ibid., vol. II, p. 336). The essence of humor for Hegel, and what makes it the essential crowning form of art of the Romantic type, is that it consists in the expression of the personality of the artist in its particularity. This introduces an essential subjective contingency into the work in that all that initially seems "objective" to the reader (and here Hegel seems to mean both the accepted formal narrative forms of fiction and the content of the story) is later revealed as entirely contingent and empty of content. It is this annihilation (Vernichtung) of that which can be taken objectively and seriously that is the sole end of subjective humor. It is, as Jean Paul himself insisted, entirely negative in this sense. Such humor is completely one-sided and invariably introduces into the artwork
a fundamental absurdity. All elements of the work are put at the disposal of the author's wit, which attacks even the artifice and accepted narrative conventions of the work. In Jean Paul at least, the attempt to flaunt conventions of art making introduces a Baroque or even grotesque element into the structure of the work, obscuring its aesthetic appeal.
Irony also relies on subjectivity to achieve its effect. Although Hegel notes that Solger and Ludwig Tieck are often cited as ironists, he is careful to qualify the ways in which they are so considered (ibid., vol. 11, pp. 233-234; vol. 13, p. 99), focusing his critique of ironism at Friedrich Schlegel. This critique is quite complex; a thumbnail sketch of it will suffice here. Hegel associates irony very closely with Fichteanism—in fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that irony is for Hegel "aestheticized" Fichte. Hegel objects to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's reliance on the Ich as the foundation of his account of the relation of subjects and objects of experience as entirely subjective and formal. All content is defined as that which stands in opposition to the subject, yet the subject can be nothing more than that which is opposed by an object. Considered as a living individual, such a subject's activity is limited to constructing its identity in terms of what is "other" to it. Formal and empty itself, such a subject treats the world merely as a receptacle for its own striving (ibid., vol. 13, p. 94). When that subject is an artist, this means living through one's art products by imprinting one's individual personality on those works. Hegel states that such a Fichtean artist lives kiinsterlich, exploiting the double sense of the adjective: such an artist lives "as an artist," but also "artificially."The artificiality resides in the fact that, because of the empty character of the identity of the Ich, the artwork can be nothing more than a shell. The essence of irony for Hegel is that the work at once poses as a substantial object for contemplation and undercuts itself at all turns by revealing its lack of substance; that is, an ironic work, in Friedrich Schlegel's sense, is one that simultaneously asserts and takes back its content. Such work is not comical, in the true sense. Humor only negates the merely accidental, Hegel states, and therefore does not question seriousness as such (at least it does not necessarily amount to a claim that nothing can be held rightly to be worthy of seriousness). Irony, however, is universal negation and mocks all claims. Hegel puts the point slightly differently when he says that irony involves the attitude of divine ingenuity (göttliche Genialität) (ibid., vol. 13, p. 95). The phrase is meant to invoke two rival, perhaps antithetical, traditional ways of explaining of creative power that are married in romantic irony. One way is the conception of creativity current in the French neoclassicism of Nicolas Boileau and Charles de Batteaux where the artist's talent to produce praiseworthy works of art relies on génie—ingenuity in manipulating stock rhetorical and poetic devices with the aim of creating novel and surprising effects while remaining within the prescribed rules of taste. A competing tradition, beginning with
HEIDEGGER, MARTIN: Survey of Thought     3 71
the radical views of Edward Young and including the Sturm und Drang and the more moderate position of Kant, emphasizes the inexplicable and free power of genius in the creative process—a capacity not bound by rules, at least not by rules issuing from external authority. The creative character proper to the ironic poet is an unholy mixture of these seeming disparate traits ascribed to genius—of the ingenuity indicative of a heightened ability to play with poetic form and meter and the unfettered divinity usually associated with theories of genius. The result is that the ironist is something of a monster, possessed of or by an entirely unbounded power to play. Irony shares with subjective humor its negative function, though irony is the more genuinely philosophical position because it extends that negation globally. In Hegelian terms, what both lack is an understanding that univocal negation must also be negated. Such an understanding is what Hegel thinks is the essence of objective humor; put another way, objective humor is dialectical. It allows the substantial to win through contingency, the negation of contingency revealing a yet deeper level at which things are united. Although a bit overly schematic, it would not be wrong to say that a work of objective humor contains within it the three dialectical moments: (i) a situation, claim, or character trait is presented as generally accepted, universal, or objectively true; (2) expectations about it are dashed as it is revealed to be merely contingent; (3) that revelation opens up a deeper sense of order in which one can situate the contingency and feel the necessity for its being revealed as such (as well as the reason why it was initially taken to be otherwise) (ibid., vol. 14, p. 231). Hegel mentions as examples of this sort of literature Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the West-östlicher Divan), the poetry of Friedrich Rückert (ibid., vol. 14, p. 242), andT. G. Hippie (ibid., vol. 11, p. 336). [See also Danto.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Hegel
Werkeausgabe. 20 vols. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main, 1972-.
Other Sources
Desmond, William. Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics. Albany, N.Y., 1986.
Gombrich, E. H. "Hegel und die Kunstgeschichte." Neue Rundschau 88 (1977): 202-219.
Harries, Karsten. "Hegel on the Future of Art." Review of Metaphysics 27 (1973-1974)1677-696.
Henrich, Dieter. "Kunst und Natur in der idealistischen Ästhetik." In Nachahmung und Illusion, edited by H. R. Jauss, pp. 128-134. -Munich, 1964.
Henrich, Dieter. "Art and Philosophy of Art Today: Reflections with Reference to Hegel." In New Perspectives in German literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, translated by David Henry Wilson et al., pp. 107-133. Princeton, N.J., 1979.
Henrich, Dieter. "The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel's Aesthetics." In Hegel, edited by Michael In wood, pp. 199-207. Oxford and New York, 1985.
Kuhn, Helmut. Die Vollendung der klassischen deutschen Ästhetik durch
Hegel. Berlin, 1931. Oelmüller, Willi. "Hegels Satz vom Ende der Kunst." Philosophisches
Jahrbuch 73 (1965): 75~94-Rosen, Michael. Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism. Cambridge and New
York, 1982.
Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge and New York, 1975.
Frkd L. Rush, Jr.
HEIDEGGER, MARTIN. [This entry comprises five essays on Heidegger's philosophy and its significance for contemporary art theory and aesthetics: Survey of Thought
Heidegger's Confrontation with Aesthetics Heidegger's Displacement of the Concept of Art Philosophical Heritage in Heidegger's Concept of Art Heidegger and Hölderlin
The first essay is an overview of Heidegger's philosophy, both his early "fundamental ontology" (a metaphysical distinction between "Being" and "beings"—with humans among the latter) and his later notion of poetic thinking. The second essay explains how Heidegger challenges the tradition of aesthetics, particularly Hegel. The third essay analyzes Heidegger's attempts to overcome the concept of "art" The fourth essay continues the discussion of the preceding two essays by showing how much Heidegger is indebted to the philosophical aesthetic tradition he tries to overcome. The fifth essay reveals in more depth the centrality of Hölderlin's poetry to Heidegger's thinking. For related discussion, see Gadamer; Hegel, article on Hegel's Conception of the End of Art; Hermeneutics; Hölderlin; and Phenomenology.]
Survey of Thought
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), twentieth-century German philosopher. Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), was inspired by but also radically transformed the phenomenology of his elder colleague and mentor, Edmund Husserl. Heidegger's early philosophy exerted enormous influence on the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and on theologians such as Rudolf Karl Bultmann and Paul Tillich, and in addition sparked renewed interest in philosophical hermeneutics, for example in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. More recently, Heidegger has found a critical audience among English-speaking philosophers influenced by the American pragmatists and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Finally, the influence of Heidegger's later writings has been felt especially among French poststruc-turalists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Born in the small town of Messkirch in Baden, Heidegger received a Catholic education at the Bertholdgymnasium in
HEIDEGGER, MARTIN: Survey of Thought     3 71
the radical views of Edward Young and including the Sturm und Drang and the more moderate position of Kant, emphasizes the inexplicable and free power of genius in the creative process—a capacity not bound by rules, at least not by rules issuing from external authority. The creative character proper to the ironic poet is an unholy mixture of these seeming disparate traits ascribed to genius—of the ingenuity indicative of a heightened ability to play with poetic form and meter and the unfettered divinity usually associated with theories of genius. The result is that the ironist is something of a monster, possessed of or by an entirely unbounded power to play. Irony shares with subjective humor its negative function, though irony is the more genuinely philosophical position because it extends that negation globally. In Hegelian terms, what both lack is an understanding that univocal negation must also be negated. Such an understanding is what Hegel thinks is the essence of objective humor; put another way, objective humor is dialectical. It allows the substantial to win through contingency, the negation of contingency revealing a yet deeper level at which things are united. Although a bit overly schematic, it would not be wrong to say that a work of objective humor contains within it the three dialectical moments: (i) a situation, claim, or character trait is presented as generally accepted, universal, or objectively true; (2) expectations about it are dashed as it is revealed to be merely contingent; (3) that revelation opens up a deeper sense of order in which one can situate the contingency and feel the necessity for its being revealed as such (as well as the reason why it was initially taken to be otherwise) (ibid., vol. 14, p. 231). Hegel mentions as examples of this sort of literature Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the West-östlicher Divan), the poetry of Friedrich Rückert (ibid., vol. 14, p. 242), andT. G. Hippie (ibid., vol. II, p. 336). [See also Danto.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Hegel
Werkeausgabe. 20 vols. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main, 1972-.
Other Sources
Desmond, William. Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics. Albany, N.Y., 1986.
Gombrich, E. H. "Hegel und die Kunstgeschichte." Neue Rundschau 88 (1977): 202-219.
Harries, Karsten. "Hegel on the Future of Art." Review of Metaphysics 27 (I973-I974): 677-696.
Henrich, Dieter. "Kunst und Natur in der idealistischen Ästhetik." In Nachahmung und Illusion, edited by H. R. Jauss, pp. 128-134. Munich, 1964.
Henrich, Dieter. "Art and Philosophy of Art Today: Reflections with Reference to Hegel." In New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, translated by David Henry Wilson et al., pp. 107-133. Princeton, N.J., 1979.
Henrich, Dieter. "The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel's Aesthetics." In Hegel, edited by Michael Inwood, pp. 199-207. Oxford and New York, 1985.
Kuhn, Helmut. Die Vollendung der klassischen deutschen Ästhetik durch
Hegel. Kerlin, 1931. Oelmüller, Willi. "Hegels Satz vom Ende der Kunst." Philosophisches
Jahrbuch 73 (1965): 75~94-Rosen, Michael. Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism. Cambridge and New
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Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge and New York, 1975.
Fred L. Rush, Jr.
HEIDEGGER, MARTIN. [This entry comprises five essays on Heidegger's philosophy and its significance for contemporary art theory and aesthetics: Survey of Thought
Heidegger's Confrontation with Aesthetics Heidegger's Displacement of the Concept of Art Philosophical Heritage in Heidegger's Concept of Art Heidegger and Hölderlin The first essay is an overview of Heidegger's philosophy, both his early "fundamental ontology" (a metaphysical distinction between "Being" and "beings"—with humans among the latter) and his later notion of poetic thinking. The second essay explains how Heidegger challenges the tradition of aesthetics, particularly Hegel. The third essay analyzes Heidegger's attempts to overcome the concept of "art" The fourth essay continues the discussion of the preceding two essays by showing how much Heidegger is indebted to the philosophical aesthetic tradition he tries to overcome. 'The fifth essay reveals in more depth the cenlrality of H'ölderlin's poetry to Heidegger's thinking. For related discussion, see Gadamer; Hegel, article on Hegel's Conception of the End of Art; Hermeneutics; Hölderlin; and Phenomenology.]
Survey of Thought
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), twentieth-century German philosopher. Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), was inspired by but also radically transformed the phenomenology of his elder colleague and mentor, Edmund Husserl. Heidegger's early philosophy exerted enormous influence on the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and on theologians such as Rudolf Karl Bultmann and Paul Tillich, and in addition sparked renewed interest in philosophical hermeneutics, for example in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. More recently, Heidegger has found a critical audience among English-speaking philosophers influenced by the American pragmatists and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Finally, the influence of Heidegger's later writings has been felt especially among French poststruc-turalists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Born in the small town of Messkirch in Baden, Heidegger received a Catholic education at the Bertholdgymnasium in