Two questions on Hegel’s Aesthetics
THE PARTICULARITIES OF AESTHETICS
From the beginning, Hegel makes it clear that aesthetics is the realm of the beautiful. More precisely, the realm of art, or fine art. (1) He will proceed with a delimitation of his work, and a defense of the philosophical study of fine arts against some common objections. The reason why aesthetics should not concern nature, but only human products, seems to come from Hegel’s notion of spirit. In nature, everything is pre-determined, necessary, and necessarily connected to its surroundings. And to the extent that everything is connected to everything else in a necessary manner, beauty cannot be perceived—to use Hegel’s words—in itself (2). We can speak of nature’s utility, but beauty in nature is a more complicated thing. Beauty requires freedom, and the proper realm of freedom is that of human creation, of culture, ideas, and reflection—which Hegel calls “spirit”. It is only in the human realm of creativity that freedom can take shape.
Hegel sustains the study of aesthetics against certain objections. The first is the view that art is somewhat superfluous, and therefore does not merit the seriousness of a scientific inquiry (3). Then, that art presents itself to sense, feeling, and imagination, and that it would be a mistake to try to grasp it intellectually (5). Rejecting these views, Hegel seems to separate fine art from any type of decorative arts, which would not be independent, but ancillary to ends such as entertainment or recreation. To that type of art, Hegel distinguishes art that is “free in its end and its means” (7). Free art, for Hegel, is close to philosophy and religion in its propensity to engage with spirit, expressing its “most comprehensive truths” (7). Art—to quote from page 7—“displays even the highest reality sensuously, bringing it thereby nearer to the senses, to feeling, and to nature’s mode of appearance” (7–8).
It’s different from philosophy and religion, however, because—unlike philosophy—it does not express these truths in the form of concepts, and—unlike religion—in the form of images of faith, but does so in man-made objects created specifically for the purpose of this representation. And this is, perhaps, its limitation. To quote from p. 9, Hegel says [last paragraph] “Neither in content nor in form is art the highest and absolute mode of bringing to our minds the true interests of the spirit. For precisely on account of its form, art is limited to a specific content. Only one sphere and stage of truth is capable of being represented in the element of art.” (9)
Art mediates, as I understand it, between the universal realm of spirit, of conceptual thinking, of reason, and the particular realm of the sensuous, the imaginative, and the concrete. (8). It represents universal ideas, but is always limited by a specific content to be represented in a specific way. The results of this mediation are artworks.
I find it interesting that Hegel seems to be trying to carve out a space for art and its philosophical study that is protected from the unfreedom of nature, but at the same time he is always marking the deficiencies of art in its role to represent spirit, or highlighting the limitations that artworks have. In a certain sense, art shares its aim with philosophy but is always behind it. On page 10, Hegel explains that in modernity, we do not venerate artistic images anymore. We relate to artworks in a reflective manner. And that being the case, the “highest vocation” of art—to use his words from page 11, is somewhat obsolete:
And this is my first question. Is Hegel defending here the view that art is obsolete? Is there any implicit hierarchization of art and philosophy, where art is always necessarily inferior?
THE CONCEPT OF THE BEAUTIFUL
When Hegel discusses the ways of treating art scientifically, he speaks of the empirical mode of investigation, the path—he says—of someone who wants to become a scholar in the field of art, an art historian, or a theorist. To that, he opposes a purely theoretical reflection on the concept of the beautiful. Hegel speaks of the latter using terms such as “the Idea”, “the Idea in general”, or “the Idea of the beautiful”, “Concept” (with a capital C in the translation).
His position seems to be one between the two opposing sides. While Hegel subscribes to the Platonic vocabulary of “Idea” and agrees with the need to speak of art in its universal aspect, he seems conscious that this method risks falling into what he calls an “abstract metaphysics” (22). Opposing the mere role of the historian of art—who knows about different art styles, media and historical contexts—and the abstract metaphysician—who discusses the concept of the beautiful regardless of any concrete manifestation [and Kant might be the figure in the background here]—opposing these views, Hegel states the following (p. 22):
We must grasp this Idea more concretely, more profoundly, since the emptiness, which clings to the Platonic Idea, no longer satisfies the richer philosophical needs of our spirit today. […] The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned, because it unites metaphysical universality with the precision of real particularity. (22)
In sum, as I understand it, Hegel is opposing both the empiricist view, according to which art and the beautiful can only be known via concrete examples, and the transcendental view—or abstract view—according to which the beautiful has to be defined theoretically. In his own mode, Hegel starts with the Idea, and proceeds with a deductive method toward more concreteness.
He first has to establish the Concept of the beautiful—more specifically, of beauty in art. He says this has been done elsewhere, in the Encyclopedia, and that the concept of the beautiful has to be taken as a presupposition here. Hegel’s method is interesting in that he seems to be adding historical content to the abstract Concept. When he discusses the modes of investigating art, or the evolution of art production, he is situating the idea of the beautiful historically, which seems to be necessary for art, since—unlike philosophy or religion—it is always limited to a specific mode of presentation, a specific medium (and later Hegel will speak of the forms of art and the kinds of art).
This particular view of the place of beauty—not in nature or in random instances, but also not in abstract thinking only leads Hegel to take issue with Kant’s views on aesthetics. For Kant, beauty and sublimity are a matter of judgment. Kant is concerned with the conditions of possibility of us finding something beautiful. When I judge an object to be beautiful, what guarantees that my judgment is correct? Can we disagree about whether something is beautiful or not? How universal is this judgment? All these questions, for Hegel, pertain to a subjective level. For Kant, it’s impossible to say that an object is objectively beautiful, as this predicate cannot belong to the object without a previous subjective judgment.
For Hegel, on the other hand, there is no clear opposition between a thinking subject and an objective thing, or, in his words, between “abstract universality and sensuous individuality” (56). He is trying to find a “reconciliation” between those two realms, and he thinks Kant’s solution is merely “subjective” (60). That is—it regards only the thinking subject, but not the object. In Schiller, Hegel says, this opposition is broken. The beautiful is defined as the mutual imbrication of the rational and the sensuous. And this relationship is taken to be objectively real, as opposed to merely subjectively, for the judging subject.
One question here is about how Hegel sees himself in this historical reconstruction. Does he think Schiller got it right by surpassing Kant’s formalism and opposition or is the problem only resolved by Hegel himself? If so, then what did Schiller get wrong?