Return to Aesthetics

We're jumping back in time and back to the Western hemisphere to reclaim aesthetics with Hegel, whose come to tell us that art is dead.

An End to Art?

150 years before Arthur C. Danto announced his “End of Art” thesis, G.W.F. Hegel made a similar proclamation. Neither of these two thinkers would go so far as to claim that good and worthy art isn’t possible anymore. In order to understand Hegel’s stance, it is necessary to put this view in the context of his entire project. What he means by saying that Art has come to an end is something like, “art no longer has the ability to represent absolute spirit.” We find Hegel articulating his view more explicitly in his Lectures on Fine Arts: “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Fine Arts, p. 10). Hegel gives a crude and incomplete account of his aesthetic theory in the Encyclopaedia, the one work to which we will confine the rest of our discussion.

Hegel considers Art one of the modes we have for expressing Geist, the absolute spirit that is both “implicitly existent and objectively self-unfolding” (Ency, 571). Art, he writes, is “the concrete contemplation and mental picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the Ideal” (Ency, 556). It is important for Hegel that Geist can only express itself by externalizing and seeing itself in the world. Art is one such externalizing movement, and proceeds according to a dialectical progression, much like other historical phenomena. Part of what’s unique about art is the way in which it tries to bring absolute Spirit to consciousness. Art is “the sole organ in which the abstract and radically indistinct content – a mixture from natural and spiritual sources – can try to bring itself to consciousness” (Ency, 562). These “natural and spiritual sources” can be thought of as natural forms of representation, and inspiration (respectively).

Hegel divides art into three different conceptual stages (conceptual rather than chronological): symbolic art; classical art; and romantic art. Each stage shows art in some way struggling with the notion of how to bring Geist into the world.

In symbolic art, the content (meaning) of the artwork is distinct from its form and the incommensurability between the artwork’s form and its content, brings about a certain level of abstraction. Here , he names the artist’s theme as “abstract God of pure thought” which is unable to find coherent expression in the finished product (Ency, 561). An example of this symbolic art is architecture, where the function of the edifice bears only a highly abstract relation to its form. To illustrate the inadequacy of symbolic art, Hegel describes it rather desperately as, “a restless and unappeased effort which throws itself into shape after shape as it vainly tries to find its goal” (Ency, 561). The problem from which all this arises seems to be a primitive and limited understanding of Geist: “The meaning or theme thus shows it has not yet reached the infinite form, is not yet known, not yet conscious of itself, as free spirit” (Ency, 561).

Classical art, which is next in the progression, seems to be the stage favored most highly by Hegel. Although hardly the perfect medium for Geist’s gradual unfurling, Hegel finds much that’s commendable and beautiful in this stage of the development of art. At times, he even calls it simply “Beautiful art.” For instance, in expressing the thought that beauty is the form by which art expresses the absolute, he seems to have classical art very much on the mind: “In this ideal, or the concrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a sign of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone: - the shape of form of Beauty.” (Ency, 556)

The paradigm of classical art is Greek statuary, whereby the divine is represented through the human form. Hegel explains the rationale behind this: “For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires not only an external given material – (under which are also included subjective images and ideas), but – for the expression of spiritual truth – must use the given forms of nature with a significance with art must divine and possess. Of all such forms the human is the highest and the true, because only in it can the spirit have its corporeality and thus its visual expression” (Ency, 558).

The advantage to classical art over symbolic art is that it exhibits harmony between form and content. It’s limitation, however, is that as an essentially polytheistic medium, it can’t grasp at the unity of Geist. Thus, the “reconciliation” achieved in classical art between “the expression of the God” and “the enthusiasm” or “genius” of the artist may seem “self-confident” and “of good cheer” (Ency, 560-561). However, it fails to grasp at the true nature of Geist; its “depth” and the “sense of its antithesis to the absolute essence” (Ency, 561). As Hegel writes, Absolute mind can’t be made explicit via the nature-form: “In and to art therefore the spirit is a limit natural spirit whose implicit universality, when steps are taken to specify its fullness in details, breaks up into an indeterminate polytheism” (559). Elsewhere, Hegel seems to be discussing classical art when he says, “Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its condition the self-consciousness of the free spirit – the consciousness that compared with it the natural and sensuous has no standing of its own: it makes the natural wholly into the mere expression of spirit, which is thus the inner form that gives utterance to itself alone” (Ency, 562).

Hegel calls the final stage in the development of art “romantic.” While Hegel may be said to consider the classical period as the aesthetic apex of art, romantic art is clearly the spiritual high point. It is in this stage that art becomes aware of its own limitation, namely that Geist is an abstract entity closer to thought than to the human form (the beauty of which was lauded so by the Greeks). Thus, in romantic art, “God is known not as only seeking his form or satisfying himself in an external form, but as only finding himself in himself, and thus giving himself his adequate figure in the spiritual world alone” (Ency, 562).

Romantic art is thus conscious of its shortcomings, and for this reason it always removed from the spectator. Here, a new dialectic between form and content emerges. With media like music, painting and poetry, the content (the expression of Geist) becomes detached from its form since the hyper-conscious artist has doubts about the suitability of the form in expressing the content. Romantic art can only come about with an advanced understanding of Geist that acknowledges that absolute spirit cannot be captured fully by art. This runs contrary to the way we picture the relationship between form and content in symbolic art. There, the concept of Geist that the artist maintains is completely unbounded and vague. Having realized the incompatibility of “the Idea” with “the sensuous figure it appears in,” “Romantic Art gives up the task of showing him as such in external form and by means of beauty; it presents him as only condescending to appearance, and the divine as the heart of hearts in an externality from which it always disengages itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards its significance.” (Ency, 562)

Romantic art need not be overtly beautiful, since the artist understands the impossibility of ever adequately expressing Geist. This makes for a marked contrast to classical art, since here art can has given up hope of adequately representing the absolute: “Beauty in general goes no further than a penetration of the vision or image by the spiritual principle.” (Ency, 559)

However, this reflexivity has one negative consequence that propels art into crisis, only to hand over the task to religion, and then philosophy; it is a breeding ground for irony. Through the power of irony, art manages to disconnect from the world. An ironic attitude is symptomatic of an advanced consciousness who, failing to grasp the true nature of Geist, fashions himself into a cynical creature incapable of rendering serious observations and judgments, all under the pretense of sophistication. “Irony, which can make every objective reality nought and vain, is itself the emptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and its own good pleasure, gives itself direction and content, remains master over it, is not bound by it – and, with the assertion that it stands on the very summit of religion and philosophy, falls back into the vanity of willfulness.” (Ency, 571)

The more we realize that Geist is far closer to thought than any object with material existence, the less reliance we place on sensuous forms to help us accomplish that recognition. This process, Hegel calls Erinnerung - inwardness and memory, and it is by this that Geist is able to retreat from reality in Romantic art. Poetry brings us out of the media of aesthetics and into ordinary speech and thought. It is thus the harbinger of religion, to which Romantic art eventually gives way. It is this transition from romantic art to religion that Hegel has in mind when he pronounces art at an end. Art comes to an end when it realizes its inadequacy for representing the “genuine objectivity.” As Hegel writes: “The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought – the medium in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence – is still absent in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness” (Ency, 562). Art will continue to happen; it’s merely that people won’t turn to art to see Geist reveal itself.

Since all along the goal of art (whether consciously or unconsciously) has been to represent Geist, there’s a sense in which art was always implicitly, indeterminately religious. As Hegel writes, “Beautiful art can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is not yet absolute” (Ency, 562). This makes the transition from romantic art to religion rather smooth. Eventually, philosophy takes over and brings to maturity, what “mere piety” could only hint at and represents the most radical externalization of Geist. The dialectical progression between art and religion has the consequence of lifting “religion away over its limitation” (Ency, 562). We get a similarly laudatory take on art in comparison to philosophy: “Beautiful art, for its side, has thus performed the same service as philosophy; it has purified the spirit from its thralldom” (Ency, 562). “The restricted value of the Idea,” which was first expressed in art, passes to the realm of religion, and then to philosophy. Art may have come to an end in 1830, but it persists in its chameleon-like behavior, by which it serves to edify faith, reason and spirit (Ency, 563).

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Bibliography:
Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Tr. by T. M. Knox. Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1975. p. 10
Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Tr. By William Wallace. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971. p. 293–297, 301–302