Between Roses and Camels. Hegel's Aesthetics in the Context of the Artworld and Art History (original) (raw)

Rethinking Hegel’s Modern Conception of Art

in: Stefan Bird-Pollan u.a. (Hg.): Hegel’s Political Aesthetics: Art in Modern Society, London: Bloomsbury, 196-211., 2020

The paper presents a revised interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of art that is based on the dialectics of the three forms of art analyzed by Hegel. I argue that the dialectics only makes sense if we take the romantic form of art as the sublation of the other two. Accordingly, Hegel has to be understood as championing a modern conception of art, not a classical one. As I show, three characteristics are of primary importance for this modern conception of art: Firstly, art has no firm foundations and thus struggles to accomplish its aims. The struggle in question, secondly, takes place among a plurality of artworks, which is itself realized within a system of different arts. Thirdly, the lack of firm foundations has the consequence that art is constitutively bound up with interpretation and art criticism and thus with conceptual practice.

The Impact of Hegel's Thought on Art with an Approach to the Romanticist Movement

nima ghasemi dehaghi & alma ghasemi dehaghi, 2019

Hegel was one of the most important German idealist philosophers who presented a new understanding of (aesthetics) in (art). From Hegel's perspective, each work of art consists of two parts: 1-The (spiritual) meaning 2-The (physical) form aspect, for this reason, this adaptation itself gives rise to the basic types of art. In fact, the basic character (Romantic Art) is already provided and the (spirit) transcends (matter) and becomes an independent being. In this research, we seek to find new modes of expanding the aesthetic in the realm (art) by approaching art in the period of (romanticism) and getting assistance from (aesthetically) Hegel's perspective. The result is that if we call the work (art) beautiful since its creator is the (spirit) human being, it can be far superior to nature's yield. Hence, in his aesthetics, Hegel also discusses beauty and natural beauty, as he thinks the worst of human contemplation result is superior to nature, because there is always (the spirit), freedom and presence of the artist. So, (beauty) only benefits from the source of the ultimate truth and testifies to it.

Hegel's Aesthetics

Hegel’s epic odyssey of the soul paints the picture of an absolute spirit (God) which is attempting to disclose its own essence to itself through individual spirits. As such, it must proceed in stages — and at every stage of this cosmic self- disclosure, the Absolute must manifest itself to itself in what I like to call higher and higher “degrees of presence”. At the last and highest stage, spirit makes itself manifest to spirit as spirit and in spirit, i.e. by those means afforded to the philosopher. Hegel’s conception of the ultimate moment of spiritual apotheosis as being achievable through thinking has very real implications for his account of art and aesthetics — which are relegated, perhaps, to a subordinate position in his own time. Wether this is a self-serving exaggeration of the philosopher’s importance is in some sense outside of the scope of our present investigation — for out of it flows an astonishingly lucid and consistent account of both the power of art, and its potential to disclose truths of ultimate interest to human beings. Because Hegel’s aesthetics are grounded in, and are congruent with such a robust metaphysics, they are endowed with the means to appraise both the value of individual artworks and the spiritual potential of particular art forms. Hegel is, for better or worse, in the business of making hierarchical distinctions in the realm of art (perhaps one of the greatest taboos in the modern intellectual landscape). What exactly does his hierarchical appraisal of symbolic, classical and romantic art say about both art itself and our modern condition? Do we dwell today in a field of perdition, a vapid and Geist-less zeitgeist? Does the ‘end of art’ herald the impoverishment of spirit? These difficult and tantalizing questions I shall attempt to elucidate in the forthcoming paper.

Form and History. On Hegels Aesthetics

In this article, I discuss the philosophical position that marks the end of the Age of Aesthetics: Hegel's philosophy of art. I demonstrate how it has passed the test of time, and will further defend its systematic outlines. I reconstruct Hegel's philosophy of art in a way that relies less on Hegel's own conceptual terminology, but, rather, attempts to shed light on the insights it can afford with regard to some more recent discussions: on the one hand, discussions about how to read Hegel of contemporary debates in postanalytical and continental philosophy, and on the other hand, in light of the post-Hegelian philosophy of art. I reconstruct Hegel's philosophy of art in the light of two key concepts: form and unity. Overall, my article has two parts. The first one deals with Hegel's concept of form, the second deals with his concept of unity. In the background of my argument stands Hegel's thought that art is a particular form of the development of the concept. Hegel's theory allows for an immanent reconstruction of art and thus a thinking of the autonomy of art. We should describe art as a particular form of experience for which a specific unity is characteristic-a kind of unity that entails that the form of experience cannot be understood in a formalist way, but must rather be understood as something that develops in and through history.

Search for a Method: A Reassessment of Hegel's Dialectic in Art History

Journal of Art Historiography, 2019

It is often noted that G.W.F. Hegel offers the modern academic discipline of art history its first methodological model of scholarly construction. This essay offers a critical analysis of some salient moments in the art historical reception of Hegel’s ‘dialectical method’ and, against that reception, to provide a reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis of method in the short yet dense ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Drawing on the recent renewed interest in Hegel in art history, I show that Hegel does not fabricate a ‘dialectical method’ but develops, instead, a sophisticated negation of method. This negation, however, is not a total annihilation. Strangely, it yields a deeper, more bewildering philosophical claim: that we are both the object and subject of philosophical analysis. In the context of the Hegelian legacy of art history, this extraction of the ontology of social being from out of the limits of philosophical methodology opens up some difficult questions, questions that concern, in the last instance, what the subject of art historical scholarship is.