Hegel's Political Aesthetics

Art in Modern Society

Stefan Bird-Pollan, Vladimir Marchenkov

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350122710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

What is the role of art in modern society? To what extent are the beautiful and the morally good intertwined? Hegel's Political Aesthetics explores Hegel's take on these ever-relevant philosophical questions and investigates three key themes: art's contribution to modern ethical life, the loss of art's authority in modern ethical life and ways of thinking beyond Hegel's analysis of art's role in society. The aesthetic is explored through the lens of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel, ultimately placing ethics and morality at the forefront of this debate. The authors explore Hegel's take on Kant's conception by historicizing what it means to be responsible to others, which for Hegel means being free within the norms of society, within what he calls ethical life. As a set of concrete social arrangements designed for finite human beings, however, ethical life falls short of actualizing freedom absolutely. The themes in this volume are motivated by a central ambivalence in Hegel's thinking about modernity. The question of freedom sits at the forefront of this text, alongside the relation between art and the spirit. This book will be of particular interest to philosophers of aesthetics, politics and ethics.

Part I

Art’s Contribution to Modern Ethical Life

1

Hegel on Aesthetic Reconciliation

Mark Alznauer

Introduction

In his lectures on fine art, Hegel claims that art’s “final end” (Endzweck) is to reconcile certain deep contradictions in human life, contradictions that stem from the opposition between mind and nature.¹ Art does this, he says, by unveiling or displaying the idea (die Idee) in the “form of sensuous artistic configuration.” It follows that artworks, art forms, and artistic genres are good qua art only to the degree that they afford us experiences of this kind of reconciliation (Versöhnung). Naturally, Hegel concedes that works of art can also be assessed in light of other ends—we can ask whether they are entertaining, instructive, morally edifying, and so forth—but he claims that these other forms of assessment instrumentalize the artwork; they put the artwork in the service of ends drawn from outside the sphere of art, ends not determined by its very concept or nature. Hegel’s claim is that reconciliation is the only end or aim of art that is autonomous in the sense of being directly derivable from its own concept.

Although there are certainly some distinctively Hegelian commitments involved in putting the point in just this way, the general idea that art’s highest vocation is to somehow reconcile mind and nature was quite common during the period in which he lived. In Hegel’s own brief recapitulation of the history of aesthetics, Friedrich Schiller is credited with being the first to clearly recognize the reconciliatory vocation of art. But Hegel acknowledges that similar claims about art were advanced by several of his own contemporaries, including Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and some of the most prominent of the German romantics (he explicitly mentions the Schlegel brothers, Karl Solger, and Ludwig Tieck, but Novalis and Hölderlin would, by most reckonings, also belong in this group).

It should also be noted that this way of thinking about art was not unique to the German context. If we cast our gaze further afield, we see a strikingly similar emphasis on the reconciliatory function of art emerging at around the same time among the most prominent figures in the English romantic tradition: like Samuel T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Percy B. Shelley. Though some of these figures were directly influenced by German currents of thought—Coleridge, most notably—others seemed to have been drawn to this way of thinking about art on their own. As M. H. Abrams remarks, the notion that art could preside over a kind of wedding between nature and mind was a “prominent period-metaphor” among poets and philosophers of the time.² The general thought that seems to have been shared by all these romantics and idealists was, to put it in Abrams’ own terms, that art’s highest task is to overcome certain experiences of human alienation and that it accomplishes this by yielding a new vision of the world, one that shows the ultimate falsity of the opposition between mind and world. I will henceforth refer to this as the reconciliatory theory of art.

In the following, I will revisit Hegel’s own version of the reconciliatory theory of art, attempting to articulate its basic structure and justification. I should note that although I will not be speaking in any great detail about other versions of the theory, my intention is to focus on those features of Hegel’s account that I think have significant overlap with other defenses of the reconciliatory theory of art, while bracketing treatment of the more notorious and original claims Hegel makes about the “end of art” and about the ultimate superiority of philosophy to art. For commentators like Manfred Frank, once these more distinctive aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of art are brought into the picture, any commonality between Hegel and the other figures in the romantic-idealist tradition starts to look comparatively insignificant; and to some degree Hegel himself saw things this way.³ But the usual emphasis on points of difference has led to a failure to understand the common project that Hegel shared with the romantics (Schelling included), a project that has been rightly characterized as an attempt to sacralize art, to view it in terms of a function more commonly associated with religion.⁴ So although Hegel’s differences from the romantics are certainly real and important, my more restricted goal here is to show that Hegel offers a particularly powerful defense of a thesis that they share, which is that art has the vocation of reconciling mind (or spirit) and nature and that his defense of this shared view does not depend in any straightforward or obvious way on his more distinctive and controversial claims about the systematic subordination of art to philosophy.

In developing my interpretation of Hegel’s theory of aesthetic reconciliation, I will be placing myself in dialogue with a prominent “left-Hegelian” line of criticism of Hegel, one that has convinced many that Hegel’s emphasis on reconciliation is the least salvageable and most unfortunate aspect of his philosophy of art. The critics I have in mind follow Hegel in thinking that it is important to unde rstand the artwork as addressing certain contradictions in modern life, and as revealing those contradictions to us through artistic objects or representations—indeed, it is this sensitivity to historical reality that is thought to make Hegel’s theory superior to its romantic alternatives. But they reject the further thought that by doing so, art can or should reconcile us to life. For these critics, Hegel’s insistence on the supposedly reconciliatory function of art founders on a fundamental problem, which is that the contradictions that art reveals as present in modern life have never been overcome and indeed show no prospect of dissolving in the near future. It follows from this that any artwork that leads us to affirm the reality we live in is ideological in the pejorative or critical sense. It encourages us to reconcile ourselves to something we ought not be reconciled to: a world that, despite Hegel’s protestations to the contrary, is in fact pervasively irrational or unsatisfactory to reason.

I will be arguing that this common “left-Hegelian” line of criticism rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of aesthetic reconciliation in Hegel’s thought, one that wrongly treats aesthetic reconciliation as a facet of social reconciliation. On the alternative reading I will defend, art reconciles the contradictions we experience in life, not by effecting some change in our political or social world, or even by attempting to show us the ultimate rationality of our world, rather, it reconciles spirit and nature only in the sense that it provides us with access to a distinct mode of human activity in which the individual overcomes the subject-object opposition and the forms of suffering that are endemic to it.⁵ The truth that art reveals is not a potentially dubious claim about the rationality of the modern political and social institutions, but a truth about human subjectivity or agency; and art reveals this truth about spirit not by representing it propositionally, or by making this truth its hidden or overt theme, but merely by being organized in such a way that it can only be properly experienced in this higher mode of activity.

In understanding art in this manner, Hegel proves himself to share the romantic-idealist tendency to invest ultimate human reconciliation not in religious eschatology, or in the achievement of any utopian political or social condition, but in the powers inherent in human consciousness as they manifest themselves in the contemplation of works of fine art (a commonality unaffected, or so I am arguing, by Hegel’s un-romantic claim that still higher forms of reconciliation are possible). But he offers us a defense of this recognizably romantic position that is unique in two important ways. First, it is supported with a systematic account of the various different standpoints that spirit or mind can adopt toward nature, one that can articulate exactly what it means for art to transcend the oppositions characteristic of ordinary life without lapsing into mystificatory discourse or evocations of the unsayable. Second, his account consciously situates itself within a sophisticated historical narrative of changing conceptions of aesthetic transcendence, one that goes beyond the sketchy contrasts between the classical and the romantic, which are typical of romantic treatments of the history of art.

The “Left-Hegelian” Critique

In order to see why Hegel’s emphasis on the reconciliatory vocation of art has come to be viewed as such a liability, it is helpful turn to an important and influential essay by Raymond Geuss entitled “Art and Theodicy.”⁶ On Geuss’s interpretation of Hegel, the final end of art—its “inherent teleological goal”—is to provide us with a theodicy, a way of reconciling spirit or humanity to the negative aspects of existence. But Geuss makes three assumptions about how this works that lead to a clear problem for Hegel. The first assumption is that the negative aspects of existence that art addresses are primarily contingent failings in the social world, aspects of the social world that might appear to frustrate important aims we have, aims that could, in principle, be satisfied under better conditions.⁷ The second is that art addresses our concern with these negative aspects of existence by unveiling certain truths about us and about our society: it gives us both an “awareness of what our deepest interests are” and some assurance that, despite the apparent obstacles we face, these interests can be “realized in the world as [we] find it.”⁸ The third assumption Geuss makes concerns the specific subjective reaction that this content is meant to provoke in us. By showing us that the world we live in is, in fact, congenial to our deepest interests, Geuss thinks, art is supposed to allow us to see that “life as we know it in our world is inherently worth living,” thus generating in us “an affectively positive optimism” (my italics).⁹

If we take these three interpretive assumptions for granted, then Geuss is surely right that the most important condition for the success of Hegel’s aesthetic theodicy is that it must “actually be the case that the world we live in is basically rational, comprehensible in principle, and ‘commensurate’ to us in the sense that it is amenable to allowing us to realize our deepest human interests and aspirations.”¹⁰ But admitting this makes Hegel’s theo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction
• Part I Art’s Contribution to Modern Ethical Life
• Part II Art’s Persistence and Authority
• Part III Thinking beyond Hegel’s Views on Art and Society
• Index
• Copyright