Hegel on Beauty

Julia Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317635222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

While the current philosophical debate surrounding Hegel's aesthetics focuses heavily on the philosopher's controversial 'end of art' thesis, its participants rarely give attention to Hegel's ideas on the nature of beauty and its relation to art. This study seeks to remedy this oversight by placing Hegel's views on beauty front and center. Peters asks us to rethink the common assumption that Hegelian beauty is exclusive to art and argues that for Hegel beauty, like art, is subject to historical development. Her careful analysis of Hegel's notion of beauty not only has crucial implications for our understanding of the 'end of art' and Hegel's aesthetics in general, but also sheds light on other fields of Hegel's philosophy, in particular his anthropology and aspects of his ethical thought.

1
The Anthropological Roots of Beauty

Most commentators on Hegel’s aesthetics today hold that for Hegel, beauty is essentially an artistic phenomenon, and therefore, our analysis of Hegel’s notion of beauty has to begin with his theory of the artwork. However, the following observation should give us pause. When Hegel wishes to illustrate, in the Lectures on Aesthetics, what beauty consists of, he always refers to the same image: the living human figure, whose inner soul or spirit becomes visible in the body. In a famous passage in the Aesthetics,¹ for instance, Hegel cites the human eye as an example of an object in which beauty can be found.² When we look into the eye of a living human being, we see not just the eye, but the soul that shows itself in it—the eye is a sign of the inner soul. Hegel mentions further the human face and figure, human gestures and motions, speech and actions as the kinds of things that can be beautiful if they make a human individual’s soul appear through them. If for Hegel beauty is essentially an artistic phenomenon, then such references cannot be taken literally. Rather, they will have to be understood in the spirit of an analogy or metaphor, stating that the beautiful artwork conveys its meaning like the human eye expresses the soul, or as if it was a human eye expressing the soul. However, I want to examine in the following whether we ought not to understand such references to the human figure in Hegel’s Aesthetics in a more literal sense and consider the possibility that the actual living human figure does in fact have significant aesthetic potential in Hegel’s view. To do so, I want to carry out the experiment of reading the Aesthetics alongside specific sections from Hegel’s ‘Anthropology’ that forms the first part of his ‘Philosophy of Subjective Spirit’ in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. In these sections, Hegel discusses the relation between body and soul that he takes to be peculiar to human beings, in particular the capacity of the human soul to become manifest or expressed in the body. The hypothesis pursued in the following is that these sections can be read as a complement to the allusions Hegel makes in the Aesthetics to the aesthetic potential of the human being. The idea that humans possess the capacity to be beautiful in virtue of giving expression to their inner soul in their body, which is merely being alluded to in the Aesthetics, is given a firmer foundation and spelled out in detail in the ‘Anthropology’. As I hope to demonstrate both in the present and in following chapters, this experiment turns out to be fruitful: Hegel’s discussion of the relation between human soul and body turns out to have significant implications for Hegel’s assessment of the aesthetic potential of the human individual.

As sketched in the introduction, the discussion in the present chapter constitutes the first step of an argument aimed at refuting the predominant view that beauty is exclusive to art in Hegel’s view. In this first step, by discussing Hegel’s account of the aesthetic potential of the human being, I offer evidence that there may be beauty to be found outside of the sphere of art from Hegel’s point of view. In other words, I provide reasons for believing that objects other than artworks—more specifically, human beings—can be beautiful for Hegel. But the argument will not be complete until the following two steps have been taken as well—that is, until the reasons adduced by commentators for holding the predominant view have been undermined, and potentially lingering worries have been dispelled. These further argumentative steps will be taken in the following chapters. Thus in the present chapter we are only beginning to embark on an argument that eventually is meant to establish that it is not the work of art, but rather the living human individual that constitutes the primary and paradigmatic instance of a beautiful object for Hegel.

The Aesthetic Potential of the Human Individual

Humans and Animals in the ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’

In order to approach the question of whether the human individual might have genuine aesthetic potential in Hegel’s view, one has to begin by considering what distinguishes the human living organism from other organisms in this respect. In the Aesthetics, Hegel states that beauty is to be found in the realm of living, organic creatures,³ but he emphasizes that not every kind of living creature has the potential to be beautiful. Following the structure of Hegel’s argument, we will therefore begin with his discussion of the animal organism in the Aesthetics, and then work our way up until we have reached what constitutes the aesthetic pinnacle in the realm of living organisms for Hegel, the human individual.

The existence of living natural organisms constitutes for Hegel one of the most readily accessible and intuitively convincing corroborations for his idealist philosophy—in the Aesthetics, he even calls the existence of such organisms an ‘objective idealism’, that is, an idealism that is openly perceptible in an object before our eyes.⁴ The animal organism, for Hegel, deserves to be called a subject, because whereas it is spread out in a manifold of parts, it nevertheless maintains a unity within these parts. This unity manifests itself both objectively and subjectively. Objectively, because the members of an organism can function and maintain their identity only as members of the organism, in contrast to, say, parts of an artifact. The bricks that make up a wall, for instance, remain what they are when the wall is taken apart. An animal’s eye or tail, in contrast, loses its ability to move and function when severed from the body, as well as losing its shape and color, and everything else that constitutes its identity. The unity of the living organism’s parts is also subjectively manifest in the organism’s sensations. The organism has sensations in almost every single one of its many spatially dispersed parts, and yet it is one identical subject that receives and processes this perceptual information; in the multiplicity of its sensations, the animal organism is always ‘reflected into itself’.⁵ This self-reflective unity of the organism is what Hegel calls the organism’s ‘soul’, its ‘inner’ or its ‘concept’.⁶ It is a soul that is distinct from its outer body insofar as it is distinct from the immediate, particular and separate existence of the organism’s parts, yet at the same time it is present in them as it senses itself in all of them. The living organism therefore provides immediately perceptible evidence for Hegel’s thesis that the concept has objective reality or, as he puts it in one of his most famous statements, that the substance is at the same time subject.⁷

Hegel makes it clear in the Aesthetics that he considers the unity and subjectivity of the living animal organism as a kind of proto-aesthetic phenomenon.⁸ The animal organism, he argues, is aesthetically superior to vegetal nature and non-living natural objects and structures.⁹ It is true that in vegetal nature and non-living objects and structures, we can find both regularity and law-likeness. Regularity consists in a repetition of the same shape, as for instance in the form of a cube, where all the sides have the same size, and all the edges have the same length. Law-likeness, in contrast to regularity, can encompass differences in shape. The shape of an egg, for instance, is law-like without being regular, for the two sides of the egg (that is, the upper and the lower side) are different. Both in regular and in law-like natural structures, we have something like a unity of a general rule or law and an objective, natural particular: the natural particular exemplifies the general rule or law. This explains why, Hegel argues, we may be tempted to ascribe a certain degree of aesthetic excellence to such structures. But what Hegel finds wanting about regular and law-like nature from an aesthetic point of view is the lack of an intrinsic connection between the general rule or law and the natural particular—or, in short, a lack of subjectivity: the general norm or law does not manifest itself or express itself in the natural particular.¹⁰

But while being aesthetically superior to non-living and vegetal nature in virtue of its subjectivity, the animal organism is nevertheless inferior in aesthetic respect to the human being. Hegel here does not make his line of argument fully explicit, but it seems to be grounded in the premise that what is necessary in order for a living subject to be aesthetically excellent—that is, ultimately, to be beautiful—is that it possesses the capacity to make its inner soul wholly manifest in its external body. But the animal organism lacks this capacity, and this is the reason why it is aesthetically deficient, in contrast to the human individual. Hegel offers several arguments and considerations to support this point, not all of which are equally relevant and convincing.¹¹ Two considerations, however, are worth noting. One is that the individual animal organism is often barred from manifesting freely its subjective unity in its individual parts because it is determined and inhibited in different ways by the world in which it lives. Thus hostile climatic conditions, lack of food, drought or natural catastrophes can deform or disfigure the organism such that it ends up indicating the condition of its environment, rather than functioning as a sign or manifestation of its inner unity and subjectivity. More importantly even, because of its peculiar constitution, the animal organism can necessarily only be an imperfect expression of its subjectivity. The argument Hegel gives in the Aesthetics to support this claim is the following. The animal body is covered with hair, shell, bone, scales or feathers, in short, with lifeless substances that hide, rather than manifest the animal’s subjectivity—its ability to sense itself in its body parts—since they make its body parts appear as if they belonged to the realm of inorganic or vegetal nature. Thus, the subjectivity of the animal organism does not achieve an external, openly perceptible existence, but remains partly ‘inward’. Hegel proceeds by contrasting this with the human body, which, he writes, manifests its subjectivity on its entire surface, which is covered with naked skin through which the pulsating heart becomes visible, rather than with lifeless coverings.¹²

Taken by itself, this argument is hardly convincing. It is not clear why one form of organic matter—skin—should be more apt to manifest subjectivity than another; furthermore, some parts of the human body are covered with hair; large parts are usually covered with clothes; and some animals are naked. A more plausible account of what Hegel has in mind can be gained, I suggest, by considering his discussion of the relation between human body and soul, which forms part of his ‘Anthropology’, the first part of his ‘Philosophy of Subjective Spirit’. The upshot of this discussion, as we shall see, is that the human individual accomplishes a unity of inner soul and outer body that is uniquely human—animals cannot accomplish such a unity of inner and outer. Furthermore, this unity of inner and outer has aesthetic implications, as it is in virtue of their capacity to accomplish such unity that human individuals can overcome the aesthetic shortcoming of the animal organism just discussed. The central concept that Hegel draws on in this context is the notion of habit.¹³ In order to appreciate why it is relevant in the context of Hegel’s aesthetic theory, we need to consider in some detail his notion of habit as he develops it in the ‘Anthropology’.

The Aesthetic Relevance of Habit

A habit, one might think, is simply a pattern of regular behavior, which can be observed in animals as well as in human beings. A herd of animals, for instance, may form the habit of always attending the same watering hole at the same time of the day in order to drink. However, Hegel is particularly interested in those habits that are acquired deliberately or intentionally—which are ‘posited’, as he puts it¹⁴—and that are therefore exclusive to human beings in his view. Human beings can, for instance, deliberately form the habit of having regular meals at certain times in the day, rather than eating whenever they feel the sensation of hunger. In the long run, the sensation of hunger will then begin to occur regularly as well, in accord with the established meal times. More generally, in order to form a habit, a human individual has to deliberately repeat the same routine of action, or the same attitude towards certain sensations, many times: human habits are acquired through repetition and training to which an individual deliberately subjects herself.¹⁵ At the same time, it is crucial to note that the acquisition even of human habits can never be reduced to a subject’s deliberate activity. One can deliberately repeat the same routine of action many times, or expose oneself repeatedly to the same sensation, but this in itself will not be sufficient for the acquisition of a habit. In order for a habit to form itself, one’s body has to ‘respond’ to this routine of repetition in the right way. For instance, if one repeats the same routine of action many times, this will in some cases lead to the onset of a ‘mechanism’:¹⁶ at some point, one begins to carry out the course of action mechanically, that is, in the absence of preceding deliberation and reflection. Likewise, if one is repeatedly exposed—or exposes oneself deliberately—to the same sensation, one will at some point become ‘hardened’¹⁷ against the sensation in question, that is, one will cease to sense it as strongly as before. However, whether the onset of the relevant mechanism or the effect of hardening does in fact occur is not under the subject’s immediate control. Rather, this is an effect with regard to which she is passive. She is here dependent on her body reacting in an appropriate way to her deliberate attempts at formation.

From Hegel’s point of view, this shows that the successful acquisition of a habit involves essentially both our spiritual and our natural side. For Hegel, the essence of spirit is freedom.¹⁸ Moreover, this freedom is to be conceived of in terms of a liberation from nature. Thus he writes in a fragment on the ‘Philosophy of Spirit’: ‘What spirit is, is just this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Anthropological Roots of Beauty
• 2 Hegel on Beauty, Nature and Art: Towards a Novel Interpretation
• 3 The Value of Beauty, Aesthetic Experience and the Aesthetic Human Ideal
• 4 The Beautiful Character and Its Limits
• 5 Beyond Beauty: The Pain of Inner Division
• 6 Modern Beauty
• Bibliography
• Index