Jurisprudencia Internacional

When discussing Hegel’s aesthetics one has to be aware of the status of Hegel’s theory of art, as it is far from unified and the Aesthetics has been subject to scrutiny and debate by scholars recently.²¹ Hegel’s position with regards to Romanticism as an art form was varied in that on the one hand Hegel believed romantic art to be part of the development of Spirit, a mode in relation to the holistic development of Spirit towards its full self-awareness. As such, Hegel afforded art an important cognitive

status, as did the contemporary romantics. However, Hegel also demonstrated hostility towards Jena Romanticism and its ideals of fragmentation, irony and self-conscious representation. In discussing Hegel’s approach to romantic art in general we therefore have to demarcate between his historical conception of romantic art and his treatment of philosophical German Romanticism. I would firstly like to adumbrate Hegel’s position towards art in the context of his philosophical theory in general and subsequently critique Hegel’s position with regards to philosophical romanticism (or romantic metaphysics).

For Hegel, art is one of the historical phenomena that define spirit, the other two higher categories being religion and philosophy. Examples of art (depending on the type of art and the historical period) serve to represent the manifestation, or attempted manifestation, of Spirit. Spirit needs to know itself in-itself and for-others, and this works in art in a similar way to formal religion, such as Christianity, whereby man knows God as defined for the corporeality of man, through the incarnation and the resurrection. Man knows himself and is set apart from nature in the same fashion as God relates to man; both processes are an extension and development of pure Spirit:

The universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side) springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e. that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is. Things in nature are only immediate and single, while man as spirit duplicates himself, in that (i) he is as things in nature are, but (ii) he is just as much for himself; he sees himself, represents himself to himself, thinks, and only in the strength of this active placing himself before himself is he spirit. […] The universal need for art, that is to say, is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he again recognises his own self. The need for this spiritual freedom he satisfies, on the one hand, within by making what is within him explicit to himself, but correspondingly by giving outward reality to this his explicit self, and thus in this duplication of himself by bringing what is in him into sight and knowledge for himself and others.²² (my italics)

Art has moved through three stages of sensual expression of the Idea for Hegel:

the symbolic, the classical and the romantic, the romantic being the final stage of art.

This stage is the point where absolute spirit attempts to turn in on itself—therefore losing all clear and beautiful corporeal definition as achieved in the classical stage.

The development of religion ties in with world historical development and in turn correlates with the development of art. Hegel himself points out the movement in the Encyclopedia after the symbolic stage in art and religion where the “—figuration suitable to the Idea is not yet found, and the thought as going forth and wrestling with the figure is exhibited as a negative attitude to it, and yet all the while toiling to work itself into it.”²³ Hegel identified the works of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, the Egyptians and Judaism as being largely symbolic, whereby art often would serve a deictic function, in which the aesthetic signifier stands at a distance from the signified. Next, there is the classical stage of Greek art, which moves beyond primitive aesthetics and religion into the realm of classical representation and anthropomorphic gods. This is the historical period where representational art most closely correlates with religious beliefs and is described by Hegel in the Phenomenology as the “religion of art.” Here we have the strongest bond between form and content. The Idea attempts to find itself and express itself in the most beautiful corporeal forms, the highest of which is sculpture, although Hegel also writes of the beauty of Greek tragedies, such as Sophocles’ Antigone. However, again in an act of infinite negativity, the spirit transcends the corporeal and becomes self-conscious, turning in on itself at the stage of romantic art, whereby we have a spirit expressed not in anthropomorphic signifiers but as the abstract god of monotheism, who signifies a deep Christian love that is transcendent of sensible appearance:

In another way the Idea and the sensuous figure it appears in are incompatible; and that is where the infinite form, subjectivity, is not as in the first extreme a mere superficial personality, but its inmost depth, and 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 in the spiritual world alone.

Romantic art gives up the task of showing him in such an external form and by means of beauty: it presents him only as 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.²⁴

The concept of love had been hugely important to Hegel in his formative Frankfurt years (around 1797) and indeed formed the basis for many of his later ideas, including Spirit, the dialectic and ultimately his theory of ethical life—Sittlichkeit.²⁵ Because of the profound inwardness of its spiritual freedom there is a sense of deep expressiveness in romantic art and a gap once again emerges between the aesthetic signifier and the signified, or the form and content. Christian art is very important as a romantic art in that it in effect humanizes the divine in terms of the sufferings of Christ. Moreover, Hegel also celebrates the beauty of inwardness in figures that express strong independent character such as Macbeth and the personal virtues of characters with strong commitments. These are all very expressive modes of profoundly inward-states of feeling, indicative of romantic art. However, after the Reformation Hegel believed that art lost its religious significance in that it became more secular. Hegel therefore believed that art in effect lost its former power for expressing the divine. Art had begun to rest more with representing the bourgeois everyday, and Hegel believed that in imbuing the everyday with our inner Spirit we could still produce valuable works of art, albeit without the function they once played in our religious and ethical life. Hegel admired the seventeenth century Dutch masters who imbued objects with the modern, secular, human form of freedom, as Stephen Houlgate comments:

By freeing art from religion and by also emancipating the secular, Protestantism allows art to explore with a good conscience the subtle beauty of the everyday. Once art has become liberated in this way, however, its distinctive vocation is no longer to give expression to the Divine. Art is thus no longer able to fulfill its highest calling.

Nevertheless, art is still able to create beauty by giving sensuous expression to concrete human freedom and natural life.²⁶

The capture or the concrete embodiment of human freedom in art is therefore still of significance for Hegel, even if it has lost its former function of giving sensuous expression to the divine.

Art in general is for Hegel a form of concrete universality and therefore the whole precedes its parts, as in religion and philosophy. However, as representation, art works in a sense on a synechdochic level in that it grasps the whole in its concrete universality and yet represents the whole through its particular parts.

Moreover, at the stage of the romantic there is an even wider bridge between the representations of the whole through the parts— at this point Hegel argues that the concrete universality of religion as intuition is more suited to expression of the Spirit in the form of Christianity. Therefore, there is a hierarchy that has developed in which art now becomes subordinate to both religion and philosophy, and inferior in terms of its ability to represent this new realization of Spirit. It is in this sense that Hegel begins to take issue with the Frühromantiker, due to the fact that they placed art on a par with (and sometimes above) philosophy, which for Hegel entailed a drastic misconception of philosophy’s relationship to the concrete universal, in that philosophy sees the whole in relation to the parts and therefore is a more complete representation.