Hegel's Æsthetics and the end of art

To many Hegel's monumental lectures on aesthetics are famous for one thing: his thesis about 'the end of art'. As we shall see, it is not insignificant to note the irony of this fame in light of the fact that although Hegel's lectures occupy over 1,200 pages in two volumes of Malcolm Knox' translation, he never once uses this phrase. What he does discuss is what he describes as the 'dissolution of romantic art'. As the third form of art -the other two being symbolic and classical- it might seem that Hegel means to suggest that art is over and done with forever, but, in the most famous phrase he ever did utter, Hegel says (in the Philosophy of Right): 'The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk'; in other words: it is not the place of philosophy to speculate upon the future course of world history, art, or anything else, but instead to be satisfied with its sober reflection upon what has been, and thus what may be reasonably considered in its proper context and full significance.What this means, clearly, is that in addition to the fact that Hegel himself does not actually say anything about art as such being over, or more dramatically, as some see fit to argue, that art is dead and that Hegel has become a sort of spokesman for its death, he, by his own definition of what philosophy is, cannot say anything about what will or will not happen in art. These claims, however, cannot be seen to be anything other than a mass hallucination, and 'the death of art' itself, then, as akin to an 'apparition' of the Virgin Mary in the clouds.To get at the truth of what Hegel actually did say we shall devote some time to what Hegel himself believed to be the truth. Accordingly the first chapter is entitled 'A Circle of Circles'- which alludes to Hegel's own characterization of his philosophy. As we shall see, rather than simply addressing one topic and then moving on to another and another and so on, Hegel's philosophy constitutes a system- in which each subject is considered in its proper place and in relation to all the others. Hegel describes each area of enquiry as a circle, and thus the system in which they all inhere as a 'circle of circles'.In order to familiarize ourselves with this system we shall examine Hegel's two most significant philosophical works: his first book The Phenomenology of Mind and his second The Science of Logic. It is in these texts that Hegel sets out the core of his philosophy- which, as we shall see, is grounded in the 'science experience' (i.e. phenomenology) and develops outward to encompass logic [the objective structure of thought (and experience itself)], nature, world history, geography, religion, political systems, and so on until everything finds its proper place and the expression of its genuine philosophical significance.One of the more important aspects of Hegel's system is the place he assigns to art (or, as he would say, the place art assumes of itself). Appearing at the end, it falls within the same 'absolute' domain as religion and philosophy. The chapter treating the subject of art in general is called 'Beauty Born of the Spirit'- suggesting that art is no mere luxury or frivolous pursuit of beauty, but instead that beauty itself is something of universal significance. Indeed we shall see that beauty (like religion and philosophy) is bound up with truth- that, in fact, it is nothing other than the sensuous appearance of truth itself. All art which deserves the name strives toward this goal, Hegel says, and when in human history it is perfectly achieved -in 'classical' art- Hegel calls it 'ideal'.Genuinely 'ideal' art, however, constitutes a very small part of the total out-put of art history, and, under the heading of 'A World of Actualized Beauty' we shall consider this history as Hegel unfolds it. Art's classical phase is preceded by 'symbolism' -which Hegel characterizes as 'struggling toward true meanings '- and ultimately superseded by romanticism. In our endeavour to make sense of what Hegel says about 'the end of art' it is this last artform which shall concern us in most detail. Thus the next chapter is headed: 'Bowing the Knee No Longer '- which is the phrase Hegel uses to describe our relation to art today- i.e. no doubt curious and enthusiastic, but no longer reverent. We shall see that Hegel attributes this decline to what he describes as 'the spirit moving on', i.e. our inability to see in art the absolute truth which we experience in other institutions, namely: religion and philosophy . For this reason, he says, 'art has become for us a thing of the past'.The first chapter of our final section, accordingly, is called 'Philosophy Paints its Grey in Grey'- a phrase from the same paragraph of the Philosophy of Right in which Hegel invokes Minerva's owl. The implication, of course, is that when, in Hegel's words, 'a shape of life has grown old', as he believes art has, all we can do as philosophers is try to understand what has happened and why . Having said that, in this chapter we acknowledge that Hegel did not -and, indeed, could not- make any claims as to the future of art, there are clear implications in his lectures on aesthetics that although romanticism has reached a sort of logical conclusion, he has every reason to believe that art will continue on indefinitely as a cultural institution. Most famously he says:'We may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection'. The main purpose of this 'Grey in Grey' chapter, then, is to consider Hegel's arguments about romantic art's 'dissolution' and then to reconstruct them in line with the logical precedent of Hegel's philosophy as a whole (whose structure, as we shall see, these final arguments do not exhibit in their present form). We will see that in this reconstruction it is possible to conclude that a logical space is opened up for a genuine future for art rather than the eternal recurrence of the problematics which signalled the end of romantic art to Hegel in the early nineteenth century (i.e. what we shall see are the extremes of 'academicism' and 'mannerism' in art).With this space thus revealed we shall turn, after the Conclusion in an Epilogue, to the work of contemporary Slovene artist and philosopher Mojca Oblak. The title - 'Obsessed with Originality'- is drawn from the text of Oblak's large scale artiso-philosophical system 'Transcendental Mannerism', which, as the phrase suggests, is concerned to go beyond art in its traditional sense to a new plane not only of artistic creation, but also of experience itself- thus offering us a tangible example of what a post-Hegelian form of art could be like. In our study we shall see how Oblak has based her system on Kantian ideas of autonomy, the sublime, and transcendental freedom. Her results, however, are utterly Hegelian in their achievement of a genuinely 'absolute' form of art which is able to embody the truth (rather than merely allude to it) in the aesthetic dimension.