读书笔记 不喜勿入

I
When coming to the question of ‘what is man’s need to produce works of art,’ Hegel first mentions an opinion according to which art can be left alone:
For it might be held that there are other and even better means of achieving what art aims at and that man has still higher and more important interests than art has the ability to satisfy. (p30)
To some extent Hegel himself shares with this opinion when he argues that religion and philosophy are two ways beyond art in which the knowledge of idea can be achieved fuller and more satisfying. The age in which art was responsible for actualizing what is rational in sensual forms so that the correspondence of idea and sensual appearance can be realized has past; nowadays even if sometimes art still can play an important role as the appearance of what is rational, the ‘highest and absolute needs’ can no longer be satisfied by art. Therefore, it is an ambiguous ‘however’ when Hegel turns, following the above sentence, to say that ‘art seems to proceed from a higher impulse and to satisfy higher needs.’
But what is more interesting is Hegel’s mentioning in the next paragraph that ‘the universal and absolute need’ which gives birth to art
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. (p31)
Then Hegel makes a distinction between the ‘theoretical’ way and the ‘practical’ way in which man acquires his consciousness. But now that the theoretical way concerns that man must ‘see himself, represent himself to himself,’ and, more importantly in my viewpoint, ‘fix before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone like in what is summoned out of himself’ (italics mine), it is hardly to tell the fundamental difference between this ‘theoretical’ way and the ‘practical’ way. Both seem to be the activity of the subject in making external things identical to himself in order to ‘recognize’ himself. Art, rather than stepping beyond the limit of this recognition of the subject, precisely confirms to it:
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 recognizes again his own self. (p31)
I think Hegel’s argument made here can be compared with the passages where he talks about the second way in which ‘what is externally present can be for the spirit.’ In contradistinction to the first way of sensuous apprehension, e.g. desire, the second way is purely ‘theoretical.’ ‘The theoretical study of things,’ he writes,
is not interested in consuming them in their individuality and satisfying itself and maintaining itself sensuously by means of them, but in coming to know them in their universality, finding their inner essence and law, and conceiving them in accordance with their Concept. (p37)
Hegel distinguishes the interest or consideration of art from this ‘theoretical’ relationship between external things and the spirit by emphasizing that art keeps the ‘individual existence’ of the object, neither consuming them to satisfy the sensuous desire of the subject, nor sacrificing them for universal thoughts and concepts. However, one cannot help but doubt whether the following description of the consideration of art is not another version of the ‘theoretical’ thinking:
Man does this [‘altering external things whereon he impressing the seal of his inner being and in which he finds again his own characteristics’] in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. (p31)
I do not think the following question is irrelevant here: what is the difference between Hegel’s argument for the recognition of the subject and the modern instrumental reason criticized by Horkheimer and Adorno? The instrumental reason which originated in the Enlightenment, according to the two authors, consists in sacrificing what is non-identical to the self-identity of the subject, in making what is non-identical identical so that a nominalist order of things can be established. The ‘objective-ness’ of things is dismissed in the process of making things to be scientific objects. The will-to-knowledge as will-to-power of the subject is quite similar with regard to Hegel’s arguments. Furthermore, even if we concede that the whole process of the recognition of the subject cannot be equaled to the subject of the instrumental reason, in that in the last analysis it is the Spirit, rather than any finite subjective perspective, that is acting out itself, Hegel’s argument cannot elide the suspicion. Considering that particular forms of sensual appearance come out from the requirement of the Idea (as the content of art), the perceiving (loosely used here, because thinking and perceiving are distinguished by Hegel elsewhere) of the subject towards artworks must not be innocent: the ‘individual existence’ of the object is only possible with the presupposition that art is the sensual appearance of the Idea. In this sense, the understanding of art is a singular philosophical presumption of Hegel, and it becomes presumptuous when Hegel tries to differentiate his own thinking from what he calls ‘theoretical consideration.’ That Hegel is able to claim that his philosophy of art does not abandon the appearance of art is because his philosophy absorbs what is external (sensual materials and forms, for instance) into the immanent logic of the Idea’s exteriorization. Before the object can respond or correspond to the subject, it is already a plaything for the subject.
II
[1. Immanent form] When explaining the reconciliation in art between the Idea and its form, i.e. the configuration of external, sensual materials, Hegel says that the first point is ‘the demand that the content which is to come into artistic representation should be in itself qualified for such representation.’ (p70; all italics are mine) In other words, dissimilar to later literary theoreticians, Hegel denies the independent quality of ‘form’—to claim bluntly that ‘form’ is determined by ‘content’ (i.e. the Idea) might not be a misunderstanding of Hegel. Besides, Hegel explicitly points out that the criterion by which the quality of an artwork can be judged is closely related to the content. (see p74.) Thus, since the correspondence of forms and the content is, fundamentally speaking, determined by the Idea, it is quite reasonable to accept Hegel’s following claim:
The Idea must be determined in and through itself as a concrete totality, and therefore possess in itself the principle and measure of its particularization and determinacy in external appearance. (p75)
And:
The truly concrete Idea alone produces its true configuration, and this correspondence of the two is the Ideal. (ibid)
Thus said, that Hegel asserts the consideration of objects as beautiful can leave objects alone as ‘being inherently free and infinite’ (p114) is rather puzzling. For example, Hegel emphasizes that, distinguished from the passive thought which leads to the unfreedom of the subject, and the practical thought, which utilizes objects as the satisfaction of (physical) desires, the contemplation of beauty makes a perfect ‘interpenetration’ between the Concept and its appearance legible:
The external form and shape does not remain separate from the external material, nor is it stamped on it mechanically for some other purposes; it appears as the form immanent in the reality and corresponding with the nature of that reality, the form giving itself an outward shape. (p115)
On what ground can Hegel claim that the external appearance, or in another sense, the form of art, can keep its ‘immanent’ form ‘in reality’ intact? But a question prior to this one logically may be: does the form which is immanent to the reality itself exist? It seems so. As far as I can find, Hegel at least hints it in one paragraph where he talks about the ‘secret harmony’ between external sensual materials and artistic forms which are determined by the Idea:
Since [sensuous existence], like spirit, has the Concept implicitly for its inner soul, a specific sensuous material does thereby…acquire a closer relation and a secret harmony with the spiritual differences and forms of artistic configuration. (p73)
However, even in this somewhat mystical relationship of ‘secret harmony,’ what is ‘immanent to the reality’ is preconditioned by the Concept insofar as only under the presupposition of the subjective or ideal unity of the Concept as such can one begin to talk about such kind of ‘closer relation’ and ‘secret harmony.’ I don’t want to leap from this point to the critique of Hegel that he does not pay enough attention to the freedom of external objects, the autonomy of things, etc. because it seems that Hegel’s fundamental point of departure is anthropomorphic: that is, in construing the concreteness of art’s content and presentation, Hegel takes an example—rather than, we might say, an analogy, even if it is of course not an example of art—by appeal to the human body: ‘for instance, the natural shape of the human body is such a sensuously concrete thing, capable of displaying spirit, which is concrete in itself, and of showing itself in conformity with it.’ (p71) I wonder if the human body is not only an instance (even if an exemplary one) in displaying the spirit, but also a meta-metaphor for Hegel’s thought on the spirit. I’m not saying that if this is the case, then Hegel is guilty of anthropocentrism; my primary concern is that while Hegel takes this point of departure for granted, I think the legitimacy is not such self-evident.
[2. Religion] It seems that Hegel uses the term ‘religion’ in at least two different senses: on the one hand, ‘religion’ is one higher stage than art in which the spirit can realize itself, standing between art and philosophy. But on the other hand, when Hegel says, for instance, that ‘art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone, a satisfaction that, at least on the part of religion, was most intimately linked with art’ (p10), what he means by ‘religion’ is definitely a rigorous philosophical category after art. What compounds the problem is Hegel’s analogy between art and religion when he characterizes the three types of art in its detailed forms. Let us check the following passage a little bit closely:
In the analogous sphere of religion, with which art at its highest stage is immediately connected, we conceive this same difference as follows… These three fundamental differences arise also in the world of art in independent development. (p83)
With regard to the first sentence, it is readily to grasp what Hegel means here: at the final stage of art, i.e. romantic art, the spirit begins to exceed the limited form and turn into itself—hence the inwardness of the subject and the so-called ‘pictorial thinking’ (but what is the difference between this peculiar form of thinking for religion and the ‘imagination’ for art, which is also said highly by Hegel as an encompassing element for all forms of art [see p90]?). However, in the second sentence, we find that curiously the sequential order of art and religion becomes a semi-parallel one: the different stages in religion seem to be corresponding to the three types of art. Elsewhere, Hegel also mentions that religion can make use of art for the sake of itself. Is art in itself intertwined to religion from the very beginning, or shall we distinguish different meanings of ‘religion’ in Hegel?
When touching upon the thesis of ‘end of art’ again in the Introduction to the first part, Hegel takes the following example to show that ‘the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit’:
No matter how we see God the Father, Christ, and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help; we bow the knee no longer before these artistic portrayals. (p103)
This example sounds rather weird because it shows less the art’s ceasing to function to satisfy the need of the spirit than the separation of art from religion. If the separation can be understood as the evidence art loses its supreme position it once had, does it mean that, even in times art could fulfill the need of the spirit, it was religion (in its Hegelian determination) which determined the working of art? If so, the whole Aesthetics should be just one part of The Philosophy of Religion.
III
[Hegel's Critique of the Kantian Aesthetics]
Even though Hegel describes Kant’s ‘reflective judgment’ as ‘subjective,’ one can find his convergence with Kant when he summarizes Kant’s notion of ‘purposiveness’ as follows:
To this end [to think the particular as contained under the universal—WQ] it needs a law, a principle, which it has to give to itself, and as this law Kant propounds ‘purposiveness’ or teleology. …in the teleological judgment of living things, Kant comes to the point of so regarding the living organism that in it the concept, the universal, contains the particular too, and, as an end, it determines the particular and external…not from without but from within, and in such a way that the particular corresponds to the end of its own accord. (p57)
Hegel argues that Kant, thinking of the reconciliation between the particular and the universal notwithstanding, in the last analysis falls into subjective contemplation rather than making the production of art ‘absolutely true and actual.’ (p60) One can readily find the similarity of Hegel’s characterization of the self-unfolding movement of the spirit, during which ‘appearance’ or shining forth of the idea is the way in which ‘essence’ can be distinguished from merely ‘being’: ‘Essence is not something beyond or behind appearance, but—just because it is the essence which exists—the existence is Appearance.’ (Logic, #131, Wallace: p186) In other words, the production of art in Hegel as the natural art in Kant, is a kind of reconciliation between what is otherwise antithetical or oppositional, though, the movement of the spirit in Hegel not only affirms itself by merely repeating the subjective self-identity in its assumption of the ‘reflective judgment,’ but more importantly, it absorbs what is other than itself into itself—or rather, it produces its products in the shape confirming to its own development. In a politico-philosophical sense, one may conceive this difference between Kant and Hegel as a difference between the emergent period of modern bourgeoisie and its rising period; that is, whilst in its incipience the bourgeois class can, out of its own whimsical thought, think of a reconciled world in which actual contradictions and oppositions would be cancelled or neutralized, it then starts to act out the possibility of reconciliation in its own terms and by its own hands. Hence numerous oppositions and otherness must be taken into consideration: the middle class simply cannot produce its own world without accounting for what is other-than-itself, even if eventually this ‘otherness’ must be (re)produced as the product of itself.
Is it fair to say that Kant’s ‘reflective judgment’ is ultimately ‘subjective’ philosophically, then? Let me quote here the corresponding paragraph in Kant where the notion of ‘reflective judgment’ is qualified:
The principle can be no other than the following: As universal laws of nature have their ground in our understanding, which prescribes them to nature (although only according to the universal concept of it as nature), so particular empirical laws, in respect of what is in them left undetermined by these universal laws, must be considered in accordance with such a unity as they would have if an understanding (although not our understanding) had furnished them to our cognitive faculties so as to make possible a system of experience according to particular laws of nature. Not as if, in this way, such an understanding must be assumed as actual (for it is only our reflective judgment to which this idea serves as a principle—for reflecting, not for determining); but this faculty thus gives a law only to itself, and not to nature. (CJ, Bernard: p15; italics mine)
It is quite clear that not only that the ‘reflective judgment’ has no influence on nature, but also, as Samuel Weber points out, that the way ‘such an understanding’ does not ‘really ha[ve] to be assumed’ accentuates the uncertain status of an assumption that, were it to be effective, it must in a certain sense ‘seek to efface itself’ (Weber: pxix). In this sense, the ‘reflective judgment’ can be said to be ‘subjective’ in two senses: first, it has nothing to do with nature, i.e. what is objective, what is simply there; second, even to assume such an assumption itself is rootless in objectively-justifiable terms; rather, it seems to be an expediency in the last instance.
IV
[On ‘the end of art’]
Hegel raises the question of the end of art in the framework of his understanding of art as the concrete reconciliation between the content and the form, the rational and the sensuous material, as the ‘objectified universality,’ despite or because of art’s limitation of particularity and concreteness. The orientation of the problem of ‘end of art’ roots in the process that, insofar as the Idea proceeds from the symbolic art, the classic art, to the romantic art, it cannot hold itself within the appearance in its concrete forms, but rather exceeds what is particular and returns to inwardness with conforming to the nature of the Spirit, namely, its absolute and infinite. It is noteworthy to examine above all Hegel’s description of the relationship between ‘the content’ and ‘the form.’ On the one hand, it is quite clear that ‘form’ of art is produced by the content, i.e. the Idea itself—moreover, the determinacy of the Idea itself constructs ‘the bridge to appearance’. Hegel says,
The inherently concrete Idea carries within itself the principle of its mode of appearance and is therefore its own free configurator. Thus the truly concrete Idea alone produces its true configuration, and this correspondence of the two is the Ideal. (p75)
Also, we know that Hegel argues that the defectiveness of form results from the defectiveness of content. So far, so good. But on the other hand, can one therefore say that the beauty of form conforms to the beauty of content? At first glance, it seems so, because it is the content which determines for itself the proper form art should take as the appearance of the idea. Considering that Hegel says ‘works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought,’ (p74) one might have reason to make an equivalence between the beauty of form and the beauty of content. But the problem seems not to be such simple. When revisiting the relationship between the content and the form, Hegel claims that
beauty of form as such does not always afford what we have called the Ideal, because the Ideal requires also individuality of content and therefore also of form. For example, a face altogether regular in form and beautiful may nevertheless be cold and expressionless. (p173)
Things may become clearer if we distinguish the ‘beauty of form’ of the above passage, as simply a formal (or formalistic) determination of what is external in terms of understanding, from ‘form’ in the particular Hegelian sense, i.e. form determined and produced by the Idea. Nevertheless, it seems that the relationship between the content and the form is not as closely connected to each other—not in the sense that the Idea is yet to be reconciled with the external material, but in the sense that even in the summit of ‘fine art,’ there seems to exist something at the level of ‘form’ which does not necessarily confirm with the Idea, while which can be regarded as ‘beautiful’ even if Hegel attributes it into the category of ‘understanding’ rather than ‘reason.’ Can we push this point a little bit further to say that, the ‘beauty of form as such’ might be symbolically (in a Hegelian sense) seen as art’s pointing beyond the scope defined by Hegel—that is, can we argue what is slightly different from Hegel in saying that the ‘end of art’ is not a requirement by/of philosophy as thinking, but a requirement of art itself?
Maybe it is at this point that, I think, we can briefly introduce Adorno’s discussion of the ‘end of art’ into the discussion. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno seems to turn the Hegelian relationship between the content and the form inside out when he says, for example,
Art and artworks are perishable…because right into the smallest detail of their autonomy, which sanctions the socially determined splitting off of spirit by the division of labor, they are not only art but something foreign and opposed to it. Admixed with art’s own concept is the ferment of its own abolition. (p4)
Why art’s concept contains the abolition of itself? The primary reason lies not within art, as Hegel might say, in the way that the Idea would eventually seek for its realization through turning to inwardness; on the contrary, the reason lies in something outside the ‘fine art’ per se. The very autonomy of art sanctions the capitalist principle of the division of labor, which stands opposite to the ideal of totality and unity of art. In this sense, art needs to react to the reality by its immanent dynamics instead of mechanically representing the ‘historical reality.’ According to Adorno, ‘the aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production…are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations or production.’ (p5) Rather than merely a reflection of relations of production in society as a whole, art inheres within itself the aesthetic relations of production—that is, art resembles the historical process of society: ‘The unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.’ (p6) Thus considered, art’s relationship to the social in the last analysis is determined by struggles in terms of forces of production and relations of production—or, in terms of social labor.
V [On Art and State]
According to Hegel, the state is the actualization of the rational, on which not only modern morality, but also an entire ethical world is based. With regard to the very position the state occupies in the aesthetic system, one can readily find that it is structured within the contrast between ancient and modern, artistic and prosaic; in other words, while in the Heroic Age the substantiality and universality stamp upon the subject on its own account, the subject in the modern prosaic world finds himself fragmented and atomized. But on the other hand, considering that state institutions are the very exteriorization of the idea, individuals are no longer determined by whimsical thoughts and accidental experiences, but become able to live an ethical life, and hence the reconstitution of ‘individuality’:
In the state proper, that is to say, laws, customs, rights are valid by constituting the universal and rational characteristics of freedom, and, moreover, by being present in this their universality and abstraction, no longer conditioned by accidental whims and particular personal peculiarities. (p182)
If one rushes therefore to conclude that the contrast between the subject living in the epic world and the subject living in modern state is that between ancient and modern—of course, ‘modernity’ in Hegel’s argument emerges no earlier than the reformation of Protestantism—one might well be shocked when Hegel takes Rome as an exemplar for the rational state when he says, for example: ‘The Romans already had their city and their legal institutions, and, in contrast to the state as the universal end, personality had to be sacrificed. To be just a Roman, to visualize in his own personal energies only the Roman state, the fatherland and its grandeur and power, this is the seriousness and dignity of Roman virtue.’ (p185) What compounds the problem further is Hegel’s discussion of the ‘civilized state,’ in which he contrasts the unfreedom of people of the lower classes in such a state with the freedom of the ‘royal families.’ It seems that the epic subject turns out to be a prince-like character who takes the responsibility for ‘civil order’ as such, which explains in turn the possibility that they can contain within themselves the association between individuality and universality. Does it mean, then, not only that the ‘civilized state’ is different from the ‘rational state,’ but also, and more importantly, that one cannot equate the ‘rational state’ with the modern state? I think one way to resolve these problems with a stroke is to follow Hegel’s argument on ‘freedom’ as such. Although the subject in Greek did hold the immediate coalescence of the individual with the universality, this freedom has the tendency of self-overcoming viewed from the self-unfolding movement of the Idea because within this freedom, as Hegel says elsewhere,
there is awakened the need for a higher freedom of the subject in himself; he claims to be free not only in the state, as the substantial whole, not only in the accepted ethical and legal code, but in his own heart, because he wants to generate out of his own resources the good and the right in his subjective knowing and bring it into recognition. (p510)
The modern subject, because of the various state institutions confronting him, must feel the conflict between the end of the state and that of himself as an inherently ‘free individual,’ which is the very target of Hegel’s vehement critique of the ironic ‘beautiful soul.’ But nevertheless the longing for ‘subjective freedom’ is an advance considering that now the subject non longer needs to identify himself with the end of the state, but gains his own autonomy. This is to deny the ‘substantial’ wholeness of the state; rather, the only problem is that, with the division of labor, the fragmentation of human activities, and the alienation of human being, the subject cannot immediately recognize himself in the external state institutions, nor—actually this is just the same thing expressed in another way—can he recognize the rationality embodied in the state. In this sense, Hegel’s praise of Dutch genre paintings as if they were Greek artworks can be understood as an argument that it is in the seemingly vulgar painting that, at the first time in history, the freedom characteristic of modern man affirms itself immediately and concretely. This is a rare moment in the grand historical stage of ‘romantic art’ that the glimpse of the Ideal of ‘classical art’ shines forth within a prosaic world. However, one must distinguish the freedom gained by Dutch people and the ancient freedom inhered in epic subjects. It is the case that in these paintings an ancient Ideal is restored; far from that, it is the self-proclaim of freedom of the modern bourgeois subject that Hegel emphasizes—theirs is a freedom of inwardness and modern subjectivity that ancient subjects did not experience. Art therefore is indispensable for the modern subject to reconcile himself with the rational state because, not being able to recognize the fact that the state is the actualization of the Idea, the subject has to appeal to art, which is an appearance of the Idea, but also a sensuous and individual appearance. Is this claim cancels the autonomy of art, submitting art to politics? Yes and no. On one hand, art is waiting for its overcoming by religion and philosophy, which means art is (pre)determined to serve as a vehicle for the Idea. In this sense, it is as though we were arguing that the state, which is an actualized Idea, in order for its own purpose, i.e. to be understood by the subject, makes use of a tool called ‘art.’ But on the other hand, now that what art individually embodies and the state universally actualized is just the same thing, that is, the Idea, what does it matter in saying that art is used to serve the state? Art is merely a means for the state. Yes, so what?
VI [On Volume 1, Chapter 3]
In the third chapter of Part I, Hegel revisits the opposition between Ideal and nature in the following passage:
In this connection ‘natural’ cannot be used in the strict sense of the word, for as the external configuration of spirit it has no value in simply existing immediately as the life of animals, the natural landscape, etc.; on the contrary, in accordance with its specific character of being the spirit which gives itself a body, it appears here only as an expression of spirit, and so already as idealized. (p167)
While on one side both ‘animals’ and ‘the natural landscape’ are classified into the category of ‘natural’ properly understood, which means simultaneously a kind of immediate being in itself without mediation and self-consciousness, contingent, disoriented, on the other side is situated art as the pure appearance of the spirit ‘which gives itself a body.’ What distinguishes human being from animal, then, is precisely man’s ability to ‘idealize’ according to the requirement of the spirit itself. But how can one reconcile the always ‘already’ ‘idealized’ expression of spirit of what is external with Hegel’s another claim that in the beautiful object freedom can be rendered to both the subject and the object, when he says, ‘the external form and shape does not remain separate from the external material, nor is it stamped on it mechanically for some other purposes; it appears as the form immanent in the reality and corresponding with the nature of that reality, the form giving itself an outward shape’ (p115)? How can one derive the ‘immanent unity and correspondence’ of what is externally existent and the Concept, considering that what is ‘natural’ proper to the beautiful (instead of proper to its own being) is itself a product of idealization? One way to approach this difficulty, I think, is to argue that when Hegel talks about what is external, what is ‘natural,’ to the spirit, he actually means but the ‘external configuration of spirit,’ i.e. the form of the art. Considering that the proper form of art is indeed produced by the idea, while external materials which will be used to fulfill the form may be said to carry with them some extent of autonomy (which is not necessarily the artistic autonomy, as Hegel will discuss at the end of Part III), from which one might say that Hegel does not contradict with himself in saying that what is ‘natural’ is already idealized. But is this really the case?
Let us return to the section on ‘The Idea in Existence,’ where Hegel at the first time discusses the identity between what is externally existent (‘reality’) and the Concept:
Truth not at all in the subjective sense that there is an accordance between some existent and my ideas, but in the objective meaning that the ego or an external object, an action, an event, a situation in its reality is itself a realization of the Concept. If this identity is not established, then the existent is only an appearance in which, not the total Concept, but only one abstract side of I is objectified… (pp. 110-111)
The identity of reality to the Concept is not the purely subjective product; but it does not mean the Concept is a transcendental power beyond man’s approach. On the contrary, I think one should understand what Hegel calls ‘subjective sense’ as pointing to the analytical attitude held by a Kantian thinking subject who satisfies himself with analyzing and contemplating with the given external without being able to activate the movement of the spirit. In fact, in light of Hegel’s subject of ‘reason,’ ‘external objectivity’ itself has no independent place: ‘external objectivity, insofar as it is the actuality of the Ideal, must give up its purely objective independence and inflexibility in order to evince itself as identical with that [subjectivity] of which it is the external existence.’ (p253) But here we are facing the same puzzling problem once again: Hegel seems to argue, on one hand, that art in contradistinction to either analytical reason or practical appropriation, gives freedom to ‘natural,’ while on the other hand, he says time and again that what is external must submit itself to the requirement of the Idea. In my point of view, Hegel hints at the solution to this problem only when he suggests that the production of art is a kind of human labor. Just several lines below his discussion about the lack of independence of the external objectivity, Hegel writes:
This world produced by the human spirit is itself again a totality; in its existence this totality forms an objective whole with which individuals, moving on this ground, must stand in essential connection. (p253; italics mine)
Individuals must have the connection between what is subjective and what is objective not (only) because otherwise man would not be able to grasp what is external to him, but rather because the totality, in which the objective side and the subjective side reconciled into a whole, is produced by the human spirit—man as man is defined by his reconciliation with what seems to be external, alien, other, to him, which eventually turns out to be his own product. That is why, I think, Hegel attributes what is called the ‘higher aim’ of human life with labor or ‘work’ when he rejects the utopian scene of Golden Age as ‘a restricted mode of life’ which is inactive and insufficient for the development of the spirit. In comparison, ‘[a] full and entire human life requires higher urgings, and this closest association with nature and its immediate products cannot satisfy it any longer. Man may not pass his life in such an idyllic poverty of spirit; he must work. What he has an urge for, he must struggle to obtain by his own activity.’ (p259) To insist that the genuine objectivity for the spirit is itself produced by and from the spirit does not mean, of course, that nothing material exists and only what is idealistic is real. Hegel is not an idealist as radical as, say, George Berkeley; for him the crucial problem is not how to justify the status of external existence but rather how to evaluate from the point of the spirit. In comparison with the activity of the spirit, contrasted with the ‘self-determining, thinking, and willing power’ as he says, ‘everything else is only relatively and momentarily independent.’ What belongs to this ‘everything else,’ maybe? The first thing comes to Hegel’s mind, surprisingly (or not surprising at all), is nature—
The sensuous phenomena of nature, the sun, the sky, stars, plants, animals, stones, streams, the sea, have only an abstract relation to themselves, and in the steady process of nature are drawn into connection with other existents, so that only for finite perception can they count as independent. (p428)
Contrary to one’s intuitive thinking, Hegel argues that the existence of natural things, the relation of these things to themselves, is abstract and only momentarily independent—one might even say that in themselves they have no ‘external objectivity.’ Only as the embodiment, as the externalized or idealized product of the spirit, is nature’s objectivity revealed and observed by the subject, while nature in itself is merely self-external and self-estranged. But we know that the impulse to produce art as the shining forth of the idea taking the external appearance before the subject in certain forms is a gradual development with several steps, first of which is the stage of symbolic art. The identity between what is external and what is idea is still an inadequate one at first, which means that the subject cannot yet penetrate into the Absolute which he wants to express by simply given external things; the decisive moment lies in the symbol’s getting rid of the constraint of ‘given-ness’ and to produce the externality according to, originating from, the meaning of itself (the Absolute). This is how Hegel puts it:
[T]he symbol must now attain configuration. For although the meaning completely pertinent up to this point has for its content the element of the negation of the natural, still the truly inward only now begins to wrest its way out of the natural and is therefore still intertwined with the external mode of appearance… (p350)
After resolving the problem of the freedom of what is ‘natural,’ however, we are faced with some further problems: What is, then, the very starting point of the whole movement of the spirit at its very beginning? What is the ‘first motivation’ that triggers the self-unfolding activity of the subject?
VII [On Architecture]
I will focus on a passage which has been picked up in last class. Hegel emphasizes the relationship between architecture and the ‘national unification’ so much so that this section begins with a question, quoted from Goethe, simple but powerful: ‘What is holy?’ As Hegel continues,
In this sense we may say that the holy with the aim of this concord, and as this concord, has been the first content of independent architecture. …In the wide plains of the Euphrates an enormous architectural work was erected; it was built in common, and the aim and content of the work was at the same time the community [sc. collectivity] of those who constructed it. (638)
It is important to notice that Hegel traces the collectivity created by/with architecture to collective labor in saying, immediately following the above passage, that ‘the ensemble of all the peoples at that period worked at this task and since they all came together to complete an immense work like this, the product of their labor was to be a bond which was to link them together (as we are linked by manners, customs, and the legal constitution of the state) by means of the excavated site and ground, the assembled blocks of stone, and the as it were architectural cultivation of the country.’ (ibid; italics mine) To this extent, the function of architecture is quite political in the sense that the ‘politicalness’ of a particular group of people, their engendering of collectivity and sense of community, are dependent upon the crystalized collective labor—i.e. the architecture. Architecture, therefore, not only makes artistic appreciation possible, but also makes politics possible.
So far, so good. A problem surfaces, however, when we consider what Hegel says, as merely a supplement or analogy, in the bracket that architecture as a product of collective labor plays a political role similar to how our manners and customs work to consolidate our political communities. Considering from Hegel’s general argument about the development of different modes of art, which corresponds to the development of the spirit itself, one might have reason to say that the actualization of the rational state is a step far-surpassing the sensuous externalization of the Idea by means of artworks. However, if architecture is, or was, that which makes collectivity and hence ‘politics’ per se possible for people, can one argue for the correspondence between the ‘limitedness’ (not merely the ‘limit’) of architecture—or, more properly speaking, a particular assemblage of architectures, e.g. a city—and the ‘limitedness’ of a political community? To some extent, this seems to be the case when taking into account Negri’s and Hardt’s discourse on the Empire, which means first and foremost the end of ‘politicalness’ and the transformation of ‘politicalness’ into domestic governance. The envision of Empire does not contradict with Hegel’s philosophy of history if only because, in comparing the Empire with the so-called ‘universal homogeneous state’ described by Alexander Kojeve, the two have many similarities and share many Hegelian assumptions. But on the other hand, as the italicized supplement suggests, Hegel does not think that architecture is still playing the function of what nowadays our customs and manners are playing, that is, constituting the consciousness of collectivity of a particular political group. The spirit must transcend architecture as merely the first mode of art in the route of art’s development: it cannot be satisfied with staying at this ambiguous symbolic period. Thus, the responsibility of constituting the consciousness of collectivity is accordingly transferred to other kinds of social and political institutions (not necessarily art). It seems that the development of spirit is also the development of state. What is paradoxical, however, is the seemingly return of the ‘politicalness’ of architecture at the period of advanced capitalism and ‘the Empire’: international ‘phenomenal’ cities and ‘spectacles’ blend successfully the working of capitalization (with its deployment of power-relations delving into each and every pore of social organism) with city design, rendering what is traditionally artistic, what is both anonymous (due to the nature of collective labor) and what embodies political collectivity, alienated from both residents and workers. Architecture or city-design in nowadays carries with itself another kind of politicalness: that which might be called as the ‘de-politicized politics.’
VIII [On Painting]
According to Hegel, painting should express the spirit instead of merely representing what is naturally given. For example, he writes,
'This depth of spiritual feeling painting also takes as a subject. But on this account these natural objects as such in their purely external form and juxtaposition should not be the real subject-matter of painting, because, if they were, painting would become mere imitation; on the contrary, the life of nature, which extends through everything, and the characteristic sympathy between objects thus animated and specific moods of the soul, is what painting has to emphasize and portray in a lively way in its landscapes. (832)'
At first glance, what Hegel is saying in this passage is quite clear and straightforward. To paraphrase it in an even simpler way: art expresses the idea of the spirit rather than the nature proper. The problem is, if the content of art is determined beforehand, and all that art is responsible for is to shape this otherwise shapeless content (or idea) of the spirit—that is, if the idea of the spirit is ontologically given prior to the development of artworks (at least in the case of classical art)—then how or why ‘mere imitation’ should be excluded from ‘art’ as a whole is questionable. There are at least two questions worth mentioning. First, the exclusion of ‘mere imitation’ from art implies that, the ‘artisanship’ aspect of art, i.e. artist’s dealing with ‘form’ under principles of ‘understanding’ rather than ‘reason,’ cannot be included as part of Hegel’s aesthetic edifice. However, this stark claim apparently contradicts with Hegel’s lengthy discussion on ‘form’ in terms of, say, symmetry, harmony, and so on. Hegel does try to do justice to what generally is seen as the ‘form’ of art—or, more properly, what is commonly called ‘artistic skill.’ But what is excluded here is not primarily the ‘skill,’ but the mistaken content, i.e. the nature proper. The two elements—the nature and the ‘form’ of art—seem quite different, but I think Hegel insistently tries to exclude them from his framework of aesthetics; the reason of which has to be left for another time.
Second, considering that the ‘content’ of art—and here, of painting—is established waiting for its artistic representation, to what extent can Hegel distinguish himself from Plato’s denigration of art in Republics, according to which artists are only imitating what is produced by technicians, who in turn are but imitating the ‘idea’ of things? If it is the case that at the stage of classical art, thanks to the perfect correspondence in art between content and form, the idea and the sensuous appearance, audience is able to recognize the otherwise obscure—even if not in the least nonexistent—‘content’ or the idea of the spirit, at the stage of romantic art one might have every reason to farewell artworks to pursue the idea in religions and philosophy. But paradoxically, it is in the mode of poetry, Hegel argues, that art at the first time culminates its identity between content and form—the content of poetry is its form and vice versa.
When coming to the question of ‘what is man’s need to produce works of art,’ Hegel first mentions an opinion according to which art can be left alone:
For it might be held that there are other and even better means of achieving what art aims at and that man has still higher and more important interests than art has the ability to satisfy. (p30)
To some extent Hegel himself shares with this opinion when he argues that religion and philosophy are two ways beyond art in which the knowledge of idea can be achieved fuller and more satisfying. The age in which art was responsible for actualizing what is rational in sensual forms so that the correspondence of idea and sensual appearance can be realized has past; nowadays even if sometimes art still can play an important role as the appearance of what is rational, the ‘highest and absolute needs’ can no longer be satisfied by art. Therefore, it is an ambiguous ‘however’ when Hegel turns, following the above sentence, to say that ‘art seems to proceed from a higher impulse and to satisfy higher needs.’
But what is more interesting is Hegel’s mentioning in the next paragraph that ‘the universal and absolute need’ which gives birth to art
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. (p31)
Then Hegel makes a distinction between the ‘theoretical’ way and the ‘practical’ way in which man acquires his consciousness. But now that the theoretical way concerns that man must ‘see himself, represent himself to himself,’ and, more importantly in my viewpoint, ‘fix before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone like in what is summoned out of himself’ (italics mine), it is hardly to tell the fundamental difference between this ‘theoretical’ way and the ‘practical’ way. Both seem to be the activity of the subject in making external things identical to himself in order to ‘recognize’ himself. Art, rather than stepping beyond the limit of this recognition of the subject, precisely confirms to it:
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 recognizes again his own self. (p31)
I think Hegel’s argument made here can be compared with the passages where he talks about the second way in which ‘what is externally present can be for the spirit.’ In contradistinction to the first way of sensuous apprehension, e.g. desire, the second way is purely ‘theoretical.’ ‘The theoretical study of things,’ he writes,
is not interested in consuming them in their individuality and satisfying itself and maintaining itself sensuously by means of them, but in coming to know them in their universality, finding their inner essence and law, and conceiving them in accordance with their Concept. (p37)
Hegel distinguishes the interest or consideration of art from this ‘theoretical’ relationship between external things and the spirit by emphasizing that art keeps the ‘individual existence’ of the object, neither consuming them to satisfy the sensuous desire of the subject, nor sacrificing them for universal thoughts and concepts. However, one cannot help but doubt whether the following description of the consideration of art is not another version of the ‘theoretical’ thinking:
Man does this [‘altering external things whereon he impressing the seal of his inner being and in which he finds again his own characteristics’] in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself. (p31)
I do not think the following question is irrelevant here: what is the difference between Hegel’s argument for the recognition of the subject and the modern instrumental reason criticized by Horkheimer and Adorno? The instrumental reason which originated in the Enlightenment, according to the two authors, consists in sacrificing what is non-identical to the self-identity of the subject, in making what is non-identical identical so that a nominalist order of things can be established. The ‘objective-ness’ of things is dismissed in the process of making things to be scientific objects. The will-to-knowledge as will-to-power of the subject is quite similar with regard to Hegel’s arguments. Furthermore, even if we concede that the whole process of the recognition of the subject cannot be equaled to the subject of the instrumental reason, in that in the last analysis it is the Spirit, rather than any finite subjective perspective, that is acting out itself, Hegel’s argument cannot elide the suspicion. Considering that particular forms of sensual appearance come out from the requirement of the Idea (as the content of art), the perceiving (loosely used here, because thinking and perceiving are distinguished by Hegel elsewhere) of the subject towards artworks must not be innocent: the ‘individual existence’ of the object is only possible with the presupposition that art is the sensual appearance of the Idea. In this sense, the understanding of art is a singular philosophical presumption of Hegel, and it becomes presumptuous when Hegel tries to differentiate his own thinking from what he calls ‘theoretical consideration.’ That Hegel is able to claim that his philosophy of art does not abandon the appearance of art is because his philosophy absorbs what is external (sensual materials and forms, for instance) into the immanent logic of the Idea’s exteriorization. Before the object can respond or correspond to the subject, it is already a plaything for the subject.
II
[1. Immanent form] When explaining the reconciliation in art between the Idea and its form, i.e. the configuration of external, sensual materials, Hegel says that the first point is ‘the demand that the content which is to come into artistic representation should be in itself qualified for such representation.’ (p70; all italics are mine) In other words, dissimilar to later literary theoreticians, Hegel denies the independent quality of ‘form’—to claim bluntly that ‘form’ is determined by ‘content’ (i.e. the Idea) might not be a misunderstanding of Hegel. Besides, Hegel explicitly points out that the criterion by which the quality of an artwork can be judged is closely related to the content. (see p74.) Thus, since the correspondence of forms and the content is, fundamentally speaking, determined by the Idea, it is quite reasonable to accept Hegel’s following claim:
The Idea must be determined in and through itself as a concrete totality, and therefore possess in itself the principle and measure of its particularization and determinacy in external appearance. (p75)
And:
The truly concrete Idea alone produces its true configuration, and this correspondence of the two is the Ideal. (ibid)
Thus said, that Hegel asserts the consideration of objects as beautiful can leave objects alone as ‘being inherently free and infinite’ (p114) is rather puzzling. For example, Hegel emphasizes that, distinguished from the passive thought which leads to the unfreedom of the subject, and the practical thought, which utilizes objects as the satisfaction of (physical) desires, the contemplation of beauty makes a perfect ‘interpenetration’ between the Concept and its appearance legible:
The external form and shape does not remain separate from the external material, nor is it stamped on it mechanically for some other purposes; it appears as the form immanent in the reality and corresponding with the nature of that reality, the form giving itself an outward shape. (p115)
On what ground can Hegel claim that the external appearance, or in another sense, the form of art, can keep its ‘immanent’ form ‘in reality’ intact? But a question prior to this one logically may be: does the form which is immanent to the reality itself exist? It seems so. As far as I can find, Hegel at least hints it in one paragraph where he talks about the ‘secret harmony’ between external sensual materials and artistic forms which are determined by the Idea:
Since [sensuous existence], like spirit, has the Concept implicitly for its inner soul, a specific sensuous material does thereby…acquire a closer relation and a secret harmony with the spiritual differences and forms of artistic configuration. (p73)
However, even in this somewhat mystical relationship of ‘secret harmony,’ what is ‘immanent to the reality’ is preconditioned by the Concept insofar as only under the presupposition of the subjective or ideal unity of the Concept as such can one begin to talk about such kind of ‘closer relation’ and ‘secret harmony.’ I don’t want to leap from this point to the critique of Hegel that he does not pay enough attention to the freedom of external objects, the autonomy of things, etc. because it seems that Hegel’s fundamental point of departure is anthropomorphic: that is, in construing the concreteness of art’s content and presentation, Hegel takes an example—rather than, we might say, an analogy, even if it is of course not an example of art—by appeal to the human body: ‘for instance, the natural shape of the human body is such a sensuously concrete thing, capable of displaying spirit, which is concrete in itself, and of showing itself in conformity with it.’ (p71) I wonder if the human body is not only an instance (even if an exemplary one) in displaying the spirit, but also a meta-metaphor for Hegel’s thought on the spirit. I’m not saying that if this is the case, then Hegel is guilty of anthropocentrism; my primary concern is that while Hegel takes this point of departure for granted, I think the legitimacy is not such self-evident.
[2. Religion] It seems that Hegel uses the term ‘religion’ in at least two different senses: on the one hand, ‘religion’ is one higher stage than art in which the spirit can realize itself, standing between art and philosophy. But on the other hand, when Hegel says, for instance, that ‘art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone, a satisfaction that, at least on the part of religion, was most intimately linked with art’ (p10), what he means by ‘religion’ is definitely a rigorous philosophical category after art. What compounds the problem is Hegel’s analogy between art and religion when he characterizes the three types of art in its detailed forms. Let us check the following passage a little bit closely:
In the analogous sphere of religion, with which art at its highest stage is immediately connected, we conceive this same difference as follows… These three fundamental differences arise also in the world of art in independent development. (p83)
With regard to the first sentence, it is readily to grasp what Hegel means here: at the final stage of art, i.e. romantic art, the spirit begins to exceed the limited form and turn into itself—hence the inwardness of the subject and the so-called ‘pictorial thinking’ (but what is the difference between this peculiar form of thinking for religion and the ‘imagination’ for art, which is also said highly by Hegel as an encompassing element for all forms of art [see p90]?). However, in the second sentence, we find that curiously the sequential order of art and religion becomes a semi-parallel one: the different stages in religion seem to be corresponding to the three types of art. Elsewhere, Hegel also mentions that religion can make use of art for the sake of itself. Is art in itself intertwined to religion from the very beginning, or shall we distinguish different meanings of ‘religion’ in Hegel?
When touching upon the thesis of ‘end of art’ again in the Introduction to the first part, Hegel takes the following example to show that ‘the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit’:
No matter how we see God the Father, Christ, and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help; we bow the knee no longer before these artistic portrayals. (p103)
This example sounds rather weird because it shows less the art’s ceasing to function to satisfy the need of the spirit than the separation of art from religion. If the separation can be understood as the evidence art loses its supreme position it once had, does it mean that, even in times art could fulfill the need of the spirit, it was religion (in its Hegelian determination) which determined the working of art? If so, the whole Aesthetics should be just one part of The Philosophy of Religion.
III
[Hegel's Critique of the Kantian Aesthetics]
Even though Hegel describes Kant’s ‘reflective judgment’ as ‘subjective,’ one can find his convergence with Kant when he summarizes Kant’s notion of ‘purposiveness’ as follows:
To this end [to think the particular as contained under the universal—WQ] it needs a law, a principle, which it has to give to itself, and as this law Kant propounds ‘purposiveness’ or teleology. …in the teleological judgment of living things, Kant comes to the point of so regarding the living organism that in it the concept, the universal, contains the particular too, and, as an end, it determines the particular and external…not from without but from within, and in such a way that the particular corresponds to the end of its own accord. (p57)
Hegel argues that Kant, thinking of the reconciliation between the particular and the universal notwithstanding, in the last analysis falls into subjective contemplation rather than making the production of art ‘absolutely true and actual.’ (p60) One can readily find the similarity of Hegel’s characterization of the self-unfolding movement of the spirit, during which ‘appearance’ or shining forth of the idea is the way in which ‘essence’ can be distinguished from merely ‘being’: ‘Essence is not something beyond or behind appearance, but—just because it is the essence which exists—the existence is Appearance.’ (Logic, #131, Wallace: p186) In other words, the production of art in Hegel as the natural art in Kant, is a kind of reconciliation between what is otherwise antithetical or oppositional, though, the movement of the spirit in Hegel not only affirms itself by merely repeating the subjective self-identity in its assumption of the ‘reflective judgment,’ but more importantly, it absorbs what is other than itself into itself—or rather, it produces its products in the shape confirming to its own development. In a politico-philosophical sense, one may conceive this difference between Kant and Hegel as a difference between the emergent period of modern bourgeoisie and its rising period; that is, whilst in its incipience the bourgeois class can, out of its own whimsical thought, think of a reconciled world in which actual contradictions and oppositions would be cancelled or neutralized, it then starts to act out the possibility of reconciliation in its own terms and by its own hands. Hence numerous oppositions and otherness must be taken into consideration: the middle class simply cannot produce its own world without accounting for what is other-than-itself, even if eventually this ‘otherness’ must be (re)produced as the product of itself.
Is it fair to say that Kant’s ‘reflective judgment’ is ultimately ‘subjective’ philosophically, then? Let me quote here the corresponding paragraph in Kant where the notion of ‘reflective judgment’ is qualified:
The principle can be no other than the following: As universal laws of nature have their ground in our understanding, which prescribes them to nature (although only according to the universal concept of it as nature), so particular empirical laws, in respect of what is in them left undetermined by these universal laws, must be considered in accordance with such a unity as they would have if an understanding (although not our understanding) had furnished them to our cognitive faculties so as to make possible a system of experience according to particular laws of nature. Not as if, in this way, such an understanding must be assumed as actual (for it is only our reflective judgment to which this idea serves as a principle—for reflecting, not for determining); but this faculty thus gives a law only to itself, and not to nature. (CJ, Bernard: p15; italics mine)
It is quite clear that not only that the ‘reflective judgment’ has no influence on nature, but also, as Samuel Weber points out, that the way ‘such an understanding’ does not ‘really ha[ve] to be assumed’ accentuates the uncertain status of an assumption that, were it to be effective, it must in a certain sense ‘seek to efface itself’ (Weber: pxix). In this sense, the ‘reflective judgment’ can be said to be ‘subjective’ in two senses: first, it has nothing to do with nature, i.e. what is objective, what is simply there; second, even to assume such an assumption itself is rootless in objectively-justifiable terms; rather, it seems to be an expediency in the last instance.
IV
[On ‘the end of art’]
Hegel raises the question of the end of art in the framework of his understanding of art as the concrete reconciliation between the content and the form, the rational and the sensuous material, as the ‘objectified universality,’ despite or because of art’s limitation of particularity and concreteness. The orientation of the problem of ‘end of art’ roots in the process that, insofar as the Idea proceeds from the symbolic art, the classic art, to the romantic art, it cannot hold itself within the appearance in its concrete forms, but rather exceeds what is particular and returns to inwardness with conforming to the nature of the Spirit, namely, its absolute and infinite. It is noteworthy to examine above all Hegel’s description of the relationship between ‘the content’ and ‘the form.’ On the one hand, it is quite clear that ‘form’ of art is produced by the content, i.e. the Idea itself—moreover, the determinacy of the Idea itself constructs ‘the bridge to appearance’. Hegel says,
The inherently concrete Idea carries within itself the principle of its mode of appearance and is therefore its own free configurator. Thus the truly concrete Idea alone produces its true configuration, and this correspondence of the two is the Ideal. (p75)
Also, we know that Hegel argues that the defectiveness of form results from the defectiveness of content. So far, so good. But on the other hand, can one therefore say that the beauty of form conforms to the beauty of content? At first glance, it seems so, because it is the content which determines for itself the proper form art should take as the appearance of the idea. Considering that Hegel says ‘works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought,’ (p74) one might have reason to make an equivalence between the beauty of form and the beauty of content. But the problem seems not to be such simple. When revisiting the relationship between the content and the form, Hegel claims that
beauty of form as such does not always afford what we have called the Ideal, because the Ideal requires also individuality of content and therefore also of form. For example, a face altogether regular in form and beautiful may nevertheless be cold and expressionless. (p173)
Things may become clearer if we distinguish the ‘beauty of form’ of the above passage, as simply a formal (or formalistic) determination of what is external in terms of understanding, from ‘form’ in the particular Hegelian sense, i.e. form determined and produced by the Idea. Nevertheless, it seems that the relationship between the content and the form is not as closely connected to each other—not in the sense that the Idea is yet to be reconciled with the external material, but in the sense that even in the summit of ‘fine art,’ there seems to exist something at the level of ‘form’ which does not necessarily confirm with the Idea, while which can be regarded as ‘beautiful’ even if Hegel attributes it into the category of ‘understanding’ rather than ‘reason.’ Can we push this point a little bit further to say that, the ‘beauty of form as such’ might be symbolically (in a Hegelian sense) seen as art’s pointing beyond the scope defined by Hegel—that is, can we argue what is slightly different from Hegel in saying that the ‘end of art’ is not a requirement by/of philosophy as thinking, but a requirement of art itself?
Maybe it is at this point that, I think, we can briefly introduce Adorno’s discussion of the ‘end of art’ into the discussion. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno seems to turn the Hegelian relationship between the content and the form inside out when he says, for example,
Art and artworks are perishable…because right into the smallest detail of their autonomy, which sanctions the socially determined splitting off of spirit by the division of labor, they are not only art but something foreign and opposed to it. Admixed with art’s own concept is the ferment of its own abolition. (p4)
Why art’s concept contains the abolition of itself? The primary reason lies not within art, as Hegel might say, in the way that the Idea would eventually seek for its realization through turning to inwardness; on the contrary, the reason lies in something outside the ‘fine art’ per se. The very autonomy of art sanctions the capitalist principle of the division of labor, which stands opposite to the ideal of totality and unity of art. In this sense, art needs to react to the reality by its immanent dynamics instead of mechanically representing the ‘historical reality.’ According to Adorno, ‘the aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production…are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations or production.’ (p5) Rather than merely a reflection of relations of production in society as a whole, art inheres within itself the aesthetic relations of production—that is, art resembles the historical process of society: ‘The unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.’ (p6) Thus considered, art’s relationship to the social in the last analysis is determined by struggles in terms of forces of production and relations of production—or, in terms of social labor.
V [On Art and State]
According to Hegel, the state is the actualization of the rational, on which not only modern morality, but also an entire ethical world is based. With regard to the very position the state occupies in the aesthetic system, one can readily find that it is structured within the contrast between ancient and modern, artistic and prosaic; in other words, while in the Heroic Age the substantiality and universality stamp upon the subject on its own account, the subject in the modern prosaic world finds himself fragmented and atomized. But on the other hand, considering that state institutions are the very exteriorization of the idea, individuals are no longer determined by whimsical thoughts and accidental experiences, but become able to live an ethical life, and hence the reconstitution of ‘individuality’:
In the state proper, that is to say, laws, customs, rights are valid by constituting the universal and rational characteristics of freedom, and, moreover, by being present in this their universality and abstraction, no longer conditioned by accidental whims and particular personal peculiarities. (p182)
If one rushes therefore to conclude that the contrast between the subject living in the epic world and the subject living in modern state is that between ancient and modern—of course, ‘modernity’ in Hegel’s argument emerges no earlier than the reformation of Protestantism—one might well be shocked when Hegel takes Rome as an exemplar for the rational state when he says, for example: ‘The Romans already had their city and their legal institutions, and, in contrast to the state as the universal end, personality had to be sacrificed. To be just a Roman, to visualize in his own personal energies only the Roman state, the fatherland and its grandeur and power, this is the seriousness and dignity of Roman virtue.’ (p185) What compounds the problem further is Hegel’s discussion of the ‘civilized state,’ in which he contrasts the unfreedom of people of the lower classes in such a state with the freedom of the ‘royal families.’ It seems that the epic subject turns out to be a prince-like character who takes the responsibility for ‘civil order’ as such, which explains in turn the possibility that they can contain within themselves the association between individuality and universality. Does it mean, then, not only that the ‘civilized state’ is different from the ‘rational state,’ but also, and more importantly, that one cannot equate the ‘rational state’ with the modern state? I think one way to resolve these problems with a stroke is to follow Hegel’s argument on ‘freedom’ as such. Although the subject in Greek did hold the immediate coalescence of the individual with the universality, this freedom has the tendency of self-overcoming viewed from the self-unfolding movement of the Idea because within this freedom, as Hegel says elsewhere,
there is awakened the need for a higher freedom of the subject in himself; he claims to be free not only in the state, as the substantial whole, not only in the accepted ethical and legal code, but in his own heart, because he wants to generate out of his own resources the good and the right in his subjective knowing and bring it into recognition. (p510)
The modern subject, because of the various state institutions confronting him, must feel the conflict between the end of the state and that of himself as an inherently ‘free individual,’ which is the very target of Hegel’s vehement critique of the ironic ‘beautiful soul.’ But nevertheless the longing for ‘subjective freedom’ is an advance considering that now the subject non longer needs to identify himself with the end of the state, but gains his own autonomy. This is to deny the ‘substantial’ wholeness of the state; rather, the only problem is that, with the division of labor, the fragmentation of human activities, and the alienation of human being, the subject cannot immediately recognize himself in the external state institutions, nor—actually this is just the same thing expressed in another way—can he recognize the rationality embodied in the state. In this sense, Hegel’s praise of Dutch genre paintings as if they were Greek artworks can be understood as an argument that it is in the seemingly vulgar painting that, at the first time in history, the freedom characteristic of modern man affirms itself immediately and concretely. This is a rare moment in the grand historical stage of ‘romantic art’ that the glimpse of the Ideal of ‘classical art’ shines forth within a prosaic world. However, one must distinguish the freedom gained by Dutch people and the ancient freedom inhered in epic subjects. It is the case that in these paintings an ancient Ideal is restored; far from that, it is the self-proclaim of freedom of the modern bourgeois subject that Hegel emphasizes—theirs is a freedom of inwardness and modern subjectivity that ancient subjects did not experience. Art therefore is indispensable for the modern subject to reconcile himself with the rational state because, not being able to recognize the fact that the state is the actualization of the Idea, the subject has to appeal to art, which is an appearance of the Idea, but also a sensuous and individual appearance. Is this claim cancels the autonomy of art, submitting art to politics? Yes and no. On one hand, art is waiting for its overcoming by religion and philosophy, which means art is (pre)determined to serve as a vehicle for the Idea. In this sense, it is as though we were arguing that the state, which is an actualized Idea, in order for its own purpose, i.e. to be understood by the subject, makes use of a tool called ‘art.’ But on the other hand, now that what art individually embodies and the state universally actualized is just the same thing, that is, the Idea, what does it matter in saying that art is used to serve the state? Art is merely a means for the state. Yes, so what?
VI [On Volume 1, Chapter 3]
In the third chapter of Part I, Hegel revisits the opposition between Ideal and nature in the following passage:
In this connection ‘natural’ cannot be used in the strict sense of the word, for as the external configuration of spirit it has no value in simply existing immediately as the life of animals, the natural landscape, etc.; on the contrary, in accordance with its specific character of being the spirit which gives itself a body, it appears here only as an expression of spirit, and so already as idealized. (p167)
While on one side both ‘animals’ and ‘the natural landscape’ are classified into the category of ‘natural’ properly understood, which means simultaneously a kind of immediate being in itself without mediation and self-consciousness, contingent, disoriented, on the other side is situated art as the pure appearance of the spirit ‘which gives itself a body.’ What distinguishes human being from animal, then, is precisely man’s ability to ‘idealize’ according to the requirement of the spirit itself. But how can one reconcile the always ‘already’ ‘idealized’ expression of spirit of what is external with Hegel’s another claim that in the beautiful object freedom can be rendered to both the subject and the object, when he says, ‘the external form and shape does not remain separate from the external material, nor is it stamped on it mechanically for some other purposes; it appears as the form immanent in the reality and corresponding with the nature of that reality, the form giving itself an outward shape’ (p115)? How can one derive the ‘immanent unity and correspondence’ of what is externally existent and the Concept, considering that what is ‘natural’ proper to the beautiful (instead of proper to its own being) is itself a product of idealization? One way to approach this difficulty, I think, is to argue that when Hegel talks about what is external, what is ‘natural,’ to the spirit, he actually means but the ‘external configuration of spirit,’ i.e. the form of the art. Considering that the proper form of art is indeed produced by the idea, while external materials which will be used to fulfill the form may be said to carry with them some extent of autonomy (which is not necessarily the artistic autonomy, as Hegel will discuss at the end of Part III), from which one might say that Hegel does not contradict with himself in saying that what is ‘natural’ is already idealized. But is this really the case?
Let us return to the section on ‘The Idea in Existence,’ where Hegel at the first time discusses the identity between what is externally existent (‘reality’) and the Concept:
Truth not at all in the subjective sense that there is an accordance between some existent and my ideas, but in the objective meaning that the ego or an external object, an action, an event, a situation in its reality is itself a realization of the Concept. If this identity is not established, then the existent is only an appearance in which, not the total Concept, but only one abstract side of I is objectified… (pp. 110-111)
The identity of reality to the Concept is not the purely subjective product; but it does not mean the Concept is a transcendental power beyond man’s approach. On the contrary, I think one should understand what Hegel calls ‘subjective sense’ as pointing to the analytical attitude held by a Kantian thinking subject who satisfies himself with analyzing and contemplating with the given external without being able to activate the movement of the spirit. In fact, in light of Hegel’s subject of ‘reason,’ ‘external objectivity’ itself has no independent place: ‘external objectivity, insofar as it is the actuality of the Ideal, must give up its purely objective independence and inflexibility in order to evince itself as identical with that [subjectivity] of which it is the external existence.’ (p253) But here we are facing the same puzzling problem once again: Hegel seems to argue, on one hand, that art in contradistinction to either analytical reason or practical appropriation, gives freedom to ‘natural,’ while on the other hand, he says time and again that what is external must submit itself to the requirement of the Idea. In my point of view, Hegel hints at the solution to this problem only when he suggests that the production of art is a kind of human labor. Just several lines below his discussion about the lack of independence of the external objectivity, Hegel writes:
This world produced by the human spirit is itself again a totality; in its existence this totality forms an objective whole with which individuals, moving on this ground, must stand in essential connection. (p253; italics mine)
Individuals must have the connection between what is subjective and what is objective not (only) because otherwise man would not be able to grasp what is external to him, but rather because the totality, in which the objective side and the subjective side reconciled into a whole, is produced by the human spirit—man as man is defined by his reconciliation with what seems to be external, alien, other, to him, which eventually turns out to be his own product. That is why, I think, Hegel attributes what is called the ‘higher aim’ of human life with labor or ‘work’ when he rejects the utopian scene of Golden Age as ‘a restricted mode of life’ which is inactive and insufficient for the development of the spirit. In comparison, ‘[a] full and entire human life requires higher urgings, and this closest association with nature and its immediate products cannot satisfy it any longer. Man may not pass his life in such an idyllic poverty of spirit; he must work. What he has an urge for, he must struggle to obtain by his own activity.’ (p259) To insist that the genuine objectivity for the spirit is itself produced by and from the spirit does not mean, of course, that nothing material exists and only what is idealistic is real. Hegel is not an idealist as radical as, say, George Berkeley; for him the crucial problem is not how to justify the status of external existence but rather how to evaluate from the point of the spirit. In comparison with the activity of the spirit, contrasted with the ‘self-determining, thinking, and willing power’ as he says, ‘everything else is only relatively and momentarily independent.’ What belongs to this ‘everything else,’ maybe? The first thing comes to Hegel’s mind, surprisingly (or not surprising at all), is nature—
The sensuous phenomena of nature, the sun, the sky, stars, plants, animals, stones, streams, the sea, have only an abstract relation to themselves, and in the steady process of nature are drawn into connection with other existents, so that only for finite perception can they count as independent. (p428)
Contrary to one’s intuitive thinking, Hegel argues that the existence of natural things, the relation of these things to themselves, is abstract and only momentarily independent—one might even say that in themselves they have no ‘external objectivity.’ Only as the embodiment, as the externalized or idealized product of the spirit, is nature’s objectivity revealed and observed by the subject, while nature in itself is merely self-external and self-estranged. But we know that the impulse to produce art as the shining forth of the idea taking the external appearance before the subject in certain forms is a gradual development with several steps, first of which is the stage of symbolic art. The identity between what is external and what is idea is still an inadequate one at first, which means that the subject cannot yet penetrate into the Absolute which he wants to express by simply given external things; the decisive moment lies in the symbol’s getting rid of the constraint of ‘given-ness’ and to produce the externality according to, originating from, the meaning of itself (the Absolute). This is how Hegel puts it:
[T]he symbol must now attain configuration. For although the meaning completely pertinent up to this point has for its content the element of the negation of the natural, still the truly inward only now begins to wrest its way out of the natural and is therefore still intertwined with the external mode of appearance… (p350)
After resolving the problem of the freedom of what is ‘natural,’ however, we are faced with some further problems: What is, then, the very starting point of the whole movement of the spirit at its very beginning? What is the ‘first motivation’ that triggers the self-unfolding activity of the subject?
VII [On Architecture]
I will focus on a passage which has been picked up in last class. Hegel emphasizes the relationship between architecture and the ‘national unification’ so much so that this section begins with a question, quoted from Goethe, simple but powerful: ‘What is holy?’ As Hegel continues,
In this sense we may say that the holy with the aim of this concord, and as this concord, has been the first content of independent architecture. …In the wide plains of the Euphrates an enormous architectural work was erected; it was built in common, and the aim and content of the work was at the same time the community [sc. collectivity] of those who constructed it. (638)
It is important to notice that Hegel traces the collectivity created by/with architecture to collective labor in saying, immediately following the above passage, that ‘the ensemble of all the peoples at that period worked at this task and since they all came together to complete an immense work like this, the product of their labor was to be a bond which was to link them together (as we are linked by manners, customs, and the legal constitution of the state) by means of the excavated site and ground, the assembled blocks of stone, and the as it were architectural cultivation of the country.’ (ibid; italics mine) To this extent, the function of architecture is quite political in the sense that the ‘politicalness’ of a particular group of people, their engendering of collectivity and sense of community, are dependent upon the crystalized collective labor—i.e. the architecture. Architecture, therefore, not only makes artistic appreciation possible, but also makes politics possible.
So far, so good. A problem surfaces, however, when we consider what Hegel says, as merely a supplement or analogy, in the bracket that architecture as a product of collective labor plays a political role similar to how our manners and customs work to consolidate our political communities. Considering from Hegel’s general argument about the development of different modes of art, which corresponds to the development of the spirit itself, one might have reason to say that the actualization of the rational state is a step far-surpassing the sensuous externalization of the Idea by means of artworks. However, if architecture is, or was, that which makes collectivity and hence ‘politics’ per se possible for people, can one argue for the correspondence between the ‘limitedness’ (not merely the ‘limit’) of architecture—or, more properly speaking, a particular assemblage of architectures, e.g. a city—and the ‘limitedness’ of a political community? To some extent, this seems to be the case when taking into account Negri’s and Hardt’s discourse on the Empire, which means first and foremost the end of ‘politicalness’ and the transformation of ‘politicalness’ into domestic governance. The envision of Empire does not contradict with Hegel’s philosophy of history if only because, in comparing the Empire with the so-called ‘universal homogeneous state’ described by Alexander Kojeve, the two have many similarities and share many Hegelian assumptions. But on the other hand, as the italicized supplement suggests, Hegel does not think that architecture is still playing the function of what nowadays our customs and manners are playing, that is, constituting the consciousness of collectivity of a particular political group. The spirit must transcend architecture as merely the first mode of art in the route of art’s development: it cannot be satisfied with staying at this ambiguous symbolic period. Thus, the responsibility of constituting the consciousness of collectivity is accordingly transferred to other kinds of social and political institutions (not necessarily art). It seems that the development of spirit is also the development of state. What is paradoxical, however, is the seemingly return of the ‘politicalness’ of architecture at the period of advanced capitalism and ‘the Empire’: international ‘phenomenal’ cities and ‘spectacles’ blend successfully the working of capitalization (with its deployment of power-relations delving into each and every pore of social organism) with city design, rendering what is traditionally artistic, what is both anonymous (due to the nature of collective labor) and what embodies political collectivity, alienated from both residents and workers. Architecture or city-design in nowadays carries with itself another kind of politicalness: that which might be called as the ‘de-politicized politics.’
VIII [On Painting]
According to Hegel, painting should express the spirit instead of merely representing what is naturally given. For example, he writes,
'This depth of spiritual feeling painting also takes as a subject. But on this account these natural objects as such in their purely external form and juxtaposition should not be the real subject-matter of painting, because, if they were, painting would become mere imitation; on the contrary, the life of nature, which extends through everything, and the characteristic sympathy between objects thus animated and specific moods of the soul, is what painting has to emphasize and portray in a lively way in its landscapes. (832)'
At first glance, what Hegel is saying in this passage is quite clear and straightforward. To paraphrase it in an even simpler way: art expresses the idea of the spirit rather than the nature proper. The problem is, if the content of art is determined beforehand, and all that art is responsible for is to shape this otherwise shapeless content (or idea) of the spirit—that is, if the idea of the spirit is ontologically given prior to the development of artworks (at least in the case of classical art)—then how or why ‘mere imitation’ should be excluded from ‘art’ as a whole is questionable. There are at least two questions worth mentioning. First, the exclusion of ‘mere imitation’ from art implies that, the ‘artisanship’ aspect of art, i.e. artist’s dealing with ‘form’ under principles of ‘understanding’ rather than ‘reason,’ cannot be included as part of Hegel’s aesthetic edifice. However, this stark claim apparently contradicts with Hegel’s lengthy discussion on ‘form’ in terms of, say, symmetry, harmony, and so on. Hegel does try to do justice to what generally is seen as the ‘form’ of art—or, more properly, what is commonly called ‘artistic skill.’ But what is excluded here is not primarily the ‘skill,’ but the mistaken content, i.e. the nature proper. The two elements—the nature and the ‘form’ of art—seem quite different, but I think Hegel insistently tries to exclude them from his framework of aesthetics; the reason of which has to be left for another time.
Second, considering that the ‘content’ of art—and here, of painting—is established waiting for its artistic representation, to what extent can Hegel distinguish himself from Plato’s denigration of art in Republics, according to which artists are only imitating what is produced by technicians, who in turn are but imitating the ‘idea’ of things? If it is the case that at the stage of classical art, thanks to the perfect correspondence in art between content and form, the idea and the sensuous appearance, audience is able to recognize the otherwise obscure—even if not in the least nonexistent—‘content’ or the idea of the spirit, at the stage of romantic art one might have every reason to farewell artworks to pursue the idea in religions and philosophy. But paradoxically, it is in the mode of poetry, Hegel argues, that art at the first time culminates its identity between content and form—the content of poetry is its form and vice versa.
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