Novel, Organism, Form: Bio-Aesthetics in Hegel and Thomas Mann

Modernist Cultures, vol. 2, 2005

Praktyka Teoretyczna

The article attempts to reconstruct the difference between the ontologies of Hegel and Deleuze. The question of nature and Man (as different from the human animal) in both philosophies can provide crucial insight into the fundamental ontological disparity between the two philosophies. Nature, according to Hegel, is truly external to the idea and (as such) is at the same time a moment in the movement of the concept becoming what it is. Deleuze, in contrast, goes back to pre-Kantian ontology without abandoning the transcendental level of analysis. This enables him to bestow upon nature real externality and to transform the dialectic into a mechanism of opening to the inexhaustible outside, not of confirming the primacy of the concept. The case of becoming-animal demonstrates the political implications of this ontological choice: it can be understood as a way of putting an end to “Man,” an enterprise compatible with abolitionist postulates.

Vernon Press, 2023

From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.

Speight has recently raised the question, which he himself leaves unanswered, how naturalism relates to spirit in Hegel’s philosophy of art. ‘Naturalism’ denotes an explanation that invokes aspects of nature that are (allegedly) irreducible or resistant to thought. I call nature ‘stubborn’ insofar as it evinces resistance to its being formed by thought and hence to its being united with it. This paper argues that §§556, 558 and 560 of Hegel’s “Encyclopedia” answer Speight’s question by specifying three elements of nature that, first, are present in art and, second, are resistant to thought. These are materiality, natural form, and genius. They exhibit nature’s stubbornness in art. This stubbornness, I argue, is what justifies Hegel’s claim that art is absolute spirt only implicitly (§556), which leads to the claim that art needs to be superseded by religion and philosophy. In this way, Speight’s question receives a precise answer.

Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy, eds. Luca Corti, Johannes-Georg Schülein, 2022

In his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx famously claims that the human being is or has a 'Gattungswesen.' This is often understood to mean that the human being is a 'species-being' and is determined by a given 'species-essence.' In this chapter, I argue that this reading is mistaken. What Marx calls Gattungswesen is precisely not a 'species-being,' but a being that, in a very specific sense, transcends the limits of its own given species. This different understanding of the genuscharacter of the human being opens up a new perspective on the naturalism of the early Marx. He is not informed by a problematic speciesist and essentialist naturalism, as is often assumed, but by a different form of naturalism which I propose to call 'dialectical naturalism.' The chapter starts (I) by developing Hegel's account of genus which provides us with a useful background for (II) understanding Marx's original notion of a genus-being and its practical, social, developmental character. In the last section, I show that (III) the actualization of our genus-being thus depends on the production of a specific type of 'second nature' that is at the heart of Marx's dialectical naturalism.

Continental Thought & Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom , 2019

Art, for Hegel, is not only distinct but self-distinguishing of and from nature-it happens in and through the latter. It liberates us from being merely natural creatures, and it does so by a dynamic of a cut or break-even though this liberation is achieved only through natural sensuousness, and hence, keeps us tethered to nature in some particular way. Inspired by Todd McGowan's emphasis on the central role of contradiction in Hegel's philosophy, this paper considers the possibility to applying the dialectic between art and nature as it is unfolded in Hegel's Aesthetic to a more insidious constellation-namely, what Marxists came to refer to as second nature: the world of commodities, in which man-made things appear to those who produce them as a naturalised and repressive opposite, a pseudo nature, an alienated solidified history.

Germanic Review, 2012

This article explores the relationship between Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and contemporary writings about natural organisms, including Goethe's own botanical studies. The article argues that Goethe's novel should be read as a meditation on the disunity of biological and human form. The defining feature of human as opposed to biological life is the former's dependence on representation, which makes human form both open-ended and malleable. Aesthetic representation achieves in this context a central yet ambiguous role within the economy of human life: While the subject (Wilhelm) is involved in acts of aesthetic self-fashioning, larger social forces (the Tower Society) make use of art to orchestrate their normative interventions. The article ends by situating Goethe's novel in relation to Foucault's lectures on liberalism and biopolitics, arguing that Wilhelm Meister shows what the liberal “art of governing humans” would look like when applied not to populations but to individuals as self-conscious actors engaged in their own constitution.

Concentrating on G.W.F. Hegel’s controversial Naturphilosophie (1830) and his Anthropology as developed in his Wissenschaft des Geistes (1830), this essay attempts to develop an intense sense of the problems that revolve around Hegelian subjectivity and its grounding in the anteriority of natural materiality. Its central claim is that Hegel’s thought offers us the conceptual tools with which to think with precision the myriad of ways in which finite subjectivity is perpetually haunted, to a degree that is underappreciated in the secondary literature, by the traumatic fragmentation that characterizes Hegelian nature. In order to develop the force of this thesis the essay first develops an interpretation of Hegelian nature that insists on the extimate fragmentation of the natural register. Subsequently, the essay focuses on what this interpretation must mean in terms of the emergence of finite subjectivity from the domain of natural materiality and therefore it concentrates on Hegel’s anthropological writings. Tracking Hegel’s conceptual analysis of the body and his bizarre yet fascinating discussion of ‘madness’, the essay attempts to develop a sense of how the natural register ambivalently and spectrally haunts Hegelian subjectivity: it is both its basal ground and the source that outlines the possibility of its annihilation. Concluding, the essay attempts to situate what such a reading of Hegel’s system might mean in terms of the broader socio-historical context of the late Enlightenment.

In this article, I discuss the philosophical position that marks the end of the Age of Aesthetics: Hegel's philosophy of art. I demonstrate how it has passed the test of time, and will further defend its systematic outlines. I reconstruct Hegel's philosophy of art in a way that relies less on Hegel's own conceptual terminology, but, rather, attempts to shed light on the insights it can afford with regard to some more recent discussions: on the one hand, discussions about how to read Hegel of contemporary debates in postanalytical and continental philosophy, and on the other hand, in light of the post-Hegelian philosophy of art. I reconstruct Hegel's philosophy of art in the light of two key concepts: form and unity. Overall, my article has two parts. The first one deals with Hegel's concept of form, the second deals with his concept of unity. In the background of my argument stands Hegel's thought that art is a particular form of the development of the concept. Hegel's theory allows for an immanent reconstruction of art and thus a thinking of the autonomy of art. We should describe art as a particular form of experience for which a specific unity is characteristic-a kind of unity that entails that the form of experience cannot be understood in a formalist way, but must rather be understood as something that develops in and through history.