Evental Aesthetics Vol. 1 No. 1 (2012) - Aesthetics After Hegel

2006

T he introduction of a historical perspective in aesthetics is usually traced back to Hegel's 1820 lectures on fine art. Given at the University of Berlin, these lectures were amongst Hegel's most successful and best attended. 1 By then a recognized intellectual figure, Hegel sets out to salvage art from its subjectivization in Kantian and romantic aesthetics, but ends up declaring that art, considered in its highest vocation, is a thing of the past. This judgment on art-that its greatness is a thing of the past-follows from Hegel's attempt to combine a notion of art's historicity with a conception of its absolute essence. Hegel, however, was not the first to think systematically about the historicity of art. For this aspect of art-and, indeed, of reason too-was explored philosophically a good sixty years before Hegel's Berlin lectures by a young and aspiring student of Kant's, namely Johann Gottfried Herder. In a series of essays and fragments, Herder develops an advanced and elaborate alternative to Hegel's conception, a fundamentally non-essentialist approach to art, history, and reason. Over the past twenty years or so, Hegel's attempt to combine an essentialist and an historicist approach to art has been revitalized, with increasing force and sophistication, by Arthur Danto. The attempts to rehabilitate Herder's aesthetics, however, have been few and far between. 3 This is the aim of the present essay, which seeks to contrast the young Herder's non-essentialist understanding of the historicity of art with Hegel's essentialist views on the artwork's historicity, pleading for a rehabilitation of the former. 4 I approach this task from three different directions. First, I offer a brief account of Herder's and Hegel's views on reason, history, and art. Second, I look closer at their conceptions of classical tragedy and sculpture, which, due to Winckelmann's studies,

nima ghasemi dehaghi & alma ghasemi dehaghi, 2019

Hegel was one of the most important German idealist philosophers who presented a new understanding of (aesthetics) in (art). From Hegel's perspective, each work of art consists of two parts: 1-The (spiritual) meaning 2-The (physical) form aspect, for this reason, this adaptation itself gives rise to the basic types of art. In fact, the basic character (Romantic Art) is already provided and the (spirit) transcends (matter) and becomes an independent being. In this research, we seek to find new modes of expanding the aesthetic in the realm (art) by approaching art in the period of (romanticism) and getting assistance from (aesthetically) Hegel's perspective. The result is that if we call the work (art) beautiful since its creator is the (spirit) human being, it can be far superior to nature's yield. Hence, in his aesthetics, Hegel also discusses beauty and natural beauty, as he thinks the worst of human contemplation result is superior to nature, because there is always (the spirit), freedom and presence of the artist. So, (beauty) only benefits from the source of the ultimate truth and testifies to it.

Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte

While Hegel’s infamous “end of art” thesis states that art is “for us, a thing of the past” he insists that philosophy and, to a degree that is often underestimated by contemporary readers, religion endure within the structure of modern life. In this paper I aim to demonstrate how by focusing on Hegel’s claim that religion meets no end, we can come to a better understanding of how and why he thinks art does end. This will lead us away from common, but false, picture of Hegel as being indifferent (or even hostile) to art’s sensuous mode of intelligibility. Inasmuch as religion remains both necessarily sensuous and a component of social life that realizes freedom and divinity within modernity, the “problem” with art cannot be its sensuousness per se. What art ultimately finds itself unable to do, and what religion can do, is find a way to reconcile the destabilizing force of individual, subjective freedom with a jointly-held representation of who and what we are and what we value most...

In this paper, I plan to show that Hegel attempts to appropriate the irreversible aspects of Romantic aesthetics in four ways: (i) Hegel radicalizes Kantian aesthetics on the basis of a basically textual approach to sublime experience that opens up the question of community as a philosophical one; (ii) without demoting classical conceptions of art, Hegel privileges Romantic conceptions that demonstrate the ascendancy of sign over symbol in a spiraling chain; (iii) Hegel laments the fate of art in the triumph of Romantic subjectivism but also suggests how communities can reconstitute themselves on the horizon of aesthetic dissolution; so that, finally, (iv) art can be re-conceived as a emancipatory adventure that redefines metaphysics through its historical unfolding as an unending series of semiotic transformations.

2015

In After the Beautiful, Robert Pippin articulates and defends a modified version of Hegelian philosophy of art. The "after" in his title indicates both "in the spirit and style of" and "since," so that we are offered a recognizably Hegelian story that is also distinctively adapted to modern life and art in surprising, non-Hegelian ways. He then undertakes to put this Hegelian philosophy of art to work to investigate and elucidate the achievements of pictorial modernism, principally those of Manet and Cezanne, "the grandfather and father of modernism in painting," as Pippin puts it (p. 2). The articulation, defense, investigation, and elucidation are organized around two sets of large, important claims that Pippin makes about Hegel. 1) Hegel is right that art, or at least important art that is responsive to the highest ambitions and possibilities of artmaking, is a socially inflected, affective-sensuous presentation that serves as a critical vehicle of self-knowledge in relation to possibilities