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Hegel's Introduction to Aesthetics Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics 1 Karsten Harries Hegel's Introduction to Aesthetics Fall Semester 2009 Yale University Copyright Karsten Harries Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics 2 Contents 1. Introduction: Hegel on the Death of Art 3 2. Danto on the End of Art 15 3. Art and Nature 37 4. Art and Theory 50 5. Towards a Science of Art 60 6. The Work of Art as an Artifact 78 7. The Sensuousness of Art 85 8. Art and Imitation 96 9. Why Art in a Needy Age? 104 10. Hegel and his Predecessors 119 11. Irony 128 12. The Division of the Arts 137 13. Conclusion: The History and End of Art 148 Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics 3 1. Introduction: Hegel on the Death of Art 1 In the Spring semester of 2008 I taught, for the last time, a seminar on Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art. A reworked version of my class notes has just been published as a book by Springer.1 In my mind that seminar and this seminar on Hegel, while they do not depend on each other, belong together. What joins them is most fundamentally the question of the place of art in the modern world. Both seminars are part of an attempt to work out in more detail the concluding chapter of my The Ethical Function of Architecture,2 which confronts Hegel with Heidegger. What is at issue in this confrontation is hinted at by some remarks Heidegger makes in the Epilogue to The Origin of the Work of Art. Heidegger there considers the possibility of the death of art, linking that death to the rise of aesthetics and the rise of aesthetics to experience. Almost from the time when specialized thinking about art and the artist began, this thought was called aesthetic. Aesthetics takes the work of art as an object, the object of aisthesis, of sensuous apprehension in the wide sense. Today we call this apprehension experience. The way in which man experiences art is supposed to give information about its nature. Experience is the source that is standard not only for art appreciation and enjoyment, but also for artistic creation. Everything is an experience. Yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies. This dying occurs so slowly that it takes a few centuries.3 In thinking the possibility of art’s dying Heidegger gestures beyond it. When Heidegger here considers the possibility of art's dying, he is thinking first of all of Hegel. In the most comprehensive reflection on the nature of art that the West possesses — comprehensive because it stems from metaphysics — namely Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, the following propositions occur: 1 Karsten Harries, Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (New York: Springer, 2009) 2 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 3 Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” Holzwege (1935–1946), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977). p. 67; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Language, Though (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 79. Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics 4 Art no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truth may obtain existence for itself. One may well hope that art will continue to advance and perfect itself, but its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit. In all these relationships art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation something past.4 Heidegger is of course aware that much of the art that most draws visitors to museums today, just think of Van Gogh or Picasso, was created long after Hegel made his gloomy pronouncements. But apparently their evident success is not sufficient to refute Hegel. That is to say, it is not art “on the side of its highest vocation.” The judgment that Hegel passes in these statements cannot be evaded by pointing out that since Hegel's lectures in aesthetics were given for the last time during the winter of 1828- 29 at the University of Berlin, we have seen the rise of many new art works and new art movements. Hegel never meant to deny this possibility. But the question remains: is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character? If, however, it is such no longer, then there remains the question why this is so.5 Heidegger here understands art “on the side of its highest vocation” as art “in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence.” As we shall see, Hegel has a very similar understanding of art. But it would seem that the truth that is “decisive for our historical existence” has not been established by art, but by science, by thought. And is not thought the proper custodian of truth? Is this not why Socrates exiled the poets from his Republic? Heidegger refuses to accept this judgment, even as he acknowledges its strength: The truth of Hegel's judgment has not yet been decided; for behind this verdict there stands Western thought since the Greeks, which thought corresponds to a truth of beings that has already happened. Decision upon the judgment will be made, when it is made, from and about the truth of what is. Until then the judgment remains in force. But for that very reason, the question is necessary whether the truth that the judgment declares is final and conclusive and what follows if it is.6 But, if Hegel’s judgment is supported by “Western thought since the Greeks,” how can Heidegger say, “The truth of Hegel's judgment has not yet been decided”? Must such 4 Ibid., p, 68; trans. pp. 79-80. 5 Ibid., p. 68; trans, p. 80. 6 Ibid., p. 68; trans. 79-80. Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics 5 thought be challenged? Heidegger apparently thinks that such a challenge is of vital importance. And it would seem that the presence of art “on the side of its highest vocation” would present such a challenge. The question is: is such an art possible in our modern world? Such questions, which solicit us more or less definitely, can be asked only after we have first taken into consideration the nature of art.7 (G5, 69/80) 2 Let me return to Heidegger's observation that Hegel never meant to deny the rise of many new works of art and art movements. This suggests the need to distinguish between two kinds of art: art “on the side of its highest vocation” and art as understood by aesthetics. How then did Hegel understand art? Apparently not as the aesthetic approach understands it. Hegel, Heidegger suggests, still understands art “on the side of its highest vocation” as the happening of truth. Just this the aesthetic approach refuses to do. And this refusal is a consequence of a development of thought that has shaped the world we live in today. The shape of modernity supports Hegel’s proclamation of the end of art in its highest sense. The aesthetic approach to art is an expression of this death. But will Hegel’s be the last word on the future of art? “Decision upon the judgment will be made, when it is made, from and about the truth of what is. Until then the judgment remains in force.”8 Crucial then in Heidegger’s confrontation with Hegel is the issue of truth. 3 Before returning to Hegel, it is necessary to take a second and closer look at what I have called the aesthetic approach. This approach and the rise of philosophical aesthetics belong together. We owe the word "aesthetics" to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who thus named the philosophical inquiry into aesthetic experience, but, also established aesthetics as a discipline, one of the main branches of philosophy.9 7 Ibid., p. 69; trans. p. 80. 8 Ibid., p. 68; trans. p. 80. 9 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus), trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954). Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics 6 But to give a bit more definition to what I mean by "aesthetic" let me turn here to a passage from Kant's “First Introduction” to the Critique of Judgment, where Kant distinguishes two rather different meanings of "aesthetic." “Aesthetic” indicates for one what has to do with sensibility. The aesthetic is understood here as belonging to the object (phenomenon). Think of the green of the grass, the smell of the rose. These are its aesthetic, i. e. its sensible qualities. “From this meaning of “aesthetic” we have to distinguish a second, where by means of the aesthetic mode of representation the represented is not related to the faculty of knowledge, but to the feeling of pleasure and diapleasure.”10 I call the green of the grass soothing, the smell of the rose delightful. Here the aesthetic is understood as belonging first of all to the subject. It is this second sense that is presupposed by the aesthetic approach. Aesthetic judgment so understood involves a reflective movement. “Reflective” here suggests a looking back from the object to the kind of experience it elicits. The philosophy of art understood as aesthetics thus has its foundation in a more subjective approach to art that tends to reduce the work of art to an occasion for a certain kind of enjoyable experience.
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