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Hegel's Aesthetics: New Perspectives on its Response to Kant and Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Karl Ameriks
Karl Ameriks*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Abstract

Above all else, Hegel can be said to be the master of context, the philosopher who insisted that properly understanding anything involves putting it in its full context, reconstructing its development and its relation to all that is around it. From the beginning of his career, Hegel did not hesitate to put into its place the work of his fellow philosophers; his analysis, critique, and supersession of them occurred all at once, and culminated when he located them within his Phenomenology of Spirit and the final system of his Encyclopedia. Long after Hegel's own era, and even after the sharp decline in the appeal of his specific system and of ambitious systematic philosophy in general, a looser form of Hegel's contextual approach remains very popular, and with good reason. Without giving in entirely to this approach, it is hard to resist the temptation to turn the tables on Hegel himself a bit. Hence, in casting a philosophical glance at the specific phenomenon of Hegel's own aesthetics, in an attempt to begin to evaluate just a few of its most distinctive characteristics (in part 2), I will proceed by first offering a sketch of how I believe his philosophy as a whole should be situated in the context of its own age and the development of German philosophy in general (in part 1).

Of course, my own interpretive perspective has its own context, external and internal. The external context is furnished by two other accounts providing slants on Hegel's aesthetics, slants that I believe are very understandable but in the end inadequate. The first of these slants is given by what I will call the “standard account,” which buys into most of Hegel's own characterization of his aesthetics (like his philosophy in general) as largely a welcome “objective” corrective to the supposedly “subjective” approach of Kant and the allegedly even more radically “subjectivistic” and arbitrary approach of the German Romantics. The second slant is to be found in Jean-Marie Schaeffer's recent book, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Schaeffer accepts much of the standard account, but he goes on to argue in an original way that the main aesthetic tradition of Germany — after Kant, from the early Romantics to Hegel and others until Heidegger — shares a large set of influential and highly questionable “speculative” presumptions, and that the sharing of this speculative approach is far more significant — and unfortunate — than whatever incidental differences can be found between various figures within this tradition.

Type
Hegel and Kant
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 23 , Issue 1-2: number 45/46 , January 2002 , pp. 72 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2002

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References

1 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, Art of the Modern Age, trans. Randall, Steven, with a Foreword by Danto, Arthur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, originally published as L 'Art de l'âge moderne. L'esthetique et le philosophie de l'art du XVIIIe siècle à nous jours l'homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 See my Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, and my “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

3 Here I am heavily indebted to recent German research, especially by Ernst Behler, Dieter Henrich, and Manfred Frank. See below, notes 6. 9, 12, and 20.

4 Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, p. 9 Google Scholar.

5 Berlin, Isaiah, The Roots of Romanticism, edited by Hardy, Henry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

6 See e.g., recent work by Frederick Beiser, James Schmidt, Charles Larmore, and Fred Rush Jr.

7 See Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, ch. 2.

8 See Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, ch. 1.1 go on to explain that Hegel himself is not a foundationalist in any ordinary understanding of the term, and yet his system has several important structural parallels with earlier idealist systems that were foundationalist, and especially with their view of the highly privileged role of philosophy itself.

9 See my “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism and the works cited below in n. 12.

10 See e.g., Cranston, Maurice, The Romantic Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994)Google Scholar.

11 Schlegel, Friedrich, Athenaeum fragment # 53 Google Scholar (my translation). A translation of selections from this and other Early Romantic works can be found in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)Google Scholar; German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Wheeler, Kathleen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Beiser, Frederick, The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also a new collection of related works on aesthetics edited by Jay Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

12 See the discussions of Erhard in Stamm, Marcelo, “Prinzipium und System: Rezeptionsmodelle der Wissenschaftslehre Fichtes 1794” Fichte-Studien 9 (1995): 215–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Frank, Manfred, “Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism,” in The Modern Subject, ed. Ameriks, Karl and Sturma, Dieter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 65–85 Google Scholar, and ‘Unendliche Annäherung’ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997)Google Scholar.

13 Cited in Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer: Korrespondenz mit dem Herbert- und Erhard- Kreis, ed. Baum, Wilhelm (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1995), pp. 76fGoogle Scholar.

14 Niethammer's significance is documented in Pinkard, Terry, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

15 Hegel, , Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, sec. lxxxii, trans. Bosanquet, Bernard, ed. Inwood, Michael (London: Penguin, 1993)Google Scholar. Section numbers are cited as added by Inwood.

16 Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. lxxxiii.

17 Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. lxxxv.

18 Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. lxxvii.

19 Cf. Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. lxxxvii.

20 See Behler, Ernst, “Hegel und Friedrich Schlegel,” in Studien zur Romantik und zur idealistischer Philosophie (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988), pp. 9–45 Google Scholar; Manfred Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’; and Norman, Judith, “Squaring the Romantic Circle: Hegel's Critique of Schlegel's Theory of Art,” in Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. Maker, William (Albany: SUNY, 2000), pp. 131–44Google Scholar.

21 See the beginning of the section on “Self-Consciousness” in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

22 Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. lxxvi.

23 See my critique of these arguments, Kant and the Fate of A utonomy, ch. 6.

24 Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. lxxvii.

25 Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. lxxvii.

26 See my “New Views on Kant's Judgment of Taste,” in Kants Ästhetik/ Kant's Aesthetics/ L'esthétique de Kant, ed. Parret, H. (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 431–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and cf. Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, pp. 59–63 Google Scholar. Kant's focus on beauty in nature rather than in art also indicates his special emphasis on objectivity as such, in contrast to Hegel.

27 See my “Taste, Conceptuality,and Objectivity,” in Kant Actuel, ed. Duchesneau, F., LaFrance, G., and Piché, C. (Montréal/Paris: Bellarmin/Vrin, 2000), pp. 141–46Google Scholar; and cf. Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, pp. 48, 61–3Google Scholar. Where Schaeffer argues that Kant “should” acknowledge a role for conceptuality in taste, I argue that he actually does, once all his terminological twists are understood in our own terms. The distinction between fully “determinate” and “indeterminate” concepts is crucial here, and, as Schaeffer notes (p. 50), it is also used by Schlegel.

28 See Schlegel, F., Lyceum Fragments ## 108, 42 Google Scholar, and cf. Behler, , Studien zur Romantik p. 20 Google Scholar. Similar points are a main theme of Novalis' so-called “Fichte-Studien,” which are at points very critical of Fichte. See below, notes 34 and 38.

29 Hegel, Aesthetics, sec. xc.

30 See Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988)Google Scholar; similar points have been expressed by Boyle, Nicholas, “Art, Literature and Theology: Learning from Germany,” in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, ed. Sullivan, Robert E. (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2001), pp. 87–111 Google Scholar.

31 See e.g., the essays by Dieter Sturma, Charles Larmore, and Andrew Bowie in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism.

32 Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, p. 6 Google Scholar.

33 Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, p.6 Google Scholar.

34 This point seems missed in the discussion of Hegel and Heidegger in Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, p. 7 Google Scholar. Hölderlin's position also deserves more discussion here. See Larmore, , “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, pp. 141–60Google Scholar; Harries, Karsten, “The Epochal Threshold and the Classical Ideal: Hölderlin contra Hegel,” in The Emergence of German Idealism, ed. Dahlstrom, Daniel and Baur, Michael (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), pp. 144–75Google Scholar; and Waibel, Violetta L., Hölderlin und Fichte 1794-1800 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000)Google Scholar.

35 Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, p. 10 Google Scholar.

36 Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, p. 10. At pp. 79–81 Google Scholar, Schaeffer seems to conflate Schelling with Novalis, and to confuse the fact that for Novalis poetry has special privileges (e.g., it can create the “loftiest” sympathy) with the claim (which I believe Novalis is not committed to in his major writings) that philosophy has no such privileges. The dispute here is like claiming that only intuitions or only concepts can reach reality; it takes lots of evidence to show that a reasonable scientist such as Novalis would deny the sensible position that they can each reach reality in their own distinctive way.

37 Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, p. 11 Google Scholar.

38 See Kneller, Jane E., “Romantic Conceptions of the Self in Hölderlin and Novalis,” in Figuring the Self, ed. Klemm, David and Zoeller, Guenter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and, more recently, her “Kant's Romanticism” (forthcoming) and her “Introduction” to Novalis, , “Fichte-Studies,” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

39 Schaeffer, argues (Art of the Modern Age, p. 13)Google Scholar that this position leads Hegel to distort, exclude, or marginalize several important kinds of art such as instrumental music, landscape architecture, and the novel. But see Surber, Jere, “Art as a Mode of Thought: Hegel's Aesthetics and the Origins of Modernism,” in Hegel and Aesthetics, pp. 45–60 Google Scholar; and Roche, Mark, Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

40 Danto, A., “Foreword,” in Schaeffer, , Art of the Modern Age, pp. xv–xvi Google Scholar. Note that this “quarrel” also resembles the distinction noted earlier that Hegel wanted to draw between himself and Schelling. From Hegel's perspective it is one thing to say that art is philosophically important, and shares some content with philosophy; it is something else to suggest that they are on the same level.

41 Consider current ethics — do the most interesting thinkers today (e. g., B. Williams, T. Nagel, C. Taylor, C. Larmore) line up neatly in traditional pseudo-scientific schools, such as utilitarianism or consequentialism, or do they not rather share a kind of objective pluralism, and sympathy with Nietzsche rather than with, say, a schoolbook Bentham?

42 On this point and many others I am very indebted to reactions to versions of this paper from audiences at meetings in Dublin, Durham (N. H.), Cornell, Colorado St., and Oxford.