I would like to give some encouragement to readers who have been thinking about maybe tackling Hegel’s Aesthetics aka his Lectures on Fine Art. Hegel had a lot to say on the topic; his collected lectures clock in at more than 1,000 pages. Let’s now worry about the sheer daunting expanse of the thing. For now, I will be content to offer some commentary on its much thumbed introduction, following the Knox translation.
But first some groundwork. Anything that Hegel has to say about art is only going to make sense in the context of his system as a whole. Hegel holds that the task of philosophy is to help us conceptualize what he calls the Absolute, by which he means the world apprehended as a network of distributed and mutually constitutive points. But the Absolute is not just any network; it is Hegel’s term, rather, for a network with mind; a thinking network, therefore; a network capable of reflecting on itself and setting its own ends. This distinction—between networks with and without mind—is fundamental to Hegel’s project. It is the difference, saliently, between a free market and a market whose actors are invited to reflect on the economic system in which they are swept up, to make judgments upon that system, and to assign to it moral and political ends. That second kind of network we might not even think to call a “market” any more.
That’s the first important point. The next thing to understand is that Hegel thinks that there are three human endeavors that will all help us apprehend the Absolute. The first is philosophy. The other two are religion and art:
-religion, because, followed through to a certain terminus, it will fix our attention on the work of mind in the world (or spirit in the word—mind and spirit are the same word in Hegel’s German) and so bring us close to the Absolute, which is the fusing of material networks with mind;
-art, because, more simply, it is the mind or spirit in material form.
This last is Hegel’s master claim about art, which we can, for a start, specify in three ways:
1) If I remark now that the reconciliation of subject and object is central to Hegel’s philosophy, then I am once again circling around the Absolute. The canonical early modern philosophers tended to treat subject and object as opposed terms. This was clearest in the matter of epistemology, which was central to European philosophy for several generations. Is the world knowable? How do we know things? How do we know that we know things? Perhaps you can see without special explanation that those questions tend to position the mind as separate from the world—and also to make of the world a Big Puzzle in need of solving. To reconcile the opposition of subject and object requires that we not organize our philosophy around such questions. Is it possible to think of the mind and the world as integrated or unified – not as strangers to each other?
2) Hegel’s big claim about art is that it is great because it has clear ways of doing this (in ways that Kant, Schiller, and the Schlegels had already made identified). But then, Hegel goes on, lots of things can do this—can bring together the material world and the mind: revolution can do this, and so can thoughtful practice, and so likewise can religion. This is one of the ways Hegel is unlike the philosophers he otherwise resembles. He doesn’t think we are especially stuck in this regard. There are several different ways of reconciling subject and object. “Art is one of the means which dissolve and reduce to unity the … opposition and contradiction between … self-concentrated Geist and nature.” (56)
3) And when all is said and done, these other things are probably better than art.