You might be interested in the problems Hegel has — by his own admission — beginning his lectures on art. He feels like he should begin by giving a definition of art, though that’s not quite the way he puts it, and the difference matters. What, he asks, is the “concept” of art? Can we give a philosophically elaborated definition? A professor writing in the 2020s would probably just say a “theory of art,” except that the word “theory” almost always suggests something provisional. (“I have a theory” means “I’m about to say something ingenious, but it might not be right.”) But the “concept,” as Hegel understands it, isn’t provisional. Just the opposite. In order to work out the “concept” of art, you would need to be able to say what makes it “necessary.” You could think of it this way: Every human society that researchers have ever encountered has something that we would call art. Art is basically ubiquitous — and in that sense a human necessity — and the question would be why? Why do human groups everywhere always produce art (of some kind)? The philosophical approach to art turns on that question.
The problem is, Hegel now says, that you can’t answer this question if all you’re talking about is art. If you want to say what gives rise to art, you have to look beyond art (to the nature of the human mind, say) in order to say what need the former is fulfilling. And at this point he says: But I don’t want to have to produce an entire theory of the mind — I don’t want to talk you through my whole system all over again. The point of these lectures is to talk about art. So for now, let’s just take art as given, and let’s begin by reflecting on the semi-philosophical things that people already believe about art. And if you ever work through my entire system, then maybe you’ll be in a position to understand the “concept” of art. But not now.
So off he goes. Hegel clears some pages to consider some once common ideas about art. He begins by pointing out that art isn’t naturally occurring, that it is human and perhaps even akin to work. “Not only has art at its command the whole wealth of natural forms in the brilliant variety of their appearance, but also the creative imagination has power to expatiate inexhaustibly beyond their limit in products of its own.” (9) You might notice how this aligns art with technology: it is the ability to produce in new ways, beyond nature.
As English-speakers, we can remark here that the word “art” used to mean “skill” and that the word “artist” still has the word “artisan” as one of its closest cousins. That observation brings the question of “craft” in its train, and the question of craft is itself a question of rules. Can you learn to make art just by learning a craft or just by following the rules? Can you give somebody an art-making instruction booklet? And to this Hegel says: No. The work of Geist cannot be brought under a rule (or a law). This jumps out, in the German context, because Germany was the cradle of the Protestant Reformation, and some Protestants have always taken very seriously the idea that Christians are saved by the spirit (Geist) and not by the law — that Christianity is not a matter of following rules. Hegel points out that if you consult writing manuals or handbooks of art, they will try to give you rules — and some of those rules will be valid enough, but a lot of them will by stupidly underdetermined (ie, they won’t actually tell you what to do and in that sense will hardly count as rules).
Hegel next says that the neoclassical emphasis on rules and correctness eventually generated a backlash in the cult of the genius — the Great Creator not bound by rules. That’s the old German notion of “genius”; the word used to mean something like “outsider artist,” someone who creates great art without having been trained. The notion of “talent,” similarly, is akin to grace in the religious sense: It is the gift you can’t give yourself. The silliest idea promoted by the theorists of genius is that some artists can create without at all reflecting on what they are doing—wholly immersed and intoxicated and riding the rush. The idea here is that artists create in a fit of Begeisterung — Knox’s translation has “inspiration,” which isn’t bad, but it’s actually the German word for religious “enthusiasm,” and it’s the word that Germans used to hurl at Protestant religious fanatics — people who thought they’d been struck by the spirit. Anyway, Hegel’s point is that even though it’s wrong to think that art can be reduced to rules, it does nonetheless require some craft or technique. That probably sounds commonsensical, but his reasoning is still distinctive: Art is a matter of the spirit/the mind/Geist, and Geist can’t be bound by rules. He’s already said, in fact, that art enacts a certain freedom, “escaping the fetters of rule and regularity”—it is the adventure of fantasy and invention. But at the same time, art is Geist-made-real, Geist actualized, Geist in object form. That’s the whole point of art: Art allows for a certain reunion or reintegration, “cheering and animating the dull and withered dryness of the idea, reconciling with reality its abstraction and its dissociation therefrom, and supplying out of the real world what is lacking to the concept.” “Art gives actuality” and begins when somebody feels compelled to find a way of representing something that is not given to the senses. And in the passage to material form, Geist can’t simply reject all rules. The artists have to remember that they were once artisans.
Finally, he says some art is contentless, notably music—which means it can be mastered by the young and the stupid. (I think he means Mozart.) But if you want to write poetry, you will have to know the world in its detail; you need to possess a worldly intelligence. (And that, he says, is why older writers are generally to be preferred to younger one.) There is a question here of Vollkommenheit—a rationalist aesthetics of plenitude or concordia discors. Music is basically empty (though, surely, one wishes to say back to Hegel, it is capable of achieving Vollkommenheit on formal grounds alone). Literature, however, takes the sundry materials of the world and arranges them into intricate mental forms.
