{"id":1794,"date":"2025-12-02T16:21:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T21:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2025-12-02T16:22:05","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T21:22:05","slug":"hegels-lectures-on-fine-art-part","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/critical-theory-and-philosophy\/hegels-lectures-on-fine-art-part\/","title":{"rendered":"Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0You might be interested in the problems\u00a0Hegel\u00a0has — by his own admission — beginning his lectures on\u00a0art. He feels like he should begin by giving a definition of\u00a0art, though that’s not quite the way he puts it, and the difference matters. What, he asks, is the “concept” of\u00a0art? Can we give a philosophically elaborated definition? A professor writing in the 2020s would probably just say a “theory of\u00a0art,” 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 \u201cconcept,\u201d as Hegel understands it, isn’t provisional. Just the opposite. In order to work out the “concept” of\u00a0art, 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\u00a0has something that we would\u00a0call\u00a0art.\u00a0Art\u00a0is basically ubiquitous — and in that sense a human necessity — and the question would be\u00a0why? Why do human groups everywhere always produce\u00a0art\u00a0(of some kind)? The philosophical approach to\u00a0art\u00a0turns on that<\/i> question.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The problem is,\u00a0Hegel\u00a0now says, that you can’t answer this question if all you’re talking about is\u00a0art. If you want to say what gives rise to\u00a0art, you have to look beyond\u00a0art\u00a0(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<\/i>. So for now, let’s just take\u00a0art\u00a0as given, and let’s begin by reflecting on the semi-philosophical things that people already believe\u00a0about\u00a0art. And if you ever work through my entire system, then maybe you’ll be in a position to understand the \u201cconcept” of\u00a0art.\u00a0But not now.<\/p>\n

So off he goes.\u00a0Hegel\u00a0clears some pages to consider some once common\u00a0 <\/span>ideas about\u00a0art. He begins by pointing out that\u00a0art\u00a0isn’t naturally occurring, that it is human and perhaps even akin to work. \u201cNot only has\u00a0art\u00a0at 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.\u201d (9) You might notice how this aligns\u00a0art\u00a0with technology: it is the ability to produce in new ways, beyond nature.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0art\u00a0just by\u00a0 <\/span>learning a craft or just by following the rules? Can you give somebody an\u00a0art-making instruction booklet? And to this\u00a0Hegel\u00a0says: No. The work of Geist<\/i> 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<\/i>) <\/i>and not by the law — that Christianity is not a matter of following rules.\u00a0Hegel\u00a0points out that if you consult writing manuals or handbooks of\u00a0art, 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).<\/p>\n

Hegel\u00a0next 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\u00a0artist,\u201d someone who creates great\u00a0art\u00a0without having been trained. The notion of \u201ctalent,\u201d similarly, is akin to grace in the religious sense: It is the gift you can\u2019t give yourself. The silliest idea promoted by the theorists of genius is that some\u00a0artists\u00a0can create without at all reflecting on what they are doing\u2014wholly immersed and intoxicated and riding the rush. The idea here is that\u00a0artists\u00a0create in a fit of\u00a0Begeisterung<\/i>\u00a0— Knox\u2019s translation has “inspiration,” which isn’t bad, but it’s actually the German\u00a0word for religious \u201centhusiasm,” and it\u2019s the word that Germans used to hurl at Protestant religious fanatics — people who thought they’d been struck by the spirit. Anyway,\u00a0Hegel’s point is that even though it\u2019s wrong to think that\u00a0art\u00a0can be reduced to rules, it does nonetheless require some craft or technique. That probably sounds commonsensical, but his reasoning is still distinctive:\u00a0Art\u00a0is a matter of the spirit\/the mind\/Geist<\/i>, and Geist<\/i> can’t be bound by rules. He\u2019s already said, in fact, that art\u00a0enacts a certain freedom, \u201cescaping the fetters of rule and regularity\u201d\u2014it is the adventure of fantasy and invention. But at the same time, art is Geist-made-real, Geist<\/i> actualized, Geist<\/i> in object form. That\u2019s the whole point of art: Art\u00a0allows for a certain reunion or reintegration, \u201ccheering 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.\u201d \u201cArt\u00a0gives actuality\u201d 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<\/i> can’t simply reject all rules. The\u00a0artists\u00a0have to remember that they were once artisans.<\/p>\n

Finally, he says some\u00a0art\u00a0is contentless, notably music\u2014which 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<\/i>\u2014a rationalist aesthetics of plenitude or concordia discors<\/i>. Music is basically empty (though, surely, one wishes to say back to Hegel,\u00a0 <\/span>it is capable of achieving Vollkommenheit<\/i> on formal grounds alone). Literature, however, takes the sundry materials of the world and arranges them into intricate mental forms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0You might be interested in the problems\u00a0Hegel\u00a0has — by his own admission — beginning his lectures on\u00a0art. He feels like he should begin by giving a definition of\u00a0art, though that’s not quite the way he puts it, and the difference … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4033],"tags":[24266,24288,24252,24289],"class_list":["post-1794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critical-theory-and-philosophy","tag-art","tag-genius","tag-hegel","tag-vollkommenheit"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1794"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1797,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions\/1797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}