Hegelian Art History

Note: The following essay is included to clarify the philosophical foundations of my approach to historical cartography. My work is shaped by a longstanding concern with representation: how abstraction orders reality, how meaning survives formalization, and whether coherent structures remain possible in a fragmented intellectual landscape. Drawing on Hegel’s aesthetics and his thesis on the historical limits of art, this essay examines the tension between inwardness and objectivity that defines modern representation. I include it here because maps, like works of art, stand between concept and world, and because my cartographic practice is best understood as an attempt to preserve intelligibility where form and meaning threaten to separate.

“Spirit has not yet sacrificed itself as self-conscious Spirit to self-consciousness, and the mystery of bread and wine is not yet the mystery of flesh and blood”[i]

            The divine marble statues of Apollo and Aphrodite stand in blessed repose, mourning their fate, lifeless and cold to the modern observer.[ii] Colorful Greek sculptures – the pinnacle of artistic beauty – no longer make sense in an abstract world where Spirit recognizes that beauty resides in “the inner shape of the soul in itself,”[iii] a truth best artistically expressed through a look, facial expressions, music, and poetry.[iv] As the Christian Middle Ages grew out of the ashes of antiquity, the Greek deities of the Pantheon “are dethroned,” for “the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them.”[v]

In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel plausibly founds the discipline of art history. Art is the Spirit’s way of manifesting itself non-discursively; in its highest vocation art sensuously expresses the Divine – it reconciles finite reality with the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.[vi] With the triumph of Christ over Zeus, “Romantic art” succeeded “Classical art,” itself having succeeded “Symbolic art.” For Hegel, Classical art is the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the form appropriate to its essential nature, namely the human figure.[vii] Yet, the development of philosophy in the ancient world coupled with the onset of abstract Roman laws violently disrupted the Greek religion of art. Classical sculpture does not and cannot satisfy the depths of spirit, for “it has as its element not that movement and that reconciliation of infinite subjectivity which has been achieved out of opposition, but instead only the untroubled harmony of determinate free individuality.”[viii] It does not articulate the higher truth of the inwardness of self-consciousness which has its base in the individual. In Romantic art the Absolute becomes the subject rather than the substance, reflecting a transcendence of the Ideal.[ix] Yet this more sophisticated content “is not susceptible of an adequate union with the external, since its true reality and manifestation it can seek and achieve only within itself.”[x] Thus, nothing can be nor become more beautiful than Classical art. Hegel is aware of other conceptions of the purpose of art, but his thesis that art is the sensuous manifestation of spiritual freedom and life is most compelling, particularly with regard to the history of art since his death.

The Classical art of the Greeks and Romans is, for Hegel, art at its most beautiful. Such is not because contemporary or Christian artists could not match the technical skill of the Greek sculptors, poets, or actors; rather, it is because Classical art succeeds in uniting natural existence with self-conscious Spirit. To the modern eye the statues appear “cold and expressionless,” yet to the ancient eye they perfectly and aesthetically articulated the Divine.[xi] In an era before Spirit had recognized the depth of truth in inner self-consciousness, Geist realized itself through the sensuous and immediate “existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man,”[xii] defined in the Olympic athlete, the Homeric hero, and semi-religious tragedy and comedy. The Idea had not yet separated from the sensual. Hence, Hegel writes that the “Greek god is the object of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination,” conditions under which Spirit can appropriately and adequately manifest itself in the corporeal.[xiii]

Greek religion necessarily decayed as man became alienated from his deeper self in late antiquity.[xiv] Hegel ties the deterioration of Greek religion and art to the development of a higher spiritual consciousness which emphasized the truth of inward self-consciousness in a world of suffering. While Classical art was connected with the ethical Spirit – the life of a free people whose customs represent the will of all – the challenges posed by Greek philosophy and the abstraction of Roman law and power divided man’s external societal duties from his internal desire for transcendent spiritual unity.[xv] Already in Greek tragedy the beginnings of the decline of Classical art become evident.

While in Bacchic revels the self is rapt out of its body and in athletic beauty Spirit is corporealized, in language there is the perfect balance of interior and exterior.[xvi] The language in Greek tragedy – according to Hegel – is one expression of the unity of the infinite and the finite, concept and reality. In tragedy, the “self appears merely assigned to the characters, not as the mediating factor of the movement.”[xvii] But it is the recognition of the spectators that the actors are merely playing assigned roles, that they themselves in life are merely acting the parts of assigned duties, which reveals “the Zeus of the universal, of the inner dwelling in concealment.”[xviii] And thus the hero “splits up into his mask and the actor, into the person in the play and the actual self”[xix]; tragedy points to the higher form of consciousness.

The advance of Greek philosophy likewise marked the decline of Classical art and religion. Hegel argues that Plato and others became aware of the great gulf which commenced to “divide the established religion and the political constitution, on the one hand, from those deeper requirements which, on the other hand, were made upon religion and politics by liberty which had learnt to recognize its inner life.”[xx] In other words, philosophers realized the alienation of the Spirit from societal and material reality. Thus, Greek philosophy took “a hostile attitude to an imaginative polytheism” which failed to address the “unity of thought and the substantiality of the Idea.”[xxi] The Greek way of life, its religion of art, no longer made sense in a world where Spirit had begun to realize the shallowness of a spiritual life restricted to the corporeal. Under Rome, popular alienation from the abstraction of life only became more pronounced.

Romantic art and Christianity necessarily succeeded Classical art and Greek polytheism. Early church fathers “steeped themselves in…Neopythagorean, Neoplatonic, and Neoaristotelian philosophy,” and “they applied that philosophical profundity of spirit to the teachings of Christianity.”[xxii] The new religion addressed the weaknesses of the old, namely the insufficient development of the inner self-conscious world which had characterized antiquity. 

In Christianity, human spirituality strives upwards towards and unifies with a spirituality transcending the human, and that transcendent spirituality comes down into and transfigures human spirituality.[xxiii] In the story of Jesus, God “experiences the feeling, consciousness, and grief of disunion in order to come, through this opposition and likewise its dissolution, to infinite reconciliation”[xxiv] The alienation of man’s subjective inner self-consciousness from existence is addressed in Christianity through the promise of the unio mystica – the unity of the finite with the transcendent infinite. Jesus represents the communion of the particular and the universal; his self-conscious and human suffering is not in vain but leads to the ultimate reconciliation with God. In Christianity, man “knows God internally,” in his subjectivity.[xxv]

As religious ideas “were drawn away from their wrapping in the element of sense and brought back to the inwardness of heart and thinking,” art could no longer succeed in its highest vocation.[xxvi] Indeed, Hegel argues that in Christians, “there dwells in the spirit the need to satisfy itself solely in its own inner self as the true form for truth to take.”[xxvii] Yet when one cannot have any determinate knowledge of God,[xxviii] it becomes impossible to accurately represent the divine artistically, at least without the philosophy of art. Rational thinking had freed “the divine Being from its contingent shape” and developed the simple Ideas of the Beautiful and the Good, but man cannot adequately express such concepts in aesthetics alone.[xxix]

Romantic artists thus sought to depict inward subjectivity and the depth of feelings of man’s inner life. Paintings depicted Christ’s crucifixion and the “inherent tranquility amidst agony and suffering.”[xxx] Artists imbued the cold lifeless Greek statues with spirit, emotion, and depth. Romantic art’s spiritual inwardness means “a joy in submission, a bliss in grief and rapture in suffering, even a delight in agony.”[xxxi] Truth, as the content of art, could be expressed in ugliness. Perhaps the greatest content of Christian art is love, for the “romantic Ideal expresses a relation to another spiritual being which is so bound up with depth of feeling that only in this other does the soul achieve this intimacy with itself.”[xxxii] Love and agony, like all subjective inner feelings, are best suited to Romantic art as Classical art was concerned with the exterior form. Hegel goes on to detail the various forms of Romantic art – painting, sculpture, music, poetry, etc. All seek to express the subjectivity through the manipulation of objective materials, a task which can never succeed to the same extent to which Greek art did.

Is Romantic art simply a relapse into Symbolic art? In both forms, Idea and shape are indifferent and inadequate to each other.[xxxiii] Despite the similarity, Hegel argues strongly against the notion that these art forms are equivalent. In Symbolic art – that from China, Egypt, India, and Persia – Spirit did not know what it was trying to say, because it did not know it was free. Viewing such art, “we feel that we are wandering amongst problems; in themselves alone these productions say nothing to us.”[xxxiv] Symbolic art is deficient in content and does not master true beauty. The religious ideas expressed “were still indeterminate, or determined badly.”[xxxv] By contrast, Romantic art knows its content, the Absolute, yet grapples with the difficulty of sensuously communicating that subject matter. Romantic artists know what they are trying to say, and that is the “essential difference.”[xxxvi]

Is Hegel correct in his analysis of the history of art as the history of Spirit making sense of itself aesthetically, where its ultimate realization is that “freedom is the highest destiny of the Spirit”?[xxxvii] Although any historical interpretation of art can be criticized as unfounded – for it is, after all, an interpretation – Hegel’s thesis expounds certain developments which go unexplained by other accounts.

Does art serve as an end in itself, as Hegel suggests? While certainly art has other purposes – political, economic, moral, etc. – these other ends are freely admitted by Hegel. His contention is that in its highest vocation art is an end in itself. Art cannot simply be the imitation of nature, for “we soon get tired of a man who can imitate to perfection the warbling of the nightingale.”[xxxviii] Moreover, Hegel contends that “other ends, like instruction, purification, bettering, financial gain, struggling for fame and honour, have nothing to do with the work of art as such, and do not determine its nature.”[xxxix] His claim that art can be an end in itself is proved by the multitude of art museums and collectors who preserve and display art with the explicit purpose of preserving and displaying art (“art for art’s sake”).

Furthermore, Hegel claims that true art is a thing of the past – that the onset of Christianity and specifically the Reformation has divorced aesthetic beauty from inner truth. When contemporary man and even the contemporary art critic and intellectual is asked what makes art art, the answer is indubitably akin to something like: art is in the eye of the beholder, art is subjective, art is anything looked at as art, and art is determined by critics. These answers and the very cherished works since Hegel’s death, such as Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Box” or any famous piece by Jackson Pollock, demonstrate the extent to which modern, postmodern, and contemporary art have no boundaries. They exhibit the evolution of a process which began with the decline of Greek art. These pieces have failed at expressing the divine, and according to Hegel, that failure is inevitable in an increasingly prosaic, abstract, and demystified world void of God. The evolution of art since Hegel’s era validates, at least to some extent, his proposition that Spirit’s artistic production reflects Spirit’s self-conception and the conception of truth.[xl] Unfortunately, Warhol and Pollock, among others, reveal that truth is no longer necessarily tied to aesthetic beauty.    

Plato perceived the demoralization of defectiveness of his society in an era when a great spiritual dialectic was occurring. His state is “wanting in subjective liberty”[xli] because the world had alienated man’s inner sense from material reality; the Classical art form was dissolving along with Greek polytheism. As Spirit liberated the Divine from a corporeal body, and thus attained a higher form of consciousness, art lost its greatest purpose: to exhibit the sinnliche Scheinen der Idee. Romantic art along with Christianity came to understand the Divine as transcendent, the reconciliation of Jesus with God, the unity of the finite and the infinite. Romantic artists sought to demonstrate the truth of inner subjectivity through writing, composing, and painting pieces about love, agony, and self-consciousness.

 Yet when Spirit detached sensuousness from truth, art gave way to religion and philosophy in expressing the Absolute, and consequently has lost its higher vocation – many see it as “reduced either to a mere entertaining game or a mere means of instruction.”[xlii] While Hegel’s claims are contentious, his thesis provides a compelling explanation for the history of art and the development of artistic movements after him. Many contemporaries are frustrated by the art they encounter in museums – what does it mean? Why is it often so ugly? Why is it worth so much? Hegel’s interpretation provides a strikingly accurate – if hopelessly tragic – answer: in its highest form, art is and has inevitably become a thing of the past. 

Bibliography

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and T. M. Knox. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol 1.           Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Print.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. "Introduction: The Lectures of 1827." In Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 149-84.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Part III: The Philosophy of Spirit.” In Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 483-552.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Endnotes