Selections from Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (1830s)

Hegel explores relationships between art and human experience. For Hegel, art can function as a representation that expresses what it might mean to be fully human. Even though Hegel is trying to work with Kant’s universalities in more concrete ways, Hegel is also making new moves for “art” with respect to form and content in an effort to connect mind and body with some kind of spirit.

Hegel works through familiar structures: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, drama and poetry. According to Hegel, art found in these six realms has the potential to be more than a mere imitation of the physical world. These processes can produce something that is more than an object, or more than an object that produces effects for human viewers (Kant). For Hegel, particular kinds of art can function as objects with meaningful content that manifests or embodies human perfection. This moves away from Kant’s ideas that the “right” kind of people can perceive aesthetics/beauty/Beauty/the sublime through their individual faculties.

Hegel divides art into three foundational categories. Certainly Symbolic Art, with its classification as a less than adequate attempt at representation, and its forced connection with Indian, Persian, or Egyptian models “primitivizes” the Other. Classical Art would seem to be the penultimate, or the Ideal, with respect to form and content because it intimately connected Greeks to their Gods, but Hegel's claim for Romantic Art seems more complicated. It moves inward and can connect man and the divine through some kinds of representation (religious iconography), but it can also function in certain kinds of representations of every day experience (the Dutch masters) that produce momentary freedom or some kind of transcendence. Are some of these principles resonating with earlier views we have seen regarding stages of human development?

I have remaining questions about form and content for Romantic Art, defining beauty/Beauty, sensate/sensuous perception, immortality, and the relationship between reason and spirit, as well as the place of pain, pleasure, and the sublime in Hegel’s text.

Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790): The version we are reading presents Kant's account of beauty and the sublime as two distinct aspects of aesthetic experience. Kant defines the features that he believes can be associated with aesthetic judgment, explores whether such judgment is possible, and examines how it mediates between theoretical and practical aspects of human cognition.

Given the impenetrable nature of this text, I am guessing that Kant's contemporary audience was a very small group of "learned men" found throughout Europe (Germany, France, England). Like his audience, Kant is interested in finding a rational way to harmonize the dualities traditionally associated with human experience. His moves in this text allow him to define aesthetic judgment (read sensation or sensate perception) as a cognitive activity with the same usefulness and validity as pure reason or practical reason.

Once I realized that Kant is continually trying to mediate rather than simply categorize, I felt that I could grasp a little bit more of this text. I also think I now understand why some contemporary art installations feature machines that vibrate: could these objects have been designed to invoke the oscillating nature of the sublime? Hmm...

I have an infinite number of questions, but in this moment I am primarily caught up with the connections between aesthetic judgment and moral culture that Kant advances near the end of this text. It smells like Darwin's theories of evolution: only the most moral cultures are fit enough to develop or foster aesthetic judgment. Would this interpretation work with what we know of Kant? How will this thread play out as we move on?

Aesthetics and Enlightenment

Baumgarten, "Reflections on Poetry" (1760): Essay strives to identify, define, categorize key relationships between philosophy and poetry. Examples from "classical" literature or antiquity are listed as ideals, models, determiners. Sensation is critical and generally combined with notions of clarity, the importance of appropriate/adequate/pleasing/well-received presentation (a "how-to" for embodying, manifesting an aesthetic?). The essay also emphasizes the interconnectedness of many relationships, and expresses a preference for text over image.

Shared knowledge/shared values with audience: Greeks are the still the gold standard for a life well-lived. There is recognized tension between "philosophy" (rationality, reason) and "poetry" (pleasure derived from ancient texts or "poetic cognition").

The shift in knowledge/values Baumgarten may be trying to establish: The mind/body split is keeping us from achieving a full understanding of human experience. Human understanding should embrace perceptions developed through personal sensation in addition to rational (merely cerebral) explorations of experience, whether we are in pursuit of the mortal, or the immortal. These classifications are offered by Baumgarten as a way to balance or harness human sensations or provide an acceptable kind of temperance for "wild" passions, particularly for a skeptical audience that may resist an impulse to let go of "rationality" as a primary tool for evaluating human experience.

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Schiller, "Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man" (1794): Series of letters (to Goethe?) examining how art mediates human experience to help achieve personal and social harmony. Art, as a pursuit of beauty, becomes an aesthetic that unifies (tempers, balances) inherent contradictions or tensions in human nature between sensation/desire/material impulses/feeling and rationality/formal impulses/thought. This reconciliation can produce a state or experience discovered through play (our inherent play drive) which is "outside of time" or extra-temporal (transcendent?) and liberatory.

Shared knowledge/values with audience: Antiquity as an ideal, a time of "glorious humanity." We have "fallen": we are not close to this distant Greek ideal, we lack social harmony and an authentic capacity to enjoy human experience. Questions related to immortality are irrelevant because they don't address the fact that the here and now is pretty awful.

The shift Schiller is trying to produce: life can be better, we can put our differences aside as we work toward this natural balance, this new pursuit will also provide us with more personal Freedom and a brief escape from the contemporary world.

What socio-historical connections can we make to Schiller's "wounds" of modern humanity and the "machinery of the states" on page 7? How are class, gender operating within these two texts?

Aesthetic Theories -- Origins in the West

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Plato’s Symposium (384 BCE?): “Reported” dialogues occurring at an exclusive drinking party for free male aristocrats. Homoerotic setting is complicated by discussion prompts to explore the nature of “love.” Plato, as Socrates, relates through Diotima that the “highest” form of love is not sexual, but intellectual and manifested in a desire to pursue wisdom and divine beauty; text concludes with Alcibiades’ desire for Socrates remaining unfulfilled. Generally interpreted to privilege non-sexual interests and desires (“Platonic” love).

Plato assumes his audience supports existing social hierarchies (white wealthy men/working men, women, slaves) as well as cultural standards of physical beauty (athletic male) and sexual desire (male-oriented). The text seems to reinforce these values, but complicate them by provocatively challenging its audience to recognize virtues like wisdom and a pursuit of the divine, which are less “base,” are not driven by self-pleasure, and could perhaps work more toward communal (reproductive?) stability.

**How is Alcibiades’ “lack” working this text, particularly as the conclusion?

**How does Diotima’s gendered “presence” function at this all-male gathering?

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Aristotle’s Poetics (350 BCE?): Essay addresses a tension between representation versus imitation, and further classifies existing forms of artistic production. Art (poetry) helps us to discover “the good” (in the nature of good men). This principle functions in opposition to the view that art, as imitation, distracts us from discovering universals which are immaterial and exist outside of that which is human. Text emphasizes order and structure through a well-recognized “conception of unity” (each part must share some relationship to the whole). Proportionality and linear progression (as unities in time and place) are also privileged.

Aristotle supports existing social hierarchies and promotes taxonomies, perhaps to standardize artistic production? He values artistic production, arguing that representation produced through human efforts can reflect human experience as it is, as it seems to be, or as it should be, which all allows for greater human understanding than mere imitation (than mere human reproduction?).

**Does pleasure (cerebral or sensual) play a central role in artistic production or reception according to this text?

**Could this essay also be called “Let’s stop waiting around for those damn Gods!” Or “Let’s define what we like, people!”?

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Longinus, On the Sublime (200 AD? Syrian, Greek, Roman?): Addressed to a friend (Terentian), the text attempts to remedy previous efforts to examine the constituents of sublimity as “loftiness in writing.” The author values elevated thought (from a noble mind), strong emotion, figures of thought and speech applied in a particular fashion, noble diction, and attention to composition (i.e., Homer, Plato, Demosthenes). Devalued qualities include turgidity, puerility, false emotion, and frigidity.

Author reinforces idea that human production is valuable. He is trying to promote this kind of production through “vital informing principles” that value unique “natural endowments,” but still share some common characteristics.

** Is he trying to keep artistic production in the hands of the elite? Perhaps something like: “Hey—not just anybody can do this, and watch out for those Bible writers, you guys!”

**How are sensuality and sexuality—bodily pleasures and conception —operating here?

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Horace, Ars Poetica (20 BCE? Roman): A poem in the form of an advice letter to a father and two sons that explores poetic craft and artistic theory. Considerations of audience and reception are more prominent, but Greek production remains the gold standard, and standard aspects of classical style are shored up. Personal choice, individuality can be reflected in art, but efforts to reference a common (Greek) history are preferred. And not just anyone can do this; you need natural talent, plus the right kind of training.

I am less clear about how this text is functioning. It seems to be reminding Romans that they need to look back to forge some kind of common (noble? privileged?) identity.

**Art can re-connect us (not as Romans, per se, but as a special elite) even though we are spread out all around the Empire?

** What prompts this (new?) focus on audience and artistic reception?

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