Abstract
Hegel’s approach to questions of art and beauty in his Lectures on Fine Art takes into consideration two competing narratives about aesthetic thought and its origin — one deriving from classical Greece and the other emerging in the eighteenth century — while offering an idealist stance from which the two can be synthesized. The synthesis which Hegel attempts raises a number of interesting questions about the relation between art and aesthetics and the relevant histories of those disciplines.
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Notes
Frank Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001).
The word first appears in Baumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (1735) and is subsequently used as the title of his (unfinished) Aesthetica (1750–58). To what extent Baumgarten’s coinage should give him credit for being the “father of aesthetics” in our contemporary sense of the term is a more difficult question, of course. For a discussion of this issue in the context of the longer development of the German tradition of rational aesthetics, see Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 5.
On dating the most recent discoveries in El Castillo, Spain (now thought to be even older than the remarkable cave art at Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc), see A. W. G. Pike et al., “U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain,” Science 336, no. 6087 (June 15, 2012): 1409–13.
Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (Oct. 1951): 496–527; and Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 1 (Jan. 1952): 17–46; reprinted as Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 163–227. Citations in what follows refer to the page numbers of the reprinted version.
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See, for example, the summary chart of these developments on p. 115.
Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Halliwell acknowledges that the term aesthetics and the notion of aesthetic disinterestedness associated with the modern discipline of aesthetics are both eighteenth-century inheritances, but argues that a history of aesthetics in Western philosophy could also be understood in terms of a more persistent appeal to the notion of mimesis. On Halliwell’s reading, the later eighteenth century shifts away from the notion of mimesis as imitation are not yet so apparent in Batteux, who after all puts a recognizably Aristotelian notion of mimesis at the center of his organization of the modern arts.
James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
In what follows, I draw not only on Porter’s attack on Kristeller in his book but also on the preemptive strike in James I. Porter, “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (Jan. 2009): 1–24.
Peter Kivy “What Really Happened in the Eighteenth Century: The ‘Modern System’ Re-examined (Again),” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 61.
Larry Shiner, “Continuity and Discontinuity in the Concept of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 2 (April 2009): 159–69.
Barnett Newman, “The First Man Was an Artist,” Tiger’s Eye 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1947): 57–60; quoted in Porter, Origins of Aesthetic Thought, 26–27.
Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 1; also quoted in Porter, “Is Art Modern?” 4n7.
See especially Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, trans. Caroline Saltzwedel, Mitch Cohen, and Kenneth Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Both points are actively discussed in Hegelian circles these days. On Hegel’s use of the human shape as a possible tie between nature and art, see my “Hegel’s Philosophy of Art,” in G. W. F. Hegel: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Baur (Durham: Acumen, forthcoming). On the issue of indispensability see especially the recent discussion in Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
On the philosophical origins and implications of Hegel’s form/content holism, see Rachel Zuckert, “The Aesthetics of Schelling and Hegel,” in The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Dean Moyar (New York: Routledge, 2010), 165–93; and my “Tragedy and the Human Image: German Idealism’s Legacy for Theory and Practice,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley vol. 3: Aesthetics and Literature, ed. Christoph Jamme and Ian Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46–68.
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Speight, A. (2014). Hegel on Art and Aesthetics. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_34
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