Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics

10. Art and the Beauty of the Absolute

Chapter 10  Art and the Beauty of the Absolute I f Hegelian historicism indeed succeeds in vindicating the role of tradition as a source of norms for art, then it becomes important to return to the question of what prevents such historicism from degenerating into mere presentism: and that, as we have seen, is the concept of the divine. Yet it has proven difficult to understand Hegel on the divine, precisely because of his own ambiguities as well as the rival interpretations of scholars seeking to make sense of those ambiguities. It is clear, however, that Hegel’s concept of the divine entails both transcendence and immanence , or to put it more consistently with his own terminology, absoluteness and contingency. For he does not simply equate God with the world; there is a residue of transcendence in his concept of God. But while this level of understanding might suffice for placing the Ideal in both the absolute and contingent realms, it is crucial for justifying the Ideal that the divine not remain at the level of an assumption derived from faith or even revelation. For Hegel’s entire philosophy seeks to place our understanding of the Absolute on a firmer, more rational foundation than religion as faith by itself would customarily allow. It is necessary, then, to follow Hegel in his quest for the justification of the Absolute in order to ground the aim of art philosophically in categories that transcend the historicity even of divine revelation. 209 THE ABSOLUTE AND THE IDEA OF THE GOOD Hegel’s claim that “art has above all to make the Divine the centre of its representations” makes it appear that art springs from and thus has responsibility to religious conceptions of the Divine, as if art were entirely subordinate to religion in its purpose. Yet closer attention to Hegel’s description of the relation of art and religion shows a substantially different argument. For he says in the same passage that since “the Divine is nevertheless essentially determinate in itself, and since it therefore disencumbers itself of abstractness, it resigns itself to pictorial representation and visualization” (VÄ 1, 231; A 1, 175). That is, artistic representation is the inevitable consequence of all religious perception: hence the centrality of the arts to Christian worship in its historical forms. But it is also for this reason that the arts develop within the purely secular sphere as the absolutely proper and inevitable consequence of the Christian understanding of the world in its relation to God. Hegel concludes, therefore, that although the Divine is pure spirit, and thus “an object of intellectual reflection alone,” yet “the spirit embodied in activity, because it always reverberates only in the human breast, belongs to art” (VÄ 1, 231; A 1, 176). Art is the inherent consequence of the realization of divine activity. It will be recalled, however, that the Ideal is specifically artistic: it is never simply an intellectual construct, because it is the goal of human activity and not a purely intellectual contemplation of the Divine as pure spirit. Thus art has always been the key to making the Divine appear to be real in this world. In this sense, only art can make religious truth real. Although Hegel sees the Protestant Reformation’s devaluation of visual respresentation as being more spiritual than earlier traditions, the importance of art in general to Protestant worship was not abandoned . Both music and poetry, in the form of hymns, continued to be cultivated as central to Protestant worship, and it is significant that both these arts, as the most spiritual in nature, rank among the highest artistic achievements of the Protestant parts of Germany. Perhaps, however, Hegel’s iconoclastic Protestantism needs to be questioned as not lying entirely in line with the logic of his own argument, for it is difficult to consign the splendors of Baroque and Rococo Roman Catholic churches to a kind of historical purgatory, as if the visual arts are not really spiritual enough for Christian worship. Thus Hegel’s original point remains valid: art is central to making the Ideal actual 210 Between Transcendence and Historicism in this world. The arts are not simply servants of religion; they create the actuality of the ultimate good of life by holding it up to our contemplation , both sensuous and intellectual, in representation. The problem, then, is how to conceive the ultimate good of life in a way...