Finding What Will Suffice: Stevens and the Post-Hegelian Evaluation of Art

PHILOSOPHY’S REPEATED ATTEMPTS to deduce art’s cognitive value have led to a plethora of conflicting conclusions. Jerome Stolnitz’s essay “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art” is a prime example of the skeptical position within the debate. There are two aspects of this position that I find fundamentally misguided and unhelpful to our ongoing endeavor to gauge the value of art: first, that it attempts to evaluate art using the truth standards of philosophy, and second, that it views art as a static entity with a fixed function and cognitive value. In what follows, I intend to show how the universalizing conclusions engendered by this view are an impediment to our discovering the hidden wealth with which art endows particular cultures.

Thus, the purpose of my contribution is to demonstrate two key theses: a) that art is capable of providing a form of cognitive value distinct from that of philosophy; and b) that the predominant criteria by which art is assessed for cognitive value ought to be viewed as historically determined.

To support these claims, I will adduce the aesthetic theories of both the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the poet Wallace Stevens. Although the thought of these two figures has already been the subject of a number of comparative studies—more particularly within Stevens criticism—a full comparison of their aesthetic theories has not yet been undertaken.¹ Hence, the first section of my essay offers a comparative exposition of their respective arguments concerning how ideal art is capable of providing a sui generis form of cognitive value. Here I focus on Hegel’s conception of beauty and on what Stevens calls the “supreme fiction.” The second section argues that art’s ability to fulfill these ideals and its hierarchical relation to both philosophy and religion are historically determined. To develop this point, I examine Hegel’s historical account of the development of fine art and Stevens’ thesis that poetry has compensated for the waning relevance of religion in the modern world. In my final section, I argue that Hegel’s and Stevens’ conflicting ideals can be reconciled, up to a point, if they are understood as separated by what I call a “criterial shift.”

I. Embodiment and Illumination: Two Aesthetic Ideals

In order to fully grasp the conclusions drawn by Hegel in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (further abbreviated, in accordance with conventions in Hegel scholarship, as LFA), it is first necessary to have an understanding of its metaphysical foundations. In the Encyclopaedia, Hegel describes what he calls the “Idea itself” as “the dialectic which eternally divides and distinguishes what is self-identical from what is differentiated, the subjective from the objective, the finite from the infinite, the soul from the body. Only in this way is the Idea eternal creation, eternal vitality, and eternal Spirit” (par. 214). The absolute idea is the self-moving and self-determining divine logos. It can also be understood in teleological terms as the telos implicit within all determinate being. In this way, the sunflower seed implicitly contains the idea of the fully grown sunflower. The idea, governing all matter internally and externally, is thus also the determining factor in both the collective and individual being of humans. As human cognition grasps this dialectical rationality governing both the external world of things (through the physical sciences) and the world of self-consciousness (spirit or Geist), the absolute idea is able to “return to itself” (par. 1782). Indeed, by revealing and understanding this universal rationality, human beings are able to become fully self-conscious and render explicit the telos implicit in their existence.

In The Science of Logic, Hegel delineates the function fulfilled by art in this process of self-revelation, asserting that “Nature and spirit are in general different modes of presenting [the idea’s] existence, art and religion its different modes of apprehending itself and giving itself an adequate existence.” Nevertheless, he continues, philosophy remains “the highest mode of apprehending the absolute idea, because its mode is the highest mode, the Notion” (824). Since philosophy deals solely with concepts, only...