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

Notes

Notes  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. See Christopher Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998), 252. 2. Modernism as an artistic movement therefore shares in the definition of modernity in general, by which to be modern is the absolutely fundamental value: see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 99. Cf. the remarks of Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” in Howard Risatti, ed., Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 55. 3. See Werner Koepsel, Die Rezeption der Hegelschen Ästhetik im 20. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975) for the history of Hegel’s influence in the twentieth century, and especially for Adorno (269 ff.). 4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 18 on the historical nature of Dasein, 391 on the authenticity of the future for Dasein. Only the future holds the possibility of authentic life. 5. Plato makes this distinction in the Timaeus, 27–28; the two worlds are also referred to as the intelligible and the sensible. 6. See the discussion in Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, Book 3, §15, trans. and ed. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 24–25. 7. Stanley Rosen emphasizes this in his G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 33. 223 8. Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967). 9. Bernard M. G. Reardon, Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1977), recognizes the ambiguity of Hegel’s language (103) and the unity of God and the world in Hegel’s conception, but insists that “God is not simply the world” (102). 10. Quentin Lauer, Hegel’s Concept of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), emphasizes that the disjunction in nature between God as Absolute Spirit and both the material condition of the created world and the finite nature of human spirit means that there cannot be any risk of reduction of God to the finitude of creation (139). 11. Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 37–40. 12. Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 45, 73. 13. Stephen Houlgate, in Freedom, Truth and History, emphasizes Hegel’s rejection of supernaturalism (189), but also God’s difference from humanity, even as humanity “is itself an integral part of the life of God” (197). William Desmond is much more critical, calling Hegel’s God an idol in his recent Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); he argues that Hegel’s concept of God is equivocal, involving at least a reconfiguration of authentic divine transcendence in the language of “holistic immanence” by which God becomes the selfgenerating Whole of wholes 13). 14. The concept of “the ethical” requires some preliminary clarification . In the classical Aristotelian sense, it refers to character, whereas in Hegel’s usage, it refers to the life of customary duties. But abstract duty itself, in the Kantian sense, he calls “moral” in nature. Of course, today, ethical is likely to mean those specific public obligations attendant on a particular profession, while moral refers to the arena of private action. What is lost, in other words, is both the primacy of character and the sense of custom and tradition in ethics, and the concern with duty that must be done just because that is what is right. However, the ethical will mean, throughout the discussion that follows, both the classical sense of virtue in character and the life of customary duties; the context will make clear which is intended. When moral is used, in general it should be understood in the broadest possible sense, unless Kant is the specific object of discussion. NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Lest it be thought that this is a purely personal and idiosyncratic observation, a leading textbook on art history calls postmodernist paint224 Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1 ing “barren” and “gutted of all significance”—an honest assessment that is all too rare in the field: see H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson, History...