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

3. The Historicity of the Ideal and the End of Art

Chapter 3  The Historicity of the Ideal and the End of Art F or Hegel, the task of art was the sensuous representation of the Ideal, which was at once an ideal of character and an intelligible content of artistic beauty. The Ideal demanded adequate artistic form; the content and form together constituted the beauty which was the aesthetic goal of art. For modern critics, however, the concept of beauty is both too idealistic and too narrow to serve as a criterion of artistic judgment. Today, art is severed from both moral and intellectual content, and its forms are not restricted to judgments grounded in the perception of what is visually or aurally pleasing. But there is also the conviction that the traditional aesthetic, whether cast in Platonic or Hegelian terms, is a thing of the past; the march of history is assumed to have definitively abandoned the aesthetic of beauty in art. The attitude of presentism precludes the extension of historical criteria to the arts. Yet for Hegel the Ideal is also conditioned by its historicity: it takes different forms with different conceptions of character and the relation of bliss to woe in the classical and the Christian eras. Hegel’s aesthetic thus raises the question of whether the historicity of artistic practice does not simply record the contingency of human subjectivity, leaving the grounding in transcendence as only an accidental characteristic of earlier times. In this case, the historicist critique of the concept of beauty would attain force. But there are deeper reasons to be 57 skeptical of Hegel’s concept of artistic beauty, for even he acknowledges that art may not always present what is pleasing; it can depict the ugly and the hateful, as well as powerful intimations of the divine itself in the category of the “sublime.” If these departures are fitted into the category of beauty, then modern critics are right in claiming that it is both too idealistic and too narrow. This would be a fatal flaw, however, in Hegel’s concept of art as the realization of beauty. A closer reading of Hegel’s historical dialectic of art shows an awareness of this tension between the theory of beauty and the demands of art even in his day. Already by the mid-eighteenth century, the beautiful had ceased to be the exclusive aesthetic category. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757 definitively established the category of the sublime as the second pole of the aesthetic, defined by danger or the threat of suffering.1 This means that at the very moment when the fine arts were being integrated as a system by means of the concept of beauty, beauty itself was no longer the only category available to artists. However, the richness introduced into aesthetics by the concept of the sublime is purchased at the price of an incoherent aesthetic theory; a dichotomy of concepts no longer provides a unitary account of the purpose of artistic endeavor. Yet the sublime can also be cast as the representation of the magnificent or the infinite as well as the powerful or the terrifying. This was the step taken by Schiller, who thereby added to the complexity of the concept of the sublime.2 The sublime, as that which inspires awe or terror, could therefore also be employed as the representation of the power of Nature or of the transcendent power of the divine. Indeed, the German word for the Sublime, “Erhaben,” is derived from the verb “erheben,” “to elevate.” The sublime is elevated above ordinary experience and ordinary beauty. It breaks the bounds of mere harmoniousness, and by its lack of symmetry brings the intimation of a transcendent power into art. It is apparent, then, that the concept of beauty can no longer be taken as the ruling paradigm of art. Logically, the link between art and beauty can no longer be maintained, unless the concept of beauty is so substantially modified that it ceases to retain the original sense of a pleasing visual appeal together with the implication of ethical nobility. One of the principal tasks of Hegel’s aesthetic is to attempt to integrate the sublime into his account of the aesthetics of art. He 58 Between Transcendence and Historicism does so by means of a historical dialectic, which is also a conceptual dialectic. Therefore, his theory of the...