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Allegories of Symbol: On Hegel’s Aesthetics
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39 Allegories of Symbol: On Hegel’s Aesthetics Andrzej Warminski G. W. F. Hegel’s double, ambiguous and ambivalent if not downright duplicitous , attitude toward art is legible in his Aesthetics from one end to the other, from the beginning and to the ends. All we need to know both about the philosophy and the history of art (according to Hegel) is there to be read already in the introduction. As Hegel goes through the three main types or forms of art according to the different relations between sensuous form and spiritual content proper to each—from the (“symbolic”) pre-art of the East and the Egyptians in which there is an inadequation between sensuous form and spiritual content on account of the abstractness of the latter to the (“classical ”) art, art properly speaking, of Greece in which there is a full adequation of form to content, and on to the (“romantic”) post-art of Christian Europe in which there is again an inadequation between form and content, this time on account of the concreteness of the latter—a first doubleness and ambiguity comes to the fore. Namely, there are two high points, two “highest” stages, classical and romantic: if the classical form of art has arrived at the highest (das Höchste) that the embodiment or making sensuous (die Versinnlichung) of art can achieve, then the romantic form in its fullest development (i.e., romantic poetry) is the highest stage (die höchste Stufe) at which art transcends itself “in that it leaves behind the element of reconciled embodiment of the spirit in sensuous form and passes over from the poetry of the imagination [or, better, representation] to the prose of thought” (indem sie das Element versöhnter Versinnlichung des Geistes verläßt und aus der Poesie 40 Andrzej Warminski der Vorstellung in die Prosa des Denkens hinübertritt)” (A 13:123, 89).1 Of course, this first “ambiguity” is easily enough resolved by reference to Hegel’s system and to the place of art in that system. Let us recall, quickly and very schematically, that, according to the articulations of Hegel’s “mature” system—that is, the “Encyclopaediasystem ”—the Idea is first of all the logical Idea or, in Hegel’s vocabulary, the Idea in itself (an sich), then it is the Idea outside or up against itself, in nature, or the Idea for itself (für sich), and, last, it is the Idea as spirit (Geist), or the Idea in and for itself (an und für sich). Hence the three divisions of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Now “spirit,” Geist, in turn realizes itself as, first, subjective spirit—as the objects of the “sciences” of anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology respectively (i.e., what Hegel calls the soul [Seele], consciousness [Bewußtsein], and mind or spirit [Geist])— then objective spirit—the domains of abstract right, morality, and “social ethics”—and, last, absolute spirit, which appears in art, religion, and philosophy . As the manifestation of absolute spirit, art occupies a very high place indeed, in this regard as high as religion and philosophy. It is, writes Hegel in the introduction, “the first reconciling mediating term (das erste versöhnende Mittelglied) between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transient (Vergängliches), between nature and its finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking” (A 13:21, 8). But as the first mediating link between senses and intellect, nature and mind, transience and infinitude, necessity and freedom, and so forth, art is also a merely preliminary appearance of absolute spirit, absolute spirit only an sich, and thus not the fully developed manifestation of absolute spirit in the “medium” or the element proper to it. The reason is self-evident. In art, absolute spirit has, by definition as it were, to appear in sensuous form, and the sensuous can never be a medium or a form or an element proper enough for that which is by definition spirit, spiritual and not sensuous, and absolutely spiritual at that. In other words, it is indeed very much a question of “definition” and “determination” here—as in de-finire or de-terminare, to “limit,” to “border off”—as is always the case for Hegel. As “the sensuous appearance of the Idea” (the Idea in and for itself), art allows absolute spirit to appear all right, but to appear only as determined in and by the form of art which, in turn, is by...