Rachel Zuckert
Hegel and Schelling understand art to be a central human activity, one that models, rivals, or even supersedes the accomplishments of philosophy. This exalted status attributed to art rests upon a novel conception of art as a distinctive metaphysical and cognitive achievement: art presents the Absolute, ultimate being, in sensible or finite form. Their theories of art are the source, in the history of aesthetics, of the influential claim that artistic value resides in the “unity of form and content” and are also the first philosophies of art that treat art systematically, differentiated both by media (art forms) and in historical periods.
This essay concentrates on Hegel and Schelling, alone, because Fichte pays little attention to aesthetics, and because the central concern of Kant’s aesthetic theory – the justification of judgments of taste – fits squarely within the eighteenth-century project of philosophical aesthetics (the investigation of taste) and is quite alien to Hegel’s and Schelling’s shared dominant concerns and methods. For this reason, Kant’s aesthetics will be discussed in the “historical background” section; various aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory that were influential on Hegel and Schelling will also be noted.
Though philosophers in the West had long discussed art and beauty, philosophical attention focused intensively upon aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Eighteenthcentury Europe saw the foundation of public institutions dedicated to the arts such as art galleries, museums, and concert halls, as well as the development of a growing public market for artworks. The category of the fine or “beautiful” arts was also first formulated, to include the arts of literature (“poetry”), painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, landscape gardening, and music (see Kristeller 1951 and 1952, and Shiner 2001). In the Germanic countries, this was also a period of great artistic flourishing – the age of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as of the origins of art history in Winckelmann’s work on the art of ancient Greece.
In part because of these historical developments, and in part for philosophical reasons, philosophers in Britain (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke), France (Batteux, du Bos, Diderot, Rousseau) and Germany (Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Herder, Kant, Schiller) devoted extensive attention to matters aesthetic. These philosophers mostly concentrated on questions concerning “taste.” They understood beauty to be identified by the pleasurable responses of spectators or auditors to objects; indeed many claimed that beauty consisted in an object’s disposition to cause such responses. Thus they aimed to identify what, phenomenologically or functionally, is distinctive about these responses, and which characteristics of an object are likely to occasion them. They attempted as well to determine which responses, by which people, are “valid” for all others, or establish a “standard of taste.” These investigations were of philosophical interest in their own right, as they purport to define the beautiful, as (usually) subjective, i.e. as dependent upon the individual’s response to objects. But they were also turned to broader philosophical purposes, for example to contribute to the Enlightenment “science of man” by providing an account of human capacities for feeling and perception, or to identify resources – shared sentiments aroused by art – for promoting moral behavior and social unification in democratic societies.
As will be discussed below, Hegel and Schelling reject this project – the investigation of taste – vehemently. Though they admit this less openly, however, they are also deeply influenced by their predecessors, particularly those in the German aesthetic tradition. We may identify three chief claims as influential upon them: (a) the representation of beauty is intermediate between “mere” sense experience and rational cognition and thereby perhaps may serve as sensible representation of rational ideas; (b) human pleasure in beauty is intermediate between sensible pleasures and rational, moral approval, and thus might be educative towards morality; (c) aesthetic or artistic value is to be understood (in part) in historical terms, as proposed by Schiller and Herder. (On many of these points, Hegel and Schelling were immediately influenced by the Romantics; on the Romantics, see Chapter 10 of this volume; on their relation to Hegel’s and Schelling’s aesthetics, see Schaeffer 2000, and in response to Schaeffer, Ameriks 2006.)
Characteristic of the German tradition in aesthetics beginning with Baumgarten is the view that the experience of beauty comprises representation that is both sensible – gained through the senses, of particular objects – and yet also akin to rational representation of universals, or of objects as governed by conceptually articulated connections and order. Baumgarten and other German rationalists (including Lessing and Mendelssohn) understood this kinship to rationality as the “perfection” of the objects of aesthetic experience: the beautiful object is (and is sensibly represented as) superlatively ordered; every part, every property, has a reason for belonging to the whole. Correspondingly, the perceiving subject is in a state of perfection itself: in apprehending such objects, the subject has orderly representations, or is in a state of proto-rationality itself.
In the Critique of Judgment – a work deeply influential on both Hegel and Schelling – Kant expands upon and reinterprets these claims. Like the German rationalists, Kant understands our representation of the beautiful to be similar to, but distinct from, conceptual cognition of objects: in representing an object as beautiful, on Kant’s view, we experience it as unified and intelligible, but without using the conceptual rules that guide our comprehension of objects in ordinary cognition. Thus – and importantly for Hegel and Schelling – Kant claims that in experiencing the beautiful, our imaginations (or capacities for sensible representation more broadly) are “free” both from causally induced association and from conceptual determination, free to perceive new, fresh order in the perceived object; likewise, artistic creation of the beautiful consists, in part, in the free, creative power of the imagination. Moreover, particularly in his discussion of the beauty of fine art, Kant suggests that the order we represent in the beautiful transcends – is richer in content, more complex, than – the order we represent in cognized objects. Artworks present to us “aesthetic ideas” or “representation[s] of the imagination that occasion much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (Kant 2000: 192). Therefore, Kant suggests, artworks may represent imaginatively or in sensible form “ideas of reason,” ideas of that which lies beyond sensible experience or description by (mere) concepts, such as “the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation” (ibid.).
Thus Kant introduces the conception of art, expanded upon by Hegel and Schelling, as not simply similar (in its beauty) to rational representation, but as a representation of rational, transcendent ideas. Kant suggests, too, that beauty might “bridge” a central Kantian “gulf” of great concern to Hegel and Schelling (as to nearly all post-Kantians): between nature and freedom or morality. Kant claims that beauty is a “symbol of morality” or a “transition” to morality: in appreciating beauty, we recognize nature as suitable to our purposes (including moral purposes), and we feel a disinterested pleasure that may move us towards the disinterested commitment required for moral action, a pleasure that is – as is morality – free from our natural needs and desires (Kant 2000: 225–8).
In his Letters on Aesthetic Education, Friedrich Schiller expands upon this Kantian suggestion, adding intra- and extra-personal historical dimensions. Like Kant, Schiller suggests that the experience of the beautiful is educative towards morality: in appreciating the beautiful, we feel our freedom from natural need and material necessity, but we do so not as purely rational, autonomous individuals, separate from the natural order. Rather, we find the beautiful object to be freely ordered within sensibility – and we are and sensibly feel ourselves to be free and harmonious in having this experience (Schiller 1982: 100–9). This state prepares the individual for rational freedom, for moral action even in conflict with sensible inclination, and thus is part of the individual’s developmental process from natural neediness to rational, free self-rule (Schiller 1982: 138–43, 160–9).
Schiller suggests that this developmental transition from beauty to rational morality may also be traced in Western history: the Greeks lived harmonious, beautiful lives, in which the claims of sensibility and rationality were immediately united. The chief difference between us moderns and the Greeks is that we have come to recognize the distinctiveness of rationality, of freedom and morality, as potentially opposed to sensible inclination and as corrective of the given natural order. But this opposition between rationality and sensibility, between freedom and nature, is also alienating, leading to disunified individuals and societies (Schiller 1982: 32–43). (In another influential essay, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” Schiller suggests that this break between ancients and moderns is reflected in poetry as well, as a distinction between “naïve” poetry that joyously celebrates the intelligibility of nature and one’s union with it, and the “sentimental” poetry of reflection, yearning, or alienation.) On Schiller’s view, as for many after him, the French Revolution exemplifies both the achievements and the dangers of modern (Kantian) moral rationality: the revolutionaries admirably attempted to transform the world in light of a self-legislated, rational moral conception, but the degeneration of the French Revolution into fanaticism also demonstrates the dangers of reason’s alienation from nature, our inability – without some sort of “transition” – to leave our sensible natures behind, to act purely in accord with reason. In light of this catastrophic event, Schiller proposes that a social return to beauty and artistic idealization might provide such a “transition” and address this alienation by bringing nature and freedom together once more (1982: 7–9, 42–7, 214–19).
Like Schiller, Johann Gottfried Herder contrasts the experience and production of art with the alienation – of rationality from sensibility, of abstract concepts from lived experience and individuality – characteristic of modern society. Art, he claims, is both produced and experienced by human beings employing all of their capacities in harmonious balance (Herder 2006: 309, 331). More strongly than Schiller, however, Herder emphasizes that art may overcome the alienation of the individual from society because it expresses the life and world view of its society, thus allowing individuals to recognize their connections to their community, their shared values. More than Schiller, therefore, Herder celebrates the historical and social diversity of artistic works: artworks not only do, but should, reflect the diversity and specificity of societies’ ways of life (Herder 2006: 292–8). Unlike Schiller’s suggestions concerning the promise of a return to beauty and an aesthetically unified future society, moreover, Herder’s conception of historical change is less optimistic: he argues that because modernity is characterized by increasing specialization and rational abstraction (as Schiller argues as well), there may be no harmonious art expressive of modern life (Herder 2006: 246–56). We, as moderns, may have lost the holism – of individual capacities, of societal values and practices – expressed in truly great art. These conceptions of the historical function of art – as expressing historically changing social values, as a source of future reconciliation, or as a lost locus of harmony – are central to Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies of art, to which we shall now turn.
Schelling and Hegel treat aesthetics in two contexts: as part of their systematic philosophies as a whole – respectively, in the System of Transcendental Idealism (of 1800) and in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, part 3: The Philosophy of Spirit (of 1830) – and, in greater detail, in lectures on the philosophy of art, given by Schelling in 1802–3, and by Hegel in 1820–1, 1823, 1826 and 1828–9. In these treatments, Schelling and Hegel propose doctrines concerning the nature of beauty and art. In the lectures, they develop these general theoretical claims into accounts of the different art forms – architecture, music, sculpture, painting, literature – claiming, ambitiously, that their theories can account for the specific character of these art forms and their historical developments.
Before turning to discuss their claims, two notes concerning these texts are in order. First, Schelling’s treatments of art span his transition from the Fichtean position of the System to the more Spinozistic position of his identity-philosophy; some differences between these phases in Schelling’s career will be noted, but they cannot be discussed in detail here (on the phases in Schelling’s philosophical career, see White 1983). Second, the edition of Hegel’s lectures that has been most studied is that edited by his disciple, Hotho, and published posthumously in 1835 (and translated in Hegel 1975). New editions of transcripts of Hegel’s lecture courses have been published, which suggest that Hotho may have altered Hegel’s lecture notes (see Hammermeister 2002: 89–90, 228). Because Hegel’s central claims in the lectures appear to remain constant and because the Hotho edition is still the most available, however, this edition alone will be cited here.
As noted above, Hegel and Schelling emphatically reject their predecessors’ philosophical aesthetics of taste. Neither denies that we respond emotionally to artworks, and both endorse a common eighteenth-century claim concerning this feeling and/ or its object, namely, disinterestedness: art (and our response to it) does not serve external ends, is not the object of desire or use, but is valuable in itself (Schelling 1978: 223, 227; Hegel 1975: 35–7, 55). But they deny that these responses alone can define or substantively characterize art. Schelling objects that eighteenth-century theories “tried to explain beauty using empirical psychology, and in general treated the miracles of art the same way one treated ghost stories and other superstitions: by enlightening us and explaining them away” (Schelling 1989: 12). Hegel argues that personal taste is arbitrary and diverse – and so (he jokes) it should be, as each husband’s taste for his wife as the most beautiful woman is much better than an agreed-upon, universal taste; thus taste cannot determine the (objective, universal) value of art (Hegel 1975: 1, 16, 44–5). Moreover, a doctrine that defines beauty or art as arousing feelings is superficial, Hegel argues, because it disregards their determinate character: feeling is an “indefinite dull region of the spirit … [D]ifferences between feelings are … completely abstract, not differences in the thing itself … .[Feeling] is capable of receiving into itself the most varied and opposite contents” (ibid.: 1, 32–3).
Hegel’s and Schelling’s objections to the philosophy of taste can be glossed as objections to aesthetic “subjectivism” in several meanings of this term: if one concentrates on taste, one understands artistic value to reside merely in felt responses – not in the object itself. These responses are, moreover, arbitrary, individualized, and insufficiently reflective of the characteristics of the object. One can, Hegel suggests, feel different emotions towards the same object, and one can feel the same emotion (e.g. anger) toward many different things. The episodes of anger themselves – though perhaps qualitatively and quantitatively somewhat different – are largely similar, and thus do not reflect the possibly vast differences among their objects. (This objection may have particular weight against the common eighteenth-century proposal that the beautiful occasions pleasure, a broadly defined and variously caused feeling.) As the quotation above from Schelling suggests, this philosophical approach is seen not only as inadequate to its subject matter (art) because it concentrates on external response, but also as reductive, denying the “miracle,” the greatness, of art, by treating it as a mere feeling-producer (cf. Hegel 1975: 34). And indeed by contrast to all of their predecessors in philosophical aesthetics, Hegel and Schelling concentrate nearly exclusively on art (as opposed to natural beauty) as a fundamental human activity and distinctive product, not merely as a source of pleasure. Correspondingly, in their lectures on the philosophy of art, they investigate, to a degree unmatched by previous or (arguably) subsequent aesthetic theorists, an enormous range of artworks.
Hegel and Schelling aim to articulate the essential character of art as a human activity and product. Both purport to provide definitions of art as such, but, by contrast to previous and subsequent aestheticians, neither claims that this definition ought to apply to any object said to be “art.” Hegel claims that though art (like thought) may be used in many frivolous ways, he is concerned solely with “true” and “free” art, that which is valuable in itself and “fulfils its supreme task” (Hegel 1975: 7). Schelling criticizes the “liberal use of …‘work of art’” that would identify even any “epigram which preserves a momentary sensation” as an artwork (Schelling 1978: 231); he is also willing to identify objects that fit his definition as art, even if they are not standardly so considered, e.g. the Catholic church (Schelling 1989: 81).
Instead of surveying objects already labeled as “art,” therefore, both Schelling and Hegel attempt to define art within their systematic accounts of the nature of being or of self-determining self-consciousness – within, that is, their systematic accounts of the “Absolute.” (I shall use the term “Absolute” to refer to what they conceive to be the ultimate being or the object of philosophical knowledge because this term is shared by both, and can be used to refer, somewhat indeterminately, to the various conceptions they propose concerning the character of ultimate being.) Only such a systematic account, they claim, can provide a properly philosophical account of the essence of art, as opposed to the merely contingent and open-ended results of empirical induction (Schelling 1989: 12; Hegel 1975: 15).
Though an account of their philosophical systems as a whole – and of the Absolute as allegedly known therein – lies beyond the scope of this essay, we may note broadly that both Hegel and Schelling attempt to provide comprehensive accounts of all aspects of being, within an organized totality. In particular, they attempt to reconcile Kantian oppositions that prevent a comprehensive understanding of being as a whole: between subjects (or self-consciousness) and objects, between human freedom and natural necessity, between universals (concepts, laws, ideals) and particulars (sensible objects, individual human beings), between sensibly appearing objects and supersensible things in themselves.
Kant had argued that nature (or objects of knowledge) was governed by causal laws only as experienced by human subjects, who employ universal concepts (such as cause and effect) to interpret sensible experience. We – as subjects of knowledge – cannot be understood to be objects (these are always objects for a subject), nor can such sensibly perceived objects be understood to exhaust all aspects of reality, which may include supersensible entities as well. Thus we human beings “in ourselves,” not as objects of experience, may be free (not causally determined) – as indeed may God (who, if He exists, is not an object of experience). Like post-Kantians generally, Hegel and Schelling found this account unsatisfactory, chiefly (for our purposes) because it does not provide an integrated account of human subjectivity and freedom as arising out of and operative within non-human nature (as Schelling argues), or because (as Hegel argues) it does not give an account of being as a whole, of which both subject and object, mind and nature, are components (Hegel 1971: 314–15). (This aspiration of Schelling’s is emphasized in Bowie 2003.) Indeed the Kantian free and knowing subject itself lies in some ways beyond knowledge or self-knowledge. Both object as well that Kant cannot account for the consonance between universals and particulars, whether in cognition or in morality: Kant’s universal laws of morality or concepts for cognition are too abstract and formal fully to determine the character of particulars or even, perhaps, definitively to apply to particulars. Specifically, the Kantian conception of morality sets up a “contradiction” between universal, rational laws of the will and particular, sensuous drives or needs: the self-determining universal will is always opposed to, but demands reconciliation with, sensuous human nature (Hegel 1975: 52ff.). Unlike the Romantics, who are also deeply concerned with these Kantian oppositions, Hegel and Schelling aspire to reconcile all of these oppositions in one, overarching, philosophically articulated system.
As we shall see, these aims are at work in their treatment of art. Most generally, Hegel and Schelling characterize art by assigning it a place within their systems in accord with two of these desiderata. Both argue, first, that artworks are or present unities of universal and particular: in artworks, universal truths or values – such as laws of nature, ideals of romantic love, moral virtues – are presented in sensible, particular form, e.g. as symbolized by gods or instantiated in characters, gestures, or actions. Second, the most central systematic “place” of art is as a form of human self-consciousness, a part of the project of self-knowledge that they take to be ruled out, at least in part, by Kant. In producing and appreciating art, we render our own commitments, nature, feelings, connection to and place within the world “objective,” i.e. we become the objects of our own consciousness (Schelling 1978: 230–1). Hegel understands such objectification as an activity of expression, of externalizing “inner,” spiritual ideals in an “outer,” perceptible medium, in which human beings can “recognize” themselves (Hegel 1975: 30–1). The language of the first person plural is important here: though Hegel and Schelling claim that individual artists engage in such activity, they do not mean that art is an individualistic, narrowly artist-centered activity or product. They argue that art renders “objective” the nature of human self-consciousness as such, or (like Herder) that it expresses the character of communally shared values or world views; thus, they claim, art renders others, the audience or society at large, “self-conscious” as well.
Hegel and Schelling purport, then, to provide systematically derived, ontological conceptions of art on the basis of their comprehensive philosophical systems. Insofar as these definitions can also explain the variations among art forms and historical change in the arts, they may, too, be endorsed for systematic reasons, namely, of providing a comprehensive account of art in its various manifestations. Thus, though Hegel and Schelling reject the empirical method of surveying so-labeled “art” objects, they do take it to be confirmation of their doctrines that they can articulate the nature and value of many artworks taken to be paradigms (see Hegel 1975: 22–5; Schelling 1989: 17–19, 53–4 – for statements of these systematic theoretical aspirations).
In accord with the exaltative “idealistic” attitude expressed in passages quoted above, then, Hegel and Schelling also aim to characterize great, paradigmatic art, to explain why it is “miraculous,” of great human significance. Thus, they propose what are now called “evaluative” theories of art, i.e. they do not attempt to describe all things referred to as “art,” but understand art in normative terms: objects that do not have the requisite character – the sensible, particular, or finite presentation of the Absolute (as will be discussed in a moment) – do not, on their view, properly count as art as such or are understood as objects “that merely ape the character of a work of art” (Schelling 1978: 225). Such evaluative definitions of art – Hegel’s predominantly among them – are in disrepute these days, because (it is claimed) such theories prescribe what artists ought to do, or exclude from consideration certain works of art in a dictatorial way, from the heights of philosophical speculation (e.g. Schaeffer 2000: 8). Though both Hegel and Schelling base their aesthetic theories upon philosophical premises, and do exclude objects from celebration as “art proper,” however, their evaluative theories are not to be dismissed so quickly. One may note, first, that such criticisms are based on metaphysical and evaluative commitments of their own – e.g. concerning the reality and value of the free creativity of artists, an aspect of art that Hegel himself emphasizes. Moreover, one might take evaluative definition to be not only accurate to, but also respectful toward, the aspiration of artists and the function of art in past and present society: artworks are taken not to be mere objects, but to be valuable – desirable, lovable, informative – and artists aim to produce objects of value and take this to be a serious enterprise, at which they could fail. Indeed Hegel anticipates this very objection and responds indirectly by alleging that it rests on a misunderstanding, namely, “that [the] life of nature and spirit [here: art] is marred and killed by comprehension … instead of being brought nearer to us by conceptual thinking” (Hegel 1975: 12). Correspondingly, Hegel denies that his evaluative definition is prescriptive for artists; it aims, rather, to elucidate the pre-existing value of art (Hegel 1975: 18). In any case, even if one endorses a “descriptive” definition of art – one that attempts to describe any object taken to be an artwork, even if bad – one may still ask what the value of good works of art might be, and we will now turn to Hegel’s and Schelling’s responses to this question, in the form of their evaluative definitions.
Hegel and Schelling not only derive their characterization of art from their systematic accounts of the Absolute, but also propose that art is a revelation – a presentation or instantiation – of that Absolute. Hegel claims that beautiful art is the “sensuous presentation of the Absolute” or of “the Idea” (Hegel 1975: 70) and Schelling defines art as “the infinite finitely displayed” (Schelling 1978: 225) or as the “representation” of the unity of “universal and the particular within the particular” (Schelling 1989: 45, 83). Schelling’s definition refers to his conception of the Absolute as a reconciliation of basic, apparently opposed characteristics of beings or “antitheses” – infinite and finite, universal and particular, subjective or conscious (“ideal”) and material (“real”); Hegel likewise claims that the Idea is “the unity of universal and particular, freedom and necessity, spirit and nature” (Hegel 1975: 62). But both gloss this represented content of art – the Absolute – in more familiar terms as well: as the “divine” or as “Ideas” (in the Platonic sense), i.e. that which is – or is conceived by human consciousness or the artist’s society as – the pre-eminent being(s), the essences of things and actions that identify their nature, value, and meaning.
In the broadest sense, then, Hegel and Schelling hold that artworks mean something, indeed mean the highest things; art “bring[s] to our minds and express[es] the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit” (Hegel 1975: 7). Art is fundamentally representational or, perhaps better, “presentational” (rather than mimetic). Art does not merely reproduce – or, as on a traditional theory widely held prior to and during the eighteenth century, “imitate” – particular objects we find around us in experience. Such imitation, Hegel argues, would be not only “superfluous,” but also “presumptuous” and “deceptive” in producing mere copies of real things, praiseworthy only for the skill involved in producing them (Hegel 1975: 42–3; cf. Schelling 1989: 129). Rather, art presents the ultimate metaphysical character of those objects, of being as such, and of human existence in particular. Like Aristotle and the neo-Platonists – and like Schopenhauer – Hegel and Schelling thus repudiate Plato’s accusation against the arts, namely, that they merely copy the appearance of particular sensible objects, which are themselves dependent beings or copies of the Ideas, in explicitly Platonic terms: art presents the Ideas, universal truths and ultimate being (Hegel 1975: 8–9, 42–3; Schelling 1989: 4–5).
Art has, therefore, deep philosophical significance, indeed is a model or rival for philosophical knowledge. Like philosophy, art is a form of self-conscious understanding of ultimate truths and values. Thus Schelling claims that art is “a magic and symbolic mirror” showing the “inner essence” of philosophy (Schelling 1989: 8) and Hegel identifies art as a mode of “absolute spirit,” like philosophy (Hegel 1971: 292f.). Accordingly, both draw upon art in their philosophical works (not merely in their philosophies of art) to inform their claims. Schelling, for example, explains the character of unconscious mental activity by adverting to the case of an artist “lost in his work” (Schelling 1978: 75), and in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel draws upon literary works, most famously the Antigone, to articulate the historically changing shapes of human self-consciousness. (Such use of art as philosophically significant material does not distinguish Hegel and Schelling from many other philosophers, but, again like the Romantics, they are distinctive in promulgating aesthetic theories that explain such use.)
Art is, however, different from philosophy, they argue, because it presents the Absolute in sensible, particular, finite form, rather than in universal, rational, or conceptual form. In Schelling’s terms, art is “aesthetic intuition” of the Absolute, namely, as presented in a particular, finite object (the artwork), as contrasted to the “intellectual intuition” characteristic of philosophy, the rational cognition of the Absolute (Schelling 1978: 229; cf. Schelling 1989: 45). In Hegel’s terms, “the work of art should put before our eyes a content, not in its universality as such, but one whose universality has been absolutely individualized and sensuously particularized” (Hegel 1975: 51). Therefore, on Hegel’s view, art is a preliminary, not completely satisfactory model for true, philosophical understanding of the Absolute; because it presents the Idea in sensible form, art is “limited to a specific content,” namely, what can be so presented (Hegel 1975: 9, 1971: 294 – hence Hegel’s infamous claim, to be discussed below, that art is at an end). Schelling’s comparative ranking of art and philosophy is more ambiguous. In the lectures, Schelling appears to concur with Hegel’s judgment: as a “real” rather than “ideal” presentation of the Absolute, art presents less clearly the truths that are the subject matter of philosophy (Schelling 1989: 6). In his earlier System, however, Schelling suggests that art can transcend the achievements of philosophy: it is the “one everlasting revelation” of the Absolute (Schelling 1978: 223) and thus “is … the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form” (Schelling 1978: 231).
Thus for Hegel and Schelling, art not only has deeply significant, philosophical meaning (the Absolute or Ideas), but also is distinct from philosophy in that it presents that meaning in sensible or particular form – stone, paint, shapes, sounds. On this point, Hegel and Schelling differ from those of their contemporaries – the Romantics, Schopenhauer – who similarly claim that art is revelatory of ultimate truths, but less clearly distinguish art from philosophy (often quite purposefully). This distinction is, however, not only philosophically plausible (art and philosophy do seem to be importantly different from one another), but also fruitful for the analysis of art. For it generates Hegel’s and Schelling’s most influential claim concerning art: that artistic representation is distinctive not only because of its form, but because of the relationship between meaning and form of representation, i.e. the “unity” of form and its content, specifically of sensible form (the configuration of a particular medium, the composition and character of the art object as a particular thing) with ideal, metaphysical content.
On Schelling’s view, the distinctive artistic mode of representation is the “symbol,” which he elucidates by contrasting it to the “schema” and the “allegory” (Schelling 1989: 46). Each of these modes of representation comprises a relationship between universal and particular: the schema is the use of a universal to mean (designate, interpret) a particular – as, e.g. when children use a flashcard image of a triangle to learn to recognize particular, triangularly shaped objects – while allegory is the use of a particular to mean (refer to, indicate) a universal, as when the Euclidean geometer uses a drawing of a particular triangle to show truths about the essence of triangles. The symbol combines these two modes of representation: the particular means the universal, and vice versa; therefore, Schelling concludes (rather strongly), the symbol both has meaning and is its meaning (Schelling 1989: 49). Schelling’s chief examples of symbols are the Greek gods, which are both particulars – individual agents with specific characters – and universals, whether aspects of nature that belong to many phenomena (e.g. light), aspects of human practices (e.g. warlikeness, invention), or virtues (e.g. wisdom). These gods may be interpreted as allegorical – Apollo stands for (the idea of) healing – or schematic – Athena, as goddess of form, can identify the common element among philosophy and the productive arts, thus allowing us to recognize and class them. But both interpretations are falsifying, missing the fundamental union of universal and particular in them, as suggested by the reversibility of the “direction” of interpretation; Apollo is both a particular god and the power of healing (Schelling 1989: 43).
These distinctions concern, first and foremost, the content of art (e.g. Greek mythology), and Schelling suggests that symbolic content itself distinguishes artistic representation. But Schelling also (albeit not entirely consistently) iterates his distinctions at the level of artistic form: the artwork as a particular object may be allegorically or symbolically (or possibly schematically) related to its content, which is in turn itself symbolic. Like the Greek gods, the art object that represents such content – when it achieves full symbolic status – does not merely “signify” it, but “is” its meaning (Schelling 1989: 83, 147).
Hegel contrasts artistic representation to other representations somewhat similarly. Ordinary representations – “mere signs” – do not, Hegel claims, comprise a unity of representation and represented, but indicate their content or object merely by convention, as, e.g. “snow” and “neige” both refer to snow, according to different conventions. By contrast, artistic representations instantiate or exemplify their meaning (as, e.g. white paint instantiates or exemplifies whiteness) and thus are not merely linked to, but unified with, the universal they instantiate. On Hegel’s view, artistic representations may, however, attain to different degrees of “unity” with their content. (Schelling also in practice takes there to be such degrees of unity, but does not treat this issue directly.) The complete unity of form and content is, on Hegel’s view, to be found in Greek art or “the Ideal,” in which sensible form perfectly expresses, and is thoroughly determined by, its ideal meaning (Hegel 1975: 763–4). But art also takes two other forms: the Symbolic (primarily characterizing art made in civilizations prior to the Greeks) and the Romantic (characterizing Christian and post-Christian art), in which the characteristic Ideas are not perfectly, seamlessly expressible in sensible form. Such Ideas are (respectively) too abstract and all-encompassing to be presented in a particular form, or concern the “inward,” “subjective” or “reflective” that cannot be adequately expressed in external, sensible form (Hegel 1975: 75–80, 1971: 295–7). Thus, in these types of art, the Idea represented is more evoked or suggested than directly presented, or is presented as beyond this particular, sensible representation.
It is probably not coincidental that Hegel chose “symbol,” Schelling’s term for art as such, to denote art that reaches for representation of something that is in principle not so representable. Though Schelling himself does not use “symbol” to describe a work aiming to present an always ungraspable (conception of the) Absolute – quite the contrary – on Hegel’s view, Schelling’s conception of the Absolute is in fact ungraspable both for human thought and in sensible representation. Likewise, Hegel’s use of “Romantic” to denote the striving, never fully externalized nature of modern art (and subjectivity) is, surely, meant to evoke the Romantics and their conception of the Absolute and the never-quite-knowable or representable nature of the subject.
Though Hegel does mean to suggest that Symbolic and Romantic art fail to attain to the full, complete essence or value of art, these are nonetheless not pejorative or exclusionary terms: both are, still, valuable exemplars of art. (Hegel reserves his pejorative, exclusionary scorn for Romantic irony, which he takes to be the selfassertion of mere, negative subjectivity, the mere denial of one’s endorsement or identity with any claim or value.) Specifically, the sensible forms of Symbolic and Romantic artworks are, on Hegel’s view, nonetheless distinct both from mere “signs” and from philosophical representation. For the particular character of the artwork is expressive of the Idea – even of the beyond-ness of that Idea – not merely indicative of a meaning entirely separable (and independently conceivable) from itself. Thus, Hegel claims that the “abstractness” of the Symbolic Idea entails and is shown in the “unrest,” “exaggeration,” “indefiniteness,” “immensity” and “diffuseness” of sensible forms (Hegel 1975: 76). The Symbolic artist does not, that is, merely say (as a negative theologian might) that the One (God) is both the source of being for all things and unfathomable, beyond all particular objects or specific description, but shows it through elevated “extravagance” of forms.
This claim concerning the unity of form and content is both appealing and somewhat puzzling, particularly in its more extreme formulations, e.g. that the content is in no way referred to, but exists solely within, that object (as the Greek gods perhaps were understood to “inhabit” their sculptural representations). (For discussion of the difficulties of this doctrine in Hegel, see Geuss 1983.) This claim cannot, moreover, be understood to mean the identity of form and content, as both Hegel and Schelling emphasize: in order to be meaningful, to be (re)presentational at all, the particular sensible object must indicate something beyond and (in some sense) different from, its character simply as a particular object. Nonetheless, we may say, first, that such unity is understood to mean that the sensible properties of the object are not conventionally, but intrinsically, connected to the Idea represented; thus they suggest (respectively) that Egyptian pyramids symbolize death (the organizing Idea of Egyptian society) or the “eternal immutability” of the elements of nature because they are inorganic and rigid in shape and material (Hegel 1975: 654; Schelling 1989: 172). Moreover, as both emphasize, there are no superfluous, inexpressive properties in the artwork; all are determined by the Idea. Correspondingly, the Idea represented in an artwork is not (fully) articulable without reference to the particular artistic representation. Thus one might say that Romeo and Juliet expresses the essence of romantic love – and one cannot characterize such love without reference to the actions, characters, images, specific language, by which it is portrayed in the drama. Hence the difficulty of translation of literary works, or one’s need to experience an artwork directly in order fully to appreciate its meaning. (This claim is, however, complicated by the claim that art presents – in some sense – the “same” content as does philosophy, namely, the Absolute.)
In any case, and importantly for both Hegel and Schelling, as such unity of form and content, the artwork inhabits an intermediary position between mere sensibility or particularity and that which is beyond sensible particulars (universal ideas of being, virtue, or value) (Hegel 1975: 35, 38). This claim constitutes a chief continuity between their aesthetic theory and the prior German tradition begun with Baumgarten, with the addendum suggested by Kant – namely, the doctrines that beauty is characteristic of representations both akin to yet different from pure rational representation, and that it is therefore suited to represent transcendent, metaphysical, rational ideas. Also like their German predecessors, Hegel and Schelling use this doctrine to characterize the traditionally identified value of art: beauty.
As noted above, Hegel’s and Schelling’s definition of art – the sensible presentation of the Absolute – is an evaluative definition. They do provide metaphysical definitions of art – they attempt to identify what art is (as opposed, for example, to many eighteenth century aestheticians, who attempt to explain, rather, why we like it) – and these definitions also refer to metaphysical truths (art presents these). Nonetheless, “art” is used as a normative concept: it identifies objects that are of value (because they present metaphysical truths), and only objects that do so will count as artworks proper. The evaluative character of this concept of art is shown even more distinctly in their assimilation of it to the concept of beauty. Schelling usually identifies the character of art (as symbolic, the presentation of the infinite in the finite, etc.) with beauty (Schelling 1978: 225–6, 1989: 29, 160). Hegel’s account is more nuanced: all art presents the Absolute in sensible form. Beauty is, in turn, the perfectly adequate presentation of the Absolute in sensible form; this is accomplished in the “Ideal” (classical Greek art). Unlike Schelling, then, Hegel explicitly leaves room for non-beautiful works of art, for degrees of artistic beauty, and for other aesthetic values such as sublimity or expressiveness (which characterize Symbolic and some Romantic art on his view). This nuance is, in fact, theoretically necessary for both Hegel’s and Schelling’s treatments of the art forms in their lectures. For, like Hegel, Schelling argues that some works, because of the constraints of their content or medium, present the Absolute less completely (are less beautiful), but he nonetheless understands them to be art.
In so defining beauty, Hegel and Schelling return to the neo-Platonic conception of beauty (as propounded, for example, by Plotinus): the immediately perceivable presence of an Idea in a particular, sensible object, the recognition of which can educate the individual towards direct, purely intellectual apprehension of the Ideas themselves. Unlike the neo-Platonists, however, Hegel and Schelling take this conception of beauty to establish the superiority of artistic beauty over natural beauty. Explicitly inverting the traditional view (that art imitates nature), Schelling claims that “what art creates in its perfection is the principle and norm for the judgment of natural beauty” (Schelling 1978: 227). Hegel, likewise, asserts that art is “higher” than natural beauty, which is a mere “reflection” of artistic beauty (Hegel 1975: 2).
This judgment appears, in part, to be motivated by their great appreciation for art and estimation of its value by comparison to that of natural beauty; e.g. music appears prima facie to be more valuable than natural arrangements of sound, even birdsong. Both Hegel and Schelling argue more explicitly, however, that natural beauty is inferior to artistic beauty for two, related reasons: natural objects have no “content” or meaning (and/or such meaning is not easily discerned), and they are only contingently beautiful (not as a result of their essential natures). Both of these reasons rest upon the different ontological status of natural objects as opposed to artworks: natural objects are not purposefully addressed to conscious recognition and enjoyment by human beings.
In appreciating natural beauty, they suggest, human beings merely project ideal significance or human interest onto natural things. Thus human beings appreciate natural beauty as “in harmony with” emotional moods, but “here significance does not belong to the objects as such, but must be sought in the emotional mood they arouse” (Hegel 1975: 131; cf. Schelling 1989: 86–7). More generally, though natural objects are determined by the Absolute or Ideas – e.g. material objects are essentially governed by rationally articulated laws – they are understood to be such externally, by theoretical intelligence.
The consequences of this view for the comparative beauty of art and nature may be read in a weaker or stronger way. More weakly: natural objects are less easily perceived to have significance, to be determined in their character by universal laws, than are artworks. Thus, Hegel writes, “Human interest, the spiritual value possessed by an event, an individual character, an action … is grasped in the work of art and blazoned more purely and … transparently than is possible on the ground of … non-artistic things” (Hegel 1975: 29). By contrast to the possibly opaque significance of natural objects, the “external shape” of the work of art is that “whereby the [ideal] content is made visible and imaginable” (Hegel 1975: 71; cf. Schelling 1989: 190). As Hegel suggests, however, this claim may also be read more strongly: natural objects do not merely have less discernible significance, but have no meaning or content; they do not refer to the laws that govern them. By contrast, art has content, can mean something, can present Ideas as their meanings – none of which needs, then, to be merely projected by the viewer.
Artworks have and present such meaning “purely and transparently” because they are the product of conscious, communicative activity. Unlike natural objects, artworks are not “naively self-centered” but are “essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and spirit” (Hegel 1975: 71). In Schelling’s more abstract terms, unlike art, natural objects are only contingently (found) beautiful (Schelling 1978: 227). It is coincidental (not a necessary result of the laws that govern them) that the essences of natural objects are transparent for perception, or that they are found beautiful, whatever one might understand beauty to be. By contrast, artworks are essentially a “call to a responsive breast”; in being (found) beautiful, artworks fulfill their intended characters, are adequate to their essences.
Though these arguments contain some persuasive observations, they appear to beg the question concerning the priority of artistic over natural beauty. For they employ a conception of beauty derived from a consideration of art (as meaningful, as a product of “spirit” made for conscious recognition). More broadly, they seem to rest on prior philosophical commitments to the ontological and normative superiority of the creations of “spirit” over mere nature (e.g. Hegel 1975: 2). By contrast – as Kant among others had argued – one might value natural beauty more than artistic beauty precisely because it is contingent: such contingency might not only intensify the unexpected order and delight therein that might define beauty, but also might be of philosophical, human significance because thereby – unexpectedly, not by our design – nature is shown to be amenable to human purposes. (This possibility is indeed noted at Schelling 1989: 49.)
These difficulties might be avoided somewhat by reframing Hegel’s and Schelling’s claims. Despite their reference to “beauty,” it might be more accurate to understand them to be the first modern aestheticians to concentrate on artistic (rather than aesthetic) value, on that which is left unregarded by theories of beauty in general, e.g. as Hegel suggests, the “human interests” portrayed in artworks. Indeed Danto, a neo-Hegelian philosopher of art, claims that Hegel’s importance as a philosopher of art lies in his recognition that beauty is “inessential to art” (Danto 2000: xii). Their proposed understanding of beauty in turn might be understood to identify the central artistic value as the unity of form and content, whether or not this is identified with beauty. And, though neither Hegel nor Schelling suggests so, their conception of artistic value does seem to accommodate great art that is not (obviously) beautiful. Thus, to take an anachronistic example, Anselm Kiefer’s paintings might be understood as successful art because they are terrifying, bleak presentations of the essence of war, as horrible destruction, i.e. not because they are beautiful, but because they unite form and content. Hegel’s and Schelling’s own deep appreciation of Greek tragedy might suggest such a view as well: tragedies may well be great, but also not clearly characterized by the harmony and tranquility characteristic of beauty (Schelling 1978: 225; Hegel 1975: 85).
We shall now turn, however, to more detailed consideration of their claims concerning artistic activity and artworks. As we have seen, Hegel and Schelling (in the System) conceive of art both as a form of self-consciousness and as a presentation of the Absolute, Ideas, or the Divine. These two conceptions of art are united because, they argue, the Absolute is best understood as a form of (non-individualized) self-consciousness (Hegel 1975: 8, 1971: 298; Schelling 1978: 7). The correct understanding of the Absolute – of the nature of being as a systematic totality – must be reflexive: it must be conceived as including, within itself, cognizance and explanation of the possibility of that very theoretical conception of it (i.e., of consciousness and self-consciousness). Correlatively, they argue that human self-consciousness is best understood in terms of one’s conception of the “divine”: one understands oneself in recognizing the universal moral laws, socially shared norms, unconditional truths, etc., to which one is most deeply committed, on which one acts, which identify one’s place in the world and society (Hegel 1975: 65–8) or, more abstractly, one recognizes one’s true being in recognizing one’s connection to the “all” (Schelling 1989: 34). For our purposes, however, these aspects of their theories are better discussed separately: their doctrines concerning art as self-consciousness concern the structure of artistic activity and reception in general, whereas their claims concerning the presentation of the Absolute in sensible, particular form concern artistic subject matters and media.
According to Hegel and Schelling, art “presents” the Absolute in part performatively, not by its signified content, but by instantiating the Absolute (as self-consciousness) in artistic processes and products: the creation and reception of art instantiates human self-consciousness as self-objectifying or self-productive.
On Schelling’s view in the System (but not in the lectures), the Absolute is understood as self-producing, self-intuiting self-consciousness, which oscillates between two opposed activities, unconscious “productive” activity and conscious, free, knowing activity. The self is, however, fundamentally identical; it is both of these activities. The self attempts to gain self-consciousness – to recognize its own identity – by striving to overcome the opposition between its two activities, to recognize itself in its unconscious productivity. Artistic activity and its products are of signal importance for this project of self-consciousness, as its most fulfilled instance.
Artistic activity
Following Kant, Schelling understands artistic creativity or “genius” to combine activity in accord with conscious intentions – to produce a work of a certain kind – and unconscious activity ruled by “nature”: the artist does not produce a work in accord with her conceptually worked out scheme alone, but also is (in traditional terms) inspired, pressed to create from an involuntary, obscure “feeling of inner contradiction” (Schelling 1978: 222). In the product of this activity – the work of art – the contradiction between conscious and unconscious activity (obscurely felt by the artist) is reconciled, the ultimate unity of the two is revealed. For the artwork is not merely a hodgepodge, an awkward combination of conscious elements and unconscious, accidental elements, but rather a unity, weaving together the artist’s conscious planning, learned skills and “industry” with unplanned, inspired touches, which “involuntarily impart…unfathomable depth” to the work “which he does not understand himself, and whose meaning is infinite” (Schelling 1978: 223–4).
In the successful work of art, therefore, one can apprehend the unity of unconscious and conscious activity, thereby realizing the goal proposed by the project of self-consciousness (Schelling 1978: 219, 221, 225). In particular, artistic activity comprises the unification of freedom and necessity, of voluntary, conceptually guided activity and compulsion, and thereby exemplifies the unification of these that must be attributed to ultimate reality (Schelling 1978: 236).
Reception and interpretation
In the System, Schelling focuses on artistic activity rather than upon reception of artworks, but his view entails some conclusions about the latter as well. The audience, like the artist, can perceive the union of freedom and necessity in the artwork; such unity is revelatory not simply of the artist’s self-consciousness, but of the workings of self-consciousness more generally, in which the audience, as well, participates. And, just as the artist engages and “objectifies” all aspects of human self-consciousness, so too does the artwork address and engage the “whole man” in the recipient, feeling and reason, perception and thought (Schelling 1978: 233).
Moreover, precisely because the artist has “instinctively…depicted [in the work] an infinity, which no finite understanding is capable of developing to the full” (Schelling 1978: 225), the artist and audience are in the same position: like the audience, the artist comes to perceive that which she did not intend, which is beyond her conscious cognizance, in the work. Every artwork, Schelling writes, is “capable of being expounded ad infinitum, as though it contained an infinity of purposes, while yet one is never able to say whether this infinity has lain within the artist … or resides … in the work of art” (Schelling 1978: 225). This moment of reception – of disentangling the complex, never completely articulated content of the artwork – is a performative “presentation” of the infinite in the finite: artworks are finite objects that provoke an infinite elaboration of possible interpretations. (This connotation of Schelling’s “infinite” is inherited from the Kantian concept of “aesthetic ideas”; it is emphasized in Hammermeister 2002.)
On the view of the System, in sum, art is the “organ” of philosophy, even superior to philosophy, because it does not merely describe (conceptually) the unity of nature and freedom in the Absolute, but instantiates and “objectifies” this unity in both artist and recipient; it engages and makes us conscious of unconscious activity in unity with conscious activity, and as our own. In Schelling’s later, more Spinozistic lectures, the Absolute is reconceived as “God,” the ultimate, primal being, which unites within itself, is “indifferent” between, the fundamental antitheses (subject and object, finite and infinite, etc.) that characterize particular entities, which “indifference” is more portrayed in art than instantiated in it. Artistic activity is, therefore, no longer conceived here as the paradigmatic activity of human self-consciousness and thereby the revelation of the Absolute, but rather as God “working through” human beings (Schelling 1989: 84). Schelling continues, however, to hold that artistic activity comprises a combination of “ideality” and “reality,” of knowledge and (unconscious) activity (Schelling 1989: 28, 30) and that the infinity in artworks is thus present as infinite interpretability (Schelling 1989: 50).
Hegel concurs with Schelling that artistic activity requires both natural gifts and conscious intent or learned technique: to produce vivid, sensuously concrete representations of Ideas (i.e. art), the artist cannot solely employ universal rules, learned technique, and knowledge of the “deep interests” of human beings – though such skills and knowledge are necessary – but must also have the natural gift of creative imagination (Hegel 1975: 26, 39–41). Unlike Schelling, then, Hegel appears to hold that the content of artistic representation is planned and conscious, whereas “nature” is required to give this content an appropriate sensible form. But more important for Hegel is the free “self-production” characteristic of artistic activity (Hegel 1975: 31).
In general terms, Hegel, like Schiller, understands human theoretical and practical consciousness as developmental in structure. The subject is most immediately immersed in sensible, natural particularity, but can (then) “criticize” that given nature in light of universal norms or concepts – asking, e.g. should I act upon these desires? What is the essence or ultimate reality underlying that particular appearance? – thus freeing itself from unquestioning determination by given nature. By articulating “the depth of a suprasensuous world which thought pierces and sets up at first as a beyond in contrast with immediate consciousness and present feeling, … the freedom of intellectual reflection … rescues itself from the here and now, called sensuous reality and finitude” (Hegel 1975: 8). Comprehensive knowledge and realized freedom comprise, finally, a reconciliation of such theoretical and practical demands with naturally given particularity, i.e. an account of the essential nature of objects as determining the particular characteristics of the object (in Hegel’s terms, understanding that object as an “individual”), and a self-determining transformation of given natural desires or one’s environment in light of universal ethical norms (as, e.g. in political institutions) (see Hegel 1971: 299–300, 1975: 68).
This realized knowledge and freedom comprise, moreover, self-knowledge and self-realization. Only through the “negation” of particular givenness, is one a self at all – a subject distinct from the objects of its regard, free to determine itself, rather than simply a particular among others. But the self’s “demand” for a “beyond” utterly distinct from, and indeterminate in application to, the world of particulars is insufficient for either self-knowledge or self-realization, for this demand is empty, the self simply an abstraction, having no substantive character or effects (Hegel 1975: 96). Thus, only through applying and realizing universal concepts or ethical demands (in theoretical claims or actions), can the self not only recognize her own substantive commitments and desires, but also be truly, effectively free, or indeed come to be a self in the fullest sense (Hegel 1975: 31–2).
Insofar as artistic activity comprises at once a free formulation of Ideas, meant to be the “inner” significance, value, or nature of things or of human life, and the presentation of such ideas in sensible form, artistic activity exemplifies the structure of absolute knowledge or realized freedom. The closer an artwork comes to the “Ideal,” the more it succeeds in being and showing itself to be an “individual,” a particular item thoroughly informed by a universal, its parts thoroughly unified and interdependent. Following Kant, Hegel takes such order to be analogous to the unity of organisms, in which the parts are what they are only in the context of the organism as a whole, or (somewhat metaphorically) in which the Idea unifies the object as the “life” or “soul” of the external shape (Hegel 1975: 982–4). (Schelling also follows Kant in suggesting various analogies between art and organisms; e.g. Schelling 1989: 9, 1978: 219.)
On Hegel’s view, artistic activity, as expression, is also an activity of self-realization. By presenting universal norms or ideals in particular, sensible form, art both renders them more determinate and thereby makes “inner” commitments “external,” recognizable. Thus through art one’s commitments are not only known, but also (in part) thereby “produced” – made concrete and rendered explicitly, self-consciously valuable. (Charles Taylor has emphasized this clarificatory and productive character of expression, as understood both by Hegel and by Herder; see Taylor 1975. It is also central to the conception of art as expression proposed by the twentieth-century aesthetician, R. J. Collingwood.) As such expression, artistic activity is also an exercise of human freedom; it comprises both the self-determining demand for necessary truths or universal norms and the transformative “return” to the sensible, natural world – here the transformation of sensible materials into representational “form.” As noted above, such activity is not, for Hegel, fundamentally individualist, expressing the artist’s own, idiosyncratic feelings or attitudes; the achievement of the artist is an achievement of and for the artist’s community at large, expressing its ideals, norms, values, world views, thus rendering the community as a whole self-conscious, aware of its metaphysical and normative commitments. (Here Hegel is quite different from later expressivists such as Collingwood.) Thus Hegel writes concerning Greek art: “the artists became for the Greeks the creators of their gods, i.e., the artists gave the nation a definite idea of the behaviour, life, and effectiveness of the Divine … . And it was not as if these ideas … were already there, in advance of poetry, in an abstract mode of consciousness … and then later were only clothed in imagery by artists … . on the contrary, the mode of artistic production was such that what fermented in these poets they could work out only in this form of art” (Hegel 1975: 102).
The preceding characterizations of artistic process apply to all works of art – in the System, Schelling indeed claims that “there is properly speaking but one absolute work of art” (Schelling 1978: 231). But because they also understand art to present the Absolute, they attend in detail, systematically, to art objects themselves, to differences of content (conceptions of the Absolute), form, and historical change.
Hegel and Schelling attend more searchingly to the represented content of artworks as fundamental to their nature and value, and as definitive of artistic periods or styles, than nearly any other aesthetic theorist before or since. (For a representative contrasting view, see Schiller 1982: 154–7.) Their understanding of artistic representation – as the unity of form and content – dictates this focus and entails some conclusions about appropriate artistic content: it must be conceived as sufficiently individualized (a unity of universal and particular, in Schelling’s terms) to be representable in and by a particular object (the artwork). Thus, for example, a fully articulated theory of physics – which could constitute an aspect of the fully worked out Idea or the Absolute – might not be susceptible to artistic representation (at least without considerable artistic reformulation). But they also suggest two further, related conditions governing appropriate artistic content: it should reflect the comprehensive world views of the historical period and society in which it is made, and it must be worthy of representation, as an Idea of the fundamental character of being or highest values.
For Hegel and Schelling, therefore, art is intimately connected to religion – a society’s comprehensive, evaluative world view; artistic content is understood, as we have seen, either as “the divine” (Hegel) or “mythology” (Schelling). (On both views, religion may also include non-representational practices, e.g. confession, and other forms of representation, but artistic representation may be the primary form of representation within many religions.) This understanding of art renders their philosophies of art – unlike many eighteenth-century (and later) theories of art as autonomous – more accurate to the origin, function and character of many canonical artworks of the Western tradition, and indeed in non-Western society (though Hegel deems the latter “defective” art, and Schelling dismisses it without much consideration). Not only classical Greek art, but also Bach’s Passions, Gothic cathedrals, Michelangelo’s Pieta, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Rumi’s poetry, Maori carvings, and Egyptian pyramids are informed by, and receive their meaning within, the religious views and practices of their originating societies. As Hegel and Schelling aver – and as has been an ongoing source of debate concerning the rightfulness of museum exhibition of such objects – the religious content and social function of these objects seem not only to be constitutive of them, but also (at least in part) to ground the high estimation of their value not only within their original societies, but for others as well, as reflective of specific ways of life, and as expressive of our highest aspirations and comprehensive understandings of the human place in the world (Hegel 1975: 30).
This focus on artistic content allows Hegel and Schelling, then, to account not only for the traditional embeddedness of artworks within societal practices and world views, but also thereby for historical and cultural variations in artistic content and style (or manner of representation), as (at least in part) determined by the varying religious conceptions of those societies. So Hegel analyzes Symbolic form, as noted above. One might suggest, similarly, that anthropomorphic religions, such as classical Greek religion, employ idealizing yet also “naturalist” modes of artistic representation (e.g. physically ideal human bodies), whereas Christianity – with its emphasis upon spirituality as separate from the body – would engender anti-realist forms of representation, in order to convey the non-materiality of that which is of ultimate value, as, e.g. the elongated figures in El Greco’s painting suggest spiritual alteration and transcendence of the body. Thus – as against crude conceptions of historical progress in the arts, grounded on the conception of art as “imitation” – Hegel argues that often the “abandonment and distortion of natural formations is not unintentional lack of technical skill … but intentional alteration which … is demanded by what is in the artist’s mind” (Hegel 1975: 74).
This view of art thus accounts not only for philosophical, but also anthropological, historical and art-historical attention to artworks as revelatory of societal practices and values (Hegel 1975: 7). But both Hegel and Schelling understand these varying conceptions not simply to be historical facts about different societies, but also as contributions – albeit incomplete – to the (development of their own) comprehensive knowledge of the Absolute. (Thus, although Hegel may be understood as the progenitor of twentieth-century Marxist and of “institutional” theories of art, he does not hold that art is simply to be identified with whatever objects a society identifies as art, or embeds in relevant institutions; art must also contribute to our understanding of the Absolute.) Hegel and Schelling interpret the Greek gods (for example) not as purported entities (in the existence of which the Greeks believed, and we do not), but rather as coalesced, individualized instantiations of the union of natural forces and human virtues (Schelling) or the presence of “spirit,” as free, within the natural world (Hegel), i.e. of the reconciled unity between freedom and nature that must characterize the Absolute. Indeed they transpose Schiller’s arguments about the effects of beauty and art – it educates towards freedom, may train recipients to harmonize rational freedom and nature – into their characterization of the content of art: art “unveils the truth” because it “set[s] forth the reconciled opposition” between nature and freedom (Hegel 1975: 55).
Hegel and Schelling therefore conceive of “divine” content more extensively than might originally appear, to include less explicitly religious content. For Hegel “God” – the Absolute – is in, works through, self-determining human beings (Hegel 1975: 30); thus the representation of realized human freedom constitutes “divine” content even more than does the representation of gods as external to human existence. That is, religious conceptions of gods are rightly understood as formulated by human beings, as part of human self-understanding; however, such an understanding does not devalue those religious conceptions, but rather reveals the “divinity,” the absolute value, of human free self-conception. Schelling’s view in the System might entail similar conclusions concerning artistic content (which is not extensively discussed there). On the conception of the Absolute in the lectures (as the indifferent union of antithetical attributes), it may be represented not only by mythological gods, but also (for example) in paintings representing light and color as, at once, natural and belonging to material objects (“real”), and as perceived, shown appearance (“ideal”).
As a result, this conception of art can also characterize artworks in the modern period that express an individual’s own feelings or distinctive world view (in contrast to pre-modern artistic portrayal of socially shared values and conceptions). For Hegel and Schelling argue that these works (and corresponding theories of art) reflect the characteristic, socially shared and articulated norms, ideals, and ways of life of Western modernity: the (secularized Christian) valuation of the individual person as an “end in himself” (to use a Kantian phrase), of individual moral struggle and resignation. Thus, for example, Schelling suggests that by contrast to traditional, socially shared and socially created conceptions of mythology, modern literature presents unique “worlds” created by distinctive individuals, drawing upon their own experience and their own creative originality (Schelling 1989: 75). In a typically reflexive way, then, Hegel and Schelling identify art in the modern period as “individualized” both in artistic content and in the practice and conception of art itself.
Hegel’s and Schelling’s concentration on artistic content also engenders illuminating discussions of artworks, by contrast to aesthetic theories of response or imitation. For example, tragedy was much discussed in the eighteenth century, as giving rise to a puzzle about audience response – why do we enjoy seeing suffering and other troubling events? – to which question theorists proposed various psychological explanations (sympathy, Schadenfreude). By contrast, Hegel argues that tragedy portrays the conflict of objective goods, an argument that is justly famous both as an analysis of the structure and content of tragedy and (thereby) as an articulation of crucial problems for human ethical action (Hegel 1975: 1194–9, 1208–37). Less famously, Schelling argues that Greek tragedies – taking Oedipus Rex rather than Hegel’s favored Antigone as his central case – portray the Absolute as the “indifference” of freedom and necessity (clearly shown also, nonetheless, to be opposed or antithetical). In tragedy, human, freely chosen action is shown to be opposed to an oppressive, inescapable necessity, fate. Such freedom is also, however, shown to be compatible with that necessity: human beings can “freely accept misfortune” by assuming responsibility and voluntarily atoning even for fated guilt (as when Oedipus blinds himself). Thus, Schelling suggests, the tragic hero’s free moral character, far from being destroyed by fate, is even “victorious” over it (Schelling 1989: 250–5, 89). Correspondingly, tragedies support (“indifferently”) interpretations that emphasize the fatedness or the moral freedom of actions, and, through the representation of the chorus, both impose necessary reactions upon spectators as the appropriate ones and thereby liberate the spectators to reflect upon those reactions (Schelling 1989: 259–60). Such treatments of tragedy are, precisely as Hegel and Schelling claim, considerably closer to the character of the objects, which are taken to have cognitive, depictive value in themselves, than the explanations of human psychological responses (pleasures in tragedy) proffered by their predecessors.
Similarly, Hegel suggests a provocative reading of Dutch still life painting, which would seem, prima facie, to be the paradigm achievement of art as imitation (for which reason Schelling deems it not very important art). Hegel suggests that the value of these beautiful imitations may be explained not only by their mimetic accuracy and the skill required to produce it, but because the paintings thereby “recreate … the existent and fleeting appearance of nature as something generated afresh [and rendered permanent] by man” (Hegel 1975: 162–3). These paintings have historical-social meaning as well, for they reflect the struggles of the Dutch for religious, commercial, and political freedom: “the citizenship, this love of enterprise, in small things as in great … this painstaking as well as cleanly and neat well-being, this joy … in their … sense that for all this they have their own activity to thank, all this is what constitutes the general content of their pictures” (Hegel 1975: 169).
Their conception of art likewise leads Hegel and Schelling to attend to the material or sensible character of artworks, as elaborated in their systematic accounts (in the lectures) of the different art forms. The details of these accounts are too numerous to be treated here, and some aspects of them – notably Hegel’s attempt to conjoin art forms with historical periods (he claims that architecture is pre-eminently Symbolic, sculpture classical, and the three other arts Romantic) – have been much criticized. We may note here, however, several central points.
First, the detailed, differentiated treatment of artistic media is dictated by the definition of art as unity of form and content: the sensible or particular form, its medium – words, three dimensional material forms, colored surface, sound – is, on this view, essential to the art object. The differences among these media are significant because they therefore can present different contents (different construals or aspects of the Absolute) (Hegel 1975: 73; Schelling 1989: 48, 162). More specifically, Hegel’s differentiation among the media is based on their different sensible properties, because he conceives of art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. By contrast, because Schelling defines art as a particular that represents the unity of universal and particular (the symbol), he differentiates art forms – the character of the object as a particular – in accord with one of his fundamental antitheses, that between “real” and “ideal”: poetry alone is an ideal art because language, its medium, is ideational, universal and cognitive, whereas the other art forms employ material media (stone, paint, sound) (Schelling 1989: 98–103, 201–2).
Thus Hegel’s and Schelling’s views can incorporate ways to differentiate artworks common in the more applied study of the arts, and renders attention to medium important for understanding particular artworks (more than is warranted or accomplished in nearly all other aesthetic theories) (see, for example, Hegel’s treatment of the various sculptural media and their meanings in Hegel 1975: 775–7). The systematic treatment of different art forms also, however, brings to the forefront two prima facie problems for their general conception of art: how to accommodate art forms that are not clearly representational (of an Idea or otherwise) and how to understand art forms that do not seem to employ sensible means of representation or are not obviously composed of particular elements as such, namely literature, which employs language, i.e. conventional and discursive signs.
Schelling and (more explicitly) Hegel respond to these paired difficulties, first, by ordering the art forms in a spectrum, from one semiotic extreme to another: both end their treatments of art forms with literature, suggesting that literature is a limit-case of artistic production (closest to philosophy or conceptual representation), and begin their treatments with art forms that represent ideal content only in a limited way. Specifically, Hegel identifies architecture, Schelling music, as initial, more “sensible” or “real” modes of artistic representation. Hegel claims that architecture does not by itself present spiritual meaning. Rather, it reforms the natural environment to produce a “place” for spiritual, human practices (primarily of religious worship and community) and to become more “akin” to spirit in having intellectually recognizable order (e.g. symmetry) (Hegel 1975: 84). Schelling claims that music represents the Absolute – as a unity of universal and particular – abstractly as the unity of multiplicity in rhythm and melody (quantitatively and qualitatively unified sequences of particular tones, respectively) and in harmony (a single sound that also unifies many). Thus, Schelling suggests, music may be understood to represent the most basic characteristics of both matter and mind – the continuity of motion and the persistence of self-consciousness through temporal change. And, in accord with his analysis of artistic representation, Schelling argues that musical works not only mean such unity (of motion and consciousness) but are motion (these sounds are vibrations of objects and of air) and (as heard) unified consciousness (Schelling 1989: 109, 111, 116). (Schelling provides a more complex version of the Hegelian proposal concerning architecture, while Hegel takes music, as non-spatial, primarily to represent subjective, internal states such as moods and feelings.)
On the other hand, both Hegel and Schelling attempt to identify “sensible” or “poetic” aspects of linguistic presentation in order to distinguish literary representation from mere “prose.” Both claim that poetic representation is distinct from much other linguistic representation because of its content (as discussed above), but also emphasize the sonorous characteristics of poetic language such as rhyme and meter. Hegel argues as well that figurative uses of language (primarily metaphor) are a “sensible” medium because they appeal to the imagination or call forth images (Hegel 1975: 1000–34; cf. Schelling 1989: 204–6). Such concerns also lead them to identify drama as the highest literary genre, where a “complete and specific action” is given a “fully visible presentation” (Hegel 1975: 1192; cf. Schelling 1989: 261).
This treatment of art forms in a “spectrum” is not only meant to be a comprehensive account of the similarities and differences among the arts, but also, like their general definition of art, is evaluative: each art form is judged in accord with the norm for art in general, and therefore ranked in accord with its ability to present the highest content (i.e. the most complete portrayal of the Absolute) sensibly or in a particular. Because of the resources of linguistic representation, both judge that poetry (literature) is most able to portray a complete world view, but it is also the least “sensible” art form (Hegel), or presents least the “real” character of the Absolute (Schelling). Thus, both claim that the “mean” between the two extremes – sculpture, for both, as well as drama, for Schelling – is the best art, the perfect unity of sensible form and ideal content or symbolic “indifference” between ideal and real.
These rankings of the art forms do not have much contemporary interest (though they were a prevalent concern for aestheticians until the twentieth century), and Hegel’s and Schelling’s ranking of Greek sculpture as the paramount art might well be attributable to the influence of Winckelmann. Their evaluative treatment of the art forms could, however, be fruitful for broader considerations of the systematic differentiation and media-specificity of artistic values. For it is apparent that different artistic values are more or less salient in the discussion of different art forms; expressiveness (particularly of emotion) is a more salient value for music, while realism is more salient for understanding painting and literature. For such reasons, twentieth-century philosophers have suggested that there ought to be “philosophies of the arts” rather than a philosophy of art that would one-sidedly emphasize one or another artistic value (e.g. Kivy 1997). Hegel’s and Schelling’s accounts might well provide a starting point for a satisfying, systematic account of artistic value, i.e. one that can articulate reasons for these evaluative differences within an overarching account of artistic ontology and value.
As noted above, Hegel and Schelling focus on an aspect of the human practice of art largely unacknowledged by previous philosophers: its historical development. On their view, art not only does, but through an internal necessity must, develop over the course of human history. This claim may be seen as a result of their conceptions of the Absolute: because Schelling (much of the time) and Hegel conceive of the Absolute as self-developing, they see art – as revelation of that Absolute – as essentially developmental as well.
Hegel and Schelling understand connoisseurship and art history to be concerned with the details of historical and social context that inform the character of particular works (Hegel 1975: 14, 34–5; Schelling 1989: 3). Such critical analysis is consonant with – indeed enjoined by – their conception of art (by contrast e.g. to formalist methods of art criticism that were inspired by Kant’s aesthetics or contemporary neurophysiological investigation of aesthetic experience, which might be taken to be the “critical” method consonant with Burke’s aesthetics). They conceive of their own task in different terms, however: to articulate the overarching structure of historical development in the arts (Hegel 1975: 12; Schelling 1989: 8–9).
This historical structure is again based upon their identification of art as an attempted unification of form and (“divine”) content. Artistic change is understood as the development of new contents for art, a development that occurs hand in hand with that of new formal modes of expression; the major periods in art history are identified both by their distinctive content and by distinctive relations between that content and sensible form. Hegel’s classification of art into symbolic, classical and romantic is, as noted above, both historical and semiotic (Hegel 1975: 75). Schelling similarly identifies two artistic periods – ancient (pre-eminently Greek) and modern (pre-eminently Christian) – on broadly semiotic grounds. In the first, mythology “precedes” abstract religious conceptions, and its universal content is nature, while modern religion “precedes” myth, and its universal content is providential history and moral consciousness. More abstractly, in the first case the infinite is taken to be present in all particulars (as parts of universal, infinite nature), while in the second the finite particular aims to realize a universal or infinite (as moral ideal) (Schelling 1989: 59, 61–2, 80–1). Ancient and modern art are distinguished as properly symbolic versus more allegorical (i.e. incomplete) representation. (This is Schelling’s official view; in light of his claims that in ancient art “the collective will cultivate itself or develop into the … particular” [Schelling 1989: 80] and for better symmetry in his account, however, one might identify ancient art as more schematic.)
Perhaps reflecting their conception of art as at once a socially and religiously embedded practice and as of non-instrumental value because it reveals the highest truths, Hegel and Schelling seem to suggest that artistic development is to be understood both as externally imposed upon and as produced within artistic practice. (Their focus on artistic media might have generated an account of univocally internal change through refinement of the handling of media, though they do not exploit this opportunity.) Both claim that the advent of Christianity radically changes the character of artworks, and seem to conceive of this change largely as imposed upon art “from outside” (Schelling 1989: 58–9; Hegel 1975: 80). But because they (particularly Hegel) claim that art articulates and thereby in part establishes a community’s religious, moral, or philosophical commitments, such historical change can also be conceived as an internal development in the arts, a search at once for more satisfactory (representable, complete, moving) content, and for the appropriate manner of representation, as Hegel analyzes the stages of Symbolic art, for example (Hegel 1975: 303ff.).
The future of art: new mythology and the end of art
On the basis of their overarching conceptions of art history, both Hegel and Schelling make famous, controversial claims about future artistic practice. Like Schiller and his Romantic contemporaries, and anticipating Heidegger, Schelling calls for a “new mythology” that will provide a holistic conception of the Absolute, and thus address human alienation in nature and society (Schelling 1978: 233). By contrast, Hegel notoriously announces the “end of art”: “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past”; it no longer fulfills our “highest need…which earlier nations sought in it, and found in it alone” (Hegel 1975: 10–11).
These claims – particularly Hegel’s – have been the subject of much debate, the full range of which cannot be discussed here. (For a good discussion, see Bungay 1986: 71–89.) We can, however, identify two theses endorsed by both Hegel and Schelling (despite their prognostic differences): that post-Christian art does not fulfill the “highest vocation” of art – unlike Greek art and mythology – and that, despite their view of Greek art as the height of artistic excellence, its achievements are neither still “living” for modern society, nor a model for modern artistic production. (They are both in this way less classicist than many of their predecessors, who often claim that Greek art furnishes general rules or models for modern art.)
Despite continuing furor over Hegel’s “end of art” claim, both of these theses are plausible, even uncontroversial. Neither denies that there are still works of art being made, even great ones; both refer to Goethe’s Faust as a great, distinctively modern work. Rather, they claim that no modern artwork or body thereof unites the functions of Greek art, namely, the complete representation of the Absolute (divine) in particular form, an articulation of the ideals and values to which a society aspires, patterns for action and interpretation of others, and an overarching vision of the natural world and of the human place within it. Moreover, they provide plausible accounts as to why Greek art cannot serve as a model for modern art: though the Greek gods (and artistic representation thereof) do provide a glimpse of the Absolute (correctly conceived) as “indifferent” union of antitheses, or reconciliation of freedom and nature, the thus-glimpsed reconciliation no longer seems possible, given the modern conceptions of both sides of this antithesis.
Specifically, on the one hand (as Schelling argues), neither modern religions nor modern scientific conceptions endow nature with divinity (Schelling 1989: 63–6, 76–7). On the other hand, as both argue, modern (Christian and secularized Christian) conceptions of morality, freedom and subjectivity resist full externalization or symbolization. As Schelling argues, one’s inner moral character, one’s connection to the (morally conceived) divine, can always be further revealed through subsequent acts (or in historical events more broadly) – no one of which is, therefore, a complete symbol of the divine or infinite, but rather is understood as a transient part of an historical revelation (Schelling 1989: 72–4). Thus, Schelling observes, modern mythological figures – Don Quixote, Don Juan, Faust – are symbols precisely of unquenched desire and incompleteness, the yearning of the finite individual for the infinite, not individuals infinite (in power and blessedness) themselves, as were the Greek gods. On Hegel’s view, the modern (secularized Christian) valuation of subjectivity entails that no one work will both sensibly realize that value (through concrete representation e.g. of individual points of view) and present that value as universal. The universal, shared valuation of all individuals (as such) is better expressed “reflectively,” in philosophy, in political ideals such as universal human rights, and the institutions that realize those ideals (Hegel 1975: 10; that human freedom is realized by modern political institutions is the purport of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).
One obvious objection to Hegel’s and Schelling’s claim that modern religion is not susceptible to artistic treatment would seem to be Jesus Christ, who is claimed to be the divine in a particular, sensible being – and is indeed the subject matter of a great deal of art. Both Hegel and Schelling waver, however, as to whether Christ is to be conceived as an artistic subject proper. Against this proposal, they argue that Christ is not a self-contained image of the divine – whether because as suffering and then resurrected by reunion with God, Christ represents the “nullification” of the finite, not the full interpenetration of finite/particular and infinite (Schelling), or because the true meaning of Christ is not Christ the individual and/or representations thereof, but the transformation of every individual’s heart, within a community (Hegel).
Hegel’s and Schelling’s differing claims concerning the future of art, given their (broadly) shared conception of modernity rest, finally, upon their disagreements concerning the nature of the Absolute and historical progress. For Hegel, as is well known, the Absolute is historically progressive, self-producing, intersubjective human self-consciousness. Thus the modern conception of free subjectivity is incontestably superior to pre-modern conceptions of the divine; if this conception is, as Hegel argues, incompletely representable in sensible form, then world-defining art is a necessary sacrifice to human historical self-realization. (Contra Wicks 1993, this claim concerning the decline of art is not inconsistent with Hegel’s general conception of dialectical-historical progress. For art is only one form or stage of absolute spirit, the dialectical progress of which culminates in philosophy.) Though modern art is inferior as art, namely, as revelation of the Absolute in sensible form, to classical art, it is superior insofar as it represents – albeit only evocatively – a more accurate conception of the Absolute (Hegel 1971: 295).
For Schelling, by contrast, such a historically progressive conception is itself distinctively modern and “one-sided,” emphasizing freedom, subjectivity, universality, ideality, over the equally constitutive antithetical aspects of the Absolute. Thus, though Schelling classifies art in historical terms – ancient versus modern – he takes these to be related to one another not progressively, but rather as two possible combinations between the antitheses “indifferently” united in the Absolute (myth may begin with nature or with freedom, with the infinite or with the finite, etc.), which are temporally unfolded (Schelling 1989: 81–2). On Schelling’s view, it is therefore not only possible, but indeed dictated by the character of art as a revelation of the Absolute, that modern art should give rise to a “new mythology” that is properly symbolic (not weighted to the allegorical, as is modern art). Such mythology would incorporate nature, just as ancient art began with nature gods but also brought these gods “into” the realm of freedom and history (predominantly in the Homeric epic) (Schelling 1989: 82). By so incorporating nature, the “new mythology” would not only more fully present the character of the Absolute, but also be consolatory for modern human beings, who are “torn loose” from the natural world (Schelling 1989: 59).
Whether Schelling’s envisioned new mythological re-enchantment of nature is possible, and whether Hegel’s claims concerning the end of art can be defended in light of the vast artistic changes after 1830, are questions we cannot pursue here. What is incontestable, however, is the influence of these prognostications upon their philosophical successors, whether in the form of the re-conception of nature in the “artists’ metaphysics” of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard’s aesthetics of subjectivity, or Marxist philosophies of art proposed by Lukàcs and Adorno, who apply Hegelian methods and guiding concerns to new art forms (e.g. mass art), and to generate anti-Hegelian conclusions.
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