What was abstract art? (From the point of view of Hegel)

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-24

  Pippin, Robert B ^a,b  

^a Department of Philosophy

^b UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 61049309157     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/367996     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. More specifically it is with respect to "its [art's] highest vocation" ("nach der Seite ihrer höchsten Bestimmung") that it does not matter as it once did. Second place on a list with that criterion would still rank awfully high (G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. [Oxford, 1975], 1:11; hereafter abbreviated A). I have cited Knox's translation, but where there might be some confusion, I have added the problematic German phrase.
2. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vols. 13-15 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main, 1970).
3. See Stephen Houlgate, "Presidential Address: Hegel and the Art of Painting," in Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. William Maker (Albany, N.Y., 2000), pp. 61-82. (I disagree below with Houlgate's version of what Hegel would have disagreed with in Greenberg's famous account of abstraction. See below, n. 9.)
4. I refer here to the set of issues raised by the well-known letter of Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin (20 Sept. 1934), quoted and glossed in a very interesting way by Eric Santner in his On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago, 2001), p. 38.
5. See T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn., 1999); hereafter abbreviated FI.
6. A standard classification of such philosophic narratives: there is the Kant-Greenberg (and some people assume Michael Fried) line (the last depends on how one interprets philosophically the categories of theatricality and absorption, as in Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot [Chicago, 1980]); the Hegel-Marx-Clark line; and the Nietzschean line, visible in very different ways in Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger, where the whole possibility of sense making breaks down, initiating a different, perhaps more archaic role for art.
7. And what can be said about the possibility of distinguishing expressions of aesthetic preferences (I like this) from aesthetic claims (this is beautiful)? Do aesthetic judgments have any normative authority, and if so on what basis? There is some Hegelian discussion of the first issue, in connection with the relations among art, religion, and philosophy. This is already not a traditional categorization issue, and Hegel does not deal with the standard issues. Rather, Hegel's project might be said to offer an account of what Dieter Henrich has variously called the "resonance" of art in human life and a "diagnosis of the state of art in our time" (Dieter Henrich, Versuch über Kunst und Leben [Munich, 2001], p. 13). Henoch's account is one of the very few to have appreciated, and with great subtlety the links between Hegel's philosophy of art and modernism. (Clark's, in a very different way is another.)
8. Compare Schiller's remark in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (New York, 1965), p. 63: "Beyond question Man carries the potentiality for divinity within himself; the path to divinity, if we may call a path what never reaches its goal, is open to him in his senses."
9. Religion is always said to be a mere representation. I disagree here with Houlgate's interpretation in "Hegel and the 'End' of Art," The Owl of Minerva 29 (Fall 1997): 1-19. Houlgate argues that because art has lost its link with the "divine," it can no longer serve our highest interests and needs, which, presumably on his view are religious. I've already indicated that Hegel's understanding of the divine is already quite heretical, and I think the text is clear that art cannot lose its connection with the "divine" (in this heretical sense of the divine) and still be art. Houlgate's confusion on this point is clear on page 9, where he claims both that Hegel approved of Protestant art because it "free[d] art from dominance by religion" and so allowed it to become "fully secular" and that such art allowed us to see "secular forms of activity" as "not simply falling outside the religious, monastic life [I'm not sure what monasteries have to do with this] but as 'holy' in themselves" (ibid., p. 9; my emphasis).
10. Hegel's expression is that art creates a reality that is itself "besouled" ("für sich beseelt") (A, 2:834). Another way to put Hegel's point would be to note his appreciation of some dimension of what would be called the disenchantment of the world (by way of Weber, borrowing from Schiller) but that such a realization does not consign us to a banal fate. An appreciation of the divinity of human freedom does not reenchant the world; it elevates us above the need for enchantment, an elevation that can have a painterly presence all its own. Compare FI, p. 34.
11. Kant's traded on the notion of "disinterestedness."
12. It should be noted that these remarks about nature are heretical in another sense, too. From the viewpoint of traditional Hegel interpretation, Hegel holds a position somewhat like Plotinus (or at least Schelling), in which the sensible, natural world is an emanation of and so linked to God or the One. Nature was supposed to be the externalization of God, finally fully self-conscious or "interiorized" in absolute spirit, in philosophy. These passages make that interpretation implausible. More specifically and more clearly put by Hegel: "the connection between the beautiful and ourselves is that we catch sight of our own essence in the beautiful" (Hegel, Vorlesung über Ästhetik: Berlin, 1820-21, ed. Helmut Schneider [Frankfurt am Main, 1995], p. 57).
13. These are the kinds of passages that prompt the kind of characterization of The Narcissistic Hegel, he of the great devouring Maw of Subjectivity, familiar to readers of Adorno. Again, it all depends on what one takes the claim to mean. See remarks on this issue in my "Hegel, Modernity and Habermas," Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 157-84.
14. See Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, 2000), pp. 219-20.
15. "Modernism turns on the impossibility of transcendence" (FI, p. 22). As indicated above, what is left without such transcendence is the issue, and for Hegel, and for Hegel's modernism, what is left is neither materiality as such (resistant to sense, to the work of painting) nor a mere object to be transformed and humanized by the "labor of the concept." What that all amounts to is a large independent issue. For an indication of Clark's view, see the analysis of David's Death of Marat, esp. FI, p. 48.
16. I am of course aware that, glancing back at European history in the twentieth century, expressing such Hegelian views without irony or qualification can seem a little naïve. But, as in so many cases, we need a comprehensive view of what Hegel means by insisting on the "rationality" of modern ethical life, and I don't believe such an interpretation is yet available among the prominent competitors, descendants of the nineteenth-century Left-Right Hegel wars. For what I hope is a start, see my "Hegel's Ethical Rationalism," Idealism and Modernism, pp. 417-50.
17. "Works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought" (A, 1:74).
18. Another endlessly contested issue. See Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-consciousness (Cambridge, 1989) for the argument defending a reading of Hegel through Kantian lenses.
19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1965), A293, B350, p. 297; my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated CPR.
20. The central problem in that endeavor is the problem Kant created for aesthetics but that after him, with the rejection of his formalism, became the core modern problem: genuine lawfulness but without a determinate law or without a possible appeal to a determinate law - and therewith another preview of the modernist spirit. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), §39, pp. 133-35, and Luc Ferry's discussion in Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago, 1993), pp. 15, 96.
21. The principle that Hegel will settle on in his account of this possibility is basically similar to that introduced by Kant in the third Critique: "An der Stelle jedes anderen denken" (Kant, Critique of Judgment, §40, p. 136).
22. When the ideal, after Kant, could no longer be identified with a distinct, intelligible world (but was instead a goal of ideal and complete intelligibility, the postulation of the unconditioned) the status of the sensible also changed dramatically. For the modern Anglophone tradition, it meant the problem of formulating a coherent empiricism, one consistent with mathematical physics, with self-knowledge, memory, and personal identity, one that could deal with the problem of skepticism, and so on. On the other hand, one prominent feature of what is called the Continental tradition, viewed in this light, is a much heightened attention to the significance of aesthetic sensibility, the significance of the fact that a merely empirical apprehension of an artwork is inappropriate. Compare the first four chapters of Ferry, Homo Aestheticus and Jay Bernstein's interesting discussion in The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, Pa., 1992). (The much discussed "subjectivization" of the aesthetic realm is thus not a relocation of aesthetic meaning "from" objective perfectionism, classical rules and formulae, and so forth, inward; it is not an interiorization of what had been "out there." Self-reliance, self-certitude, and constructivism are not in isolation the modernist problems [for Hegel], but a making, the products of which fully embody the freedom of the maker, reflect that freedom adequately.)
23. See Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York, 1960).
24. Compare Clement Greenberg: "I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant" (Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian, 4 vols. [Chicago, 1993], 4:85).
25. For a different account that makes the same beginning, see my Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (1991; Oxford, 2000). Greenberg treats modernism as beginning with a kind of Kantian inspiration not to take painting itself (as color on a flat surface) for granted anymore, but to explore what it is to put color on a flat, limited (framed) surface. It doesn't seem to me possible to understand the significance of that without understanding the significance of the ideal of critical autonomy and that move always seems to appear to Greenberg "impure," an attempt at the tyrannization of painting by something nonpainting, like philosophy or social theory (very un-Hegelian dichotomies).
26. Compare the difficulty in his position in "The Case for Abstract Art," where such a move to abstraction is treated as an antidote against hyper-self-interested, materialistic, anticontemplative mass society (this is what the art means) even while he insists it functions as an example of something that "does not have to mean" (Greenberg, "The Case for Abstract Art," The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4:80; my emphasis). From Hegel's point of view this is not a debater's point but an indication of how deeply Kantian Greenberg's program remains.
27. See Ferry, Homo Aestheticus, chap. 4.
28. At the close of the lectures, Hegel appears to give fine art a new, different, and quite important function: "Art itself is the most beautiful side of that history [the unfolding of truth in world history] and it is the best compensation for hard work in the world and the bitter labor for knowledge" (A, 2:1236-37). Note too that Hegel claims that the supersession of art by philosophy also provides "an inducement for taking up the essence of art too in a profounder way" (A, 1:21).
29. See Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), pp. 148-72.1 agree with what I take to be Fried's attitude: there was no failure of modernism, no exhaustion by the end of abstract expressionism. Rather there was (and still is) a failure to appreciate and integrate the self-understanding reflected in such art (the same kind of failure to appreciate modernism, or the same kind of straw-men attacks, in what we call postmodernism). The aftermath - minimalism, "literalism," op and pop art, postmodernism - can better be understood as evasions and regressions rather than alternatives.
30. There is a tension here in Hegel's position. Prior to the Hegelian stage of modernity, the intuitive expression of the truth that art alone made possible was counted as a necessary element in the becoming-self-conscious of such a truth, while, after that stage, art was to merely express sensibly a truth attained properly by philosophy. But this would mean that in such a philosophical stage, art would no longer be functioning as art. As art, it is an aspect of a sensible reflection of truth unavailable in any other way; see Henrich, "Art and Philosophy of Art Today: Reflections with Reference to Hegel," in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, trans. David Henry Wilson et al., ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, N.J., 1979), pp. 107-33. See especially Henrich's note on p. 114 about Hegel's 1828 aesthetics lectures. (This essay is a catastrophically bad translation of the powerful, original article that compellingly defends the relevance of the Hegelian analysis for modern art.
31. See Henrich, "Kunst und Kunst Philosophie der Gegenwart," Poetik und Hermeneutik 1 [1983].)
32. Compare, for example, the closing couplet of Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, p. 493.
33. Hans Belting, "The Dream of Absolute Art," The Invisible Masterpiece (Chicago, 2001), p. 295.
34. Again, a very long story. For an abstract formulation, see my "Hegels Begriffslogik als die Logik der Freiheit," forthcoming in Der Begriff als die Wahrheit: Zum Anspruch der Hegeleschen Subjektiven Logik, ed. Anton Koch and Konrad Utz.
35. One more remark about Clark. The difference between his take on modernism and mine involves a different tone in the invocation of Hegel. Hegel's defense of the modernity of art (romanticism in his view, even if of diminished importance with regard to the highest things; modernism, even abstraction, in the view I am attributing to the immortal Hegel) is indeed a defense of the ultimacy of bourgeois modernity. But, as with everything else, that depends on what that involves. Hegel's soberness about what it involves can be bracing, but it is not, to invoke an old term from Marcuse, one-dimensional. On the contrary. Compare Pippin, "Unending Modernity," in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, chap. 7.
36. This last remark pulls hard at only one thread intertwined with many others in Hegel's assessment of the state of art at the end of romanticism. Specific aesthetic issues - his evaluation of the greater importance of color over drawing and linear perspective, his apparent commitment to the paramount importance of human beings and objects that reflect human moods, and his apparent linking of aesthetic with ethical ideals (with regard to Christian love, for example) - would all need further treatment before this suggestion of a Hegelian sympathy for abstraction could be defended. But Houlgate, in the two articles noted above, already seems to me to go too far in excluding the abstractionists from the Hegelian aesthetic realm, the realm of inwardness and "objectless" freedom. The question is not really about abstraction but about what historical forms allow what Hegel, in his comments on late romantic art, described as the attempt to preserve something "substantial" in art (an impetus that already sounds Friedian) (A, 1:602). And that issue cannot be assessed in modernism without attention to the rather heterodox view of freedom that Hegel defends as the modern substantiality. This whole situation is, again, made somewhat more difficult by the influence of Greenberg's criticism, which treats the autonomy of art so purely, so "surrenders" (to use Greenberg's telling word) to the flatness and materiality of painterly expression, that he makes it hard to answer the obvious Hegelian question: what does it mean (why does it matter) that such self-authorizing painterly norms (flatness and frame) so exclusively lay claim on the aesthetic imagination? (Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," The Collected Essays and Criticism, 1:34).