Hegel's lectures on aesthetics bear witness not to the cessation of artistic activity as such, but to a progressive decline in its significance for human self-understanding. Still, the nature and extent of this decline remain contested. Is the creation of new art a vestigial activity in a world governed by philosophical forms of understanding? Or does Hegel grant the arts an indispensable role in modern life? This dissertation defends the latter view. I begin by responding to Dieter Henrich's claim that, in light of art's subordination to philosophy, the deliverances of modern painting and literature are necessarily redundant. First, the logic of sublation itself suggests an ongoing role for art; second, Hegel sketches a mutually collaborative, rather than competitive, relationship among art, religion, and philosophy. If art can afford us distinctive forms of self-knowledge which, though unavailable to philosophical thought, are nonetheless asymmetrically dependent upon the framework it erects, then art can escape redundancy without violating its subordination. What are the distinctive forms of human self-understanding modern art might afford us? This is the second, constructive question that occupies the remaining chapters of the project. Roughly, I claim, artworks can help reconcile us to those dimensions of our experience too trivial or too unreflective to admit of anything but cursory, and thus unsatisfying, philosophic treatment. Thus, Hegel appreciates in Dutch genre painting not only a feat of national self-assertion, but an attempt, visible in the painter's choice of a "repugnantly" common subject matter, to confront worries about the possibilities of self-determination implicit in the wage labor and domestic ennui that characterize the modern West. The poetry of Goethe and his Persian forebear Hafiz, meanwhile addresses themselves to the erotic and the personal--a realm, again, in which we may feel ourselves prisoner to contingency. Central to both painting and literature, finally, is a notion of artistic virtuosity, for it is virtuosity that takes the place of beauty in the table of modern artistic values.

Last modified

• 07/30/2018

Creator

• Benjamin R Rutter

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N24D99

Subject

• Philosophy

Keyword

• Philosophy

Date created

• 05-15-2007

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright