Please post your questions about our week 3 readings from Hegel’s Lecture on Fine Arts and/or Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads as a comment below
“On the contrary, as spiritual activity it is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the mind’s eye a quite other and richer content and more comprehensive individual creations [than formulae can provide]. There fore, in so far as such rules do actually contain something specific and there fore of practical utility, they may apply in case of need, but still can afford no more than specifications for purely external circumstances” (Hegel 555).
I have some questions about this quote, the first being about “spiritual activity.” Is Hegel inferring that spiritual activity only takes place when a work of art is being composed, sculpted, etc.? By extension, does spiritual activity necessitate a tangible work?
My other question concerns the “rules” that Hegel seems to argue are useless for the artist to follow because they inhibit free play and true spiritual activity. (I hope I understood that correctly.) If we can apply his thoughts on rules to literature, what does it mean for a writer to work in a particular literary tradition or genre? Two examples are Joyce’s Ulysses/The Odyssey and the “exact notion of style” that Wordsworth is attempting to craft (22). This brings me back to my first question, too: does having a set of prescribed rules or aesthetic ambitions make literary composition a sort of de-spiritualized activity?
Wordsworth:
“For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor… The invaluable works of our elder writers…are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (Wordsworth, p. 21).
Immediately upon reading this, I wondered if anyone else was struck, as I was, by the relevance of this passage to our current situation, in that it feels like our extended moment of political/social unrest/chaos is making everyone gravtiate towards silly content that provides some sort of mental relief or escape (I’m thinking about the rise in popularity of Young Adult fantasy novels that everyone seems to be reading on the train…). Is Wordsworth making a plea to the public to engage with literature in a more philosophical, rigorous manner?
How would Hegel react to Wordsworth’s proposal of a “new” kind of poetics which traces the “primary laws of our nature” (Wordsworth 18)? Is Wordsworth’s attempt at this new poetics Hegelian (does this new kind of poetry get closer to adequately representing Spirit)?
Wordsworth writes that “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure” (26). Poetry, in contrast with its end, is “manly” when “words metrically arranged will long continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind” (26). On the following page, Wordsworth writes that among the chief causes of the pleasure of metrical language is “the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude… From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it take their origin” (27). Here, the pleasure of meter is aligned with not only sexual pleasure, but sexual difference, I think. Further, this type of pleasure is opposed to the feminized “excitement” mentioned above. The pleasure of meter is further associated with repetition. He writes that if one was given “two descriptions either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once” (28). The prose, it is suggested, requires a “tempering” of the painful affect. Without the tempering by way of meter, the reader cannot read it again. My question. What do we make of the relationship between pleasure, manliness, and repetition? What do we make of this desire for pleasure without excitement? How do we connect this to a theory of aesthetics?
I’m interested in Hegel’s leveraging of orders of complexity in gauging the greatness of an artwork. For example, the first form of art – non-Western art – is a “mere search for portrayal” rather than a “true presentation” of the ‘Idea’ (559). Classical art, on the other hand, is a step up because it overcomes the internal disorder of the first-order art (disorder= external nature unaffected by man). It dwells in the human body, which is inherently better than nature, but it dwells there too comfortably. We need Christian art, which is ordered nature that, all the same, does not dwell in itself too easily because it knows that it is always a division of the whole.
This seems so much like Heideggar’s orders of being, and not because of the triad.
1.) Worldlessness, or the condition of objects (= Hegel’s primitive art, which basically just makes natural objects)
2.) Captivation in the world, the condition of animals (= Hegel’s classical art, which doesn’t strive to transcend the body)
3.) Dasein, or being in the world, the domain of humans (= Hegel’s Romantic art, which requires human activity/ consciousness/ rationality to come into being)
So let me finally get to my questions:
Why three? Why not ten? Is there just to model the trinity, and avoid the binary? The racism and misogyny of these orders is obvious to us now; I guess what I wonder is if we throw the baby out with the bathwater. It strikes me as rather useless to query whether an artwork has properly exhibited the third-order activity required of worthy art, even if we make our scope more inclusive. Do others feel differently?
More anecdotally, reading this gave me visions of microplastics filling the oceans and every living thing. At this particular saturation point, how do art objects distinguish from all the other impressions that humans make on the Earth? It seems an ecocritical, or perhaps ecopessimistic, angle is really needed here: Hegel’s formulation ensures that there is meaning and intention to human creation, but can this be maintained? Does it now just come off as compulsion?
It seems as though the question of human presence in art — in it, behind it, as the source of its artifice — is central to Hegel’s system of aesthetic value. An artwork bears testament to having passed through an artist’s interior consciousness (“spirit”) and into external manifestation (“external existence,” or “sensuousness”) (557). Hegel’s “work of art stands higher than any natural product which has not made this journey through the spirit” and such a “work of the spirit acquires a higher rank than the mere natural landscape,” which, if I am understanding correctly, remains bereft of the projection of human consciousness (557).
How can we reconcile Hegel’s insistence on an artist’s presence within the artwork itself with other, later aesthetic theories involving the total removal of the artist (or author, as in Barthes’ “Death of the Author”) from the artwork?
Hegel states: “For nature and its products, it is said, are a work of God, created by his goodness and wisdom, whereas the art-product is a purely human work, made by human hands according to human insight” and “God is more honored by what the spirit makes than by the productions and formations of nature.” (557)
These two statements seem to be contradicting each other. If God has created all natural things, how is it that He [God] views human-made art as superior than his own creations? Is he making an assumption because he does not believe that God has actually created all natural things (“it is said”)? Does it have to do with the fact that many people believe that we were created by a God, so in this case, God’s creations (humans) are using their God-given talent and their consciousness to make art, which would be considered more valuable than nature itself?
I realized that I left out the next part, which comes on page 558, and where Hegel explains how God exists in both things mentioned before, but his opinion still stands: nature exists in the unconscious, whereas art in the conscious. However, my question still remains the same, as I am very confused about what his actual thought process was behind these remarks.
Does Wordsworth make any judgements on subject and langue, or subject vs. language? He stresses the importance of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (27), which appears to be the ‘goal’ of poetry, but doesn’t seem to favor subject matter of a poem over its language, or vice versa, if I read correctly. The subject is important, it should be of “common life,” but so is the language, it should be “real” (28) and written in meter. Does an importance of both subject and language working together to derive pleasure from a poem echo Hegel’s synthesis of Idea and its materialization in the romantic form of art?
Hegel claims the need for art to be universal, something that men seek to “lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self” ( 559). This seems to add a psychological ( dare we say ante litteram proto-psychoanalytical?) flavor to art, which leads me to wonder:
what implications does this understanding have on the mere aesthetic value of art? What should we then make of the two categories of “symbolic” (559) and “classical” art(560), which Hegel does not mention “the Spirit” to be a part of? Should we /Could we infer that Hegel is implying a sort of ranking of the types of art?
How do we as both literary critics and educators contend with amorphous, metaphysical notions such as spirit, talent, and genius? Besides formal complexity, are these not subject to the same constraints and critiques of Kantian taste?
If the zeitgeist is necessarily reflected in an era’s artistic form, what would the implications be for our current moment of neoliberalism and the predominance of secularism?
Are there certain forms of art that “better” “display the depths of the heart and the spirit” (556)? And, by which measurement (or are we even using a measurement that we can delineate to begin with) do we prescribe something more or less “better” than other forms of art?
And, by the way, how does art “display” spirit? That is to say, what sort of “displaying” occurs with/in art? Does it exemplify (represent/disclose/”put to work,” etc.) spirit in such a way that opens a space for something like Kantian beauty to be felt (or even cognized, which would be an impossibility for Kant, but maybe not so for Hegel)? What about a space for something like Kantian sublimity? Or, aside from either of these Kantian options, what else “happens” in the “display” of spirit with/in the work of art, for Hegel?
What do we make of Hegel’s discussion of the “superfluous” quality of consciousness when it comes to an “artist’s own activity” and his recognition of the need for “skill in technique” which must be honed through reflection, industry, and practice. It kind of reminded me of the incompatibility of purposeless purposiveness from last week. Is the formulation of a concept from a paradox or a contradiction what is meant by dialectic?
Is Hegel saying that art creation is the development of human response through “practical alteration” of external forces to map the self onto externality? I’m thinking here of the stone and ripples, and the alteration of the body, on pg. 558.
Architecture, sculpture, then painting and music, then poetry require a diminishing amount of “handiwork” and “workmanship” for Hegel (556). Is there an inverse relationship between handiwork/ workmanship and art? “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (569).” Spontaneous feelings require no handiwork in the way that shaping stone does. What about Kant’s purpose again..does the difference in purpose between a building and a poem speak to their relative artistic merit for Hegel and Wordsworth?
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15 Comments
Francesca
“On the contrary, as spiritual activity it is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the mind’s eye a quite other and richer content and more comprehensive individual creations [than formulae can provide]. There fore, in so far as such rules do actually contain something specific and there fore of practical utility, they may apply in case of need, but still can afford no more than specifications for purely external circumstances” (Hegel 555).
I have some questions about this quote, the first being about “spiritual activity.” Is Hegel inferring that spiritual activity only takes place when a work of art is being composed, sculpted, etc.? By extension, does spiritual activity necessitate a tangible work?
My other question concerns the “rules” that Hegel seems to argue are useless for the artist to follow because they inhibit free play and true spiritual activity. (I hope I understood that correctly.) If we can apply his thoughts on rules to literature, what does it mean for a writer to work in a particular literary tradition or genre? Two examples are Joyce’s Ulysses/The Odyssey and the “exact notion of style” that Wordsworth is attempting to craft (22). This brings me back to my first question, too: does having a set of prescribed rules or aesthetic ambitions make literary composition a sort of de-spiritualized activity?
Coco Fitterman
Wordsworth:
“For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor… The invaluable works of our elder writers…are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” (Wordsworth, p. 21).
Immediately upon reading this, I wondered if anyone else was struck, as I was, by the relevance of this passage to our current situation, in that it feels like our extended moment of political/social unrest/chaos is making everyone gravtiate towards silly content that provides some sort of mental relief or escape (I’m thinking about the rise in popularity of Young Adult fantasy novels that everyone seems to be reading on the train…). Is Wordsworth making a plea to the public to engage with literature in a more philosophical, rigorous manner?
How would Hegel react to Wordsworth’s proposal of a “new” kind of poetics which traces the “primary laws of our nature” (Wordsworth 18)? Is Wordsworth’s attempt at this new poetics Hegelian (does this new kind of poetry get closer to adequately representing Spirit)?
–coco
Jodie Kahan (she/her)
Wordsworth writes that “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure” (26). Poetry, in contrast with its end, is “manly” when “words metrically arranged will long continue to impart such a pleasure to mankind” (26). On the following page, Wordsworth writes that among the chief causes of the pleasure of metrical language is “the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude… From this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it take their origin” (27). Here, the pleasure of meter is aligned with not only sexual pleasure, but sexual difference, I think. Further, this type of pleasure is opposed to the feminized “excitement” mentioned above. The pleasure of meter is further associated with repetition. He writes that if one was given “two descriptions either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once” (28). The prose, it is suggested, requires a “tempering” of the painful affect. Without the tempering by way of meter, the reader cannot read it again. My question. What do we make of the relationship between pleasure, manliness, and repetition? What do we make of this desire for pleasure without excitement? How do we connect this to a theory of aesthetics?
Dana Burns
Please forgive the long post:
I’m interested in Hegel’s leveraging of orders of complexity in gauging the greatness of an artwork. For example, the first form of art – non-Western art – is a “mere search for portrayal” rather than a “true presentation” of the ‘Idea’ (559). Classical art, on the other hand, is a step up because it overcomes the internal disorder of the first-order art (disorder= external nature unaffected by man). It dwells in the human body, which is inherently better than nature, but it dwells there too comfortably. We need Christian art, which is ordered nature that, all the same, does not dwell in itself too easily because it knows that it is always a division of the whole.
This seems so much like Heideggar’s orders of being, and not because of the triad.
1.) Worldlessness, or the condition of objects (= Hegel’s primitive art, which basically just makes natural objects)
2.) Captivation in the world, the condition of animals (= Hegel’s classical art, which doesn’t strive to transcend the body)
3.) Dasein, or being in the world, the domain of humans (= Hegel’s Romantic art, which requires human activity/ consciousness/ rationality to come into being)
So let me finally get to my questions:
Why three? Why not ten? Is there just to model the trinity, and avoid the binary? The racism and misogyny of these orders is obvious to us now; I guess what I wonder is if we throw the baby out with the bathwater. It strikes me as rather useless to query whether an artwork has properly exhibited the third-order activity required of worthy art, even if we make our scope more inclusive. Do others feel differently?
More anecdotally, reading this gave me visions of microplastics filling the oceans and every living thing. At this particular saturation point, how do art objects distinguish from all the other impressions that humans make on the Earth? It seems an ecocritical, or perhaps ecopessimistic, angle is really needed here: Hegel’s formulation ensures that there is meaning and intention to human creation, but can this be maintained? Does it now just come off as compulsion?
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
It seems as though the question of human presence in art — in it, behind it, as the source of its artifice — is central to Hegel’s system of aesthetic value. An artwork bears testament to having passed through an artist’s interior consciousness (“spirit”) and into external manifestation (“external existence,” or “sensuousness”) (557). Hegel’s “work of art stands higher than any natural product which has not made this journey through the spirit” and such a “work of the spirit acquires a higher rank than the mere natural landscape,” which, if I am understanding correctly, remains bereft of the projection of human consciousness (557).
How can we reconcile Hegel’s insistence on an artist’s presence within the artwork itself with other, later aesthetic theories involving the total removal of the artist (or author, as in Barthes’ “Death of the Author”) from the artwork?
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
Hegel states: “For nature and its products, it is said, are a work of God, created by his goodness and wisdom, whereas the art-product is a purely human work, made by human hands according to human insight” and “God is more honored by what the spirit makes than by the productions and formations of nature.” (557)
These two statements seem to be contradicting each other. If God has created all natural things, how is it that He [God] views human-made art as superior than his own creations? Is he making an assumption because he does not believe that God has actually created all natural things (“it is said”)? Does it have to do with the fact that many people believe that we were created by a God, so in this case, God’s creations (humans) are using their God-given talent and their consciousness to make art, which would be considered more valuable than nature itself?
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
I realized that I left out the next part, which comes on page 558, and where Hegel explains how God exists in both things mentioned before, but his opinion still stands: nature exists in the unconscious, whereas art in the conscious. However, my question still remains the same, as I am very confused about what his actual thought process was behind these remarks.
Joanna Ligon
Does Wordsworth make any judgements on subject and langue, or subject vs. language? He stresses the importance of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (27), which appears to be the ‘goal’ of poetry, but doesn’t seem to favor subject matter of a poem over its language, or vice versa, if I read correctly. The subject is important, it should be of “common life,” but so is the language, it should be “real” (28) and written in meter. Does an importance of both subject and language working together to derive pleasure from a poem echo Hegel’s synthesis of Idea and its materialization in the romantic form of art?
Irene Ferrami
Hegel claims the need for art to be universal, something that men seek to “lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self” ( 559). This seems to add a psychological ( dare we say ante litteram proto-psychoanalytical?) flavor to art, which leads me to wonder:
what implications does this understanding have on the mere aesthetic value of art? What should we then make of the two categories of “symbolic” (559) and “classical” art(560), which Hegel does not mention “the Spirit” to be a part of? Should we /Could we infer that Hegel is implying a sort of ranking of the types of art?
Alex Lleras
How do we as both literary critics and educators contend with amorphous, metaphysical notions such as spirit, talent, and genius? Besides formal complexity, are these not subject to the same constraints and critiques of Kantian taste?
If the zeitgeist is necessarily reflected in an era’s artistic form, what would the implications be for our current moment of neoliberalism and the predominance of secularism?
Alex Riedel
Are there certain forms of art that “better” “display the depths of the heart and the spirit” (556)? And, by which measurement (or are we even using a measurement that we can delineate to begin with) do we prescribe something more or less “better” than other forms of art?
And, by the way, how does art “display” spirit? That is to say, what sort of “displaying” occurs with/in art? Does it exemplify (represent/disclose/”put to work,” etc.) spirit in such a way that opens a space for something like Kantian beauty to be felt (or even cognized, which would be an impossibility for Kant, but maybe not so for Hegel)? What about a space for something like Kantian sublimity? Or, aside from either of these Kantian options, what else “happens” in the “display” of spirit with/in the work of art, for Hegel?
Peter
What do we make of Hegel’s discussion of the “superfluous” quality of consciousness when it comes to an “artist’s own activity” and his recognition of the need for “skill in technique” which must be honed through reflection, industry, and practice. It kind of reminded me of the incompatibility of purposeless purposiveness from last week. Is the formulation of a concept from a paradox or a contradiction what is meant by dialectic?
Is Hegel saying that art creation is the development of human response through “practical alteration” of external forces to map the self onto externality? I’m thinking here of the stone and ripples, and the alteration of the body, on pg. 558.
Architecture, sculpture, then painting and music, then poetry require a diminishing amount of “handiwork” and “workmanship” for Hegel (556). Is there an inverse relationship between handiwork/ workmanship and art? “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (569).” Spontaneous feelings require no handiwork in the way that shaping stone does. What about Kant’s purpose again..does the difference in purpose between a building and a poem speak to their relative artistic merit for Hegel and Wordsworth?
Serena
What distinguishes art from self-expression? Is it merely a question of time and technique?
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Dropping the link here, to help us think throught the relationship between Wordsworth’s theories and his poetic practice: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798
Alex Lleras
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sJrmeBZtdbXiG4XT77_3ELaf0Z0Bo10VJT2yxM1rv0E/edit?usp=sharing