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It has often been remarked that the cave paintings discovered in France were situated in caves that were not places of everyday habitation and this suggests that in the minds of the painters there was perhaps an idea or intuition of a space that possessed a special significance: a space that ought to be visited occasionally either when needs pressed or in accordance with a primitive time schedule related to important events in their lives. It is also claimed that the paintings of bison we see were symbolising something, and that, in the absence of the presence of writing served to preserve the object in its universality, and if this is the case then perhaps we have the first testimony of man relating himself to transcendental objectivity.
If the above is a correct description of the era that is designated by many as the Origin of Art, then this needs to be accounted for in any theory of Art. Kantian theorists would have no difficulty in interpreting the meaning of the above description, viewing it in terms of Kantian Philosophical Psychology, as a confirmation of the way in which the faculties of the imagination and the understanding cooperate in order to form a transcendent object located in transcendent space. Platonic scholars might also sense the poetry in an image of a cave itself containing images of a universal character which although signify limited freedom on the part of the artist who painted the images nevertheless also points to a kind of enslavement to the image because of its ties to human desire and the absence of depiction of anything that fall under a universal idea of the good. On both Kantian and Platonic theory the cave painters are “intuitive” artists not yet capable of psychically distancing themselves from their subject matter. Aristotle once claimed that insofar as artefacts and living organisms are concerned, if you wish to investigate the essence of such phenomena one should attempt to return to their origin. This raises the question of whether we are indeed truly at the moment of origin of a work of art with these paintings on the walls of caves. Hegel together with Adrian Stokes claimed that architecture was the mother of all arts with sculpture coming next in this hierarchy and painting music and poetry coming in at the base of the hierarchy. If Hegel and Stokes were correct then perhaps focussing upon the painting can be construed as looking in the wrong place for the origin of a work of Art. We should, rather, it can be argued, be looking at the cave, the transcendent space with its walls that by the light of the fire may have appeared to be surfaces upon which to project one’s fantasies, emotions, and intuitions–dream screens tempting the art out of the artist. Now, these cave walls were not, of course, erected by a man in the way in which in future millennia temples would be built in honour of Transcendent Being: as an expression of man’s freedom and commitment to the truth of the existence of such Being. In Greek times, temples housed sculptures of a God which Hegel characterises as having been inserted allegorically into the space as part of a lightning strike of Logos that further shaped the transcendent space of the temple with the “Shape ” of a God. The builders of the temple and the sculptors on this account were divinely inspired by “Ideas” that partook of the divine spirit, symbolising freedom from the human that during this time was the stuff of oracles and dreams. Hegel calls this process “idealisation”: a process connected to the Greek concept of “Aletheia” or the revelation of who we are as human beings and also what we are capable of.
Now Hegel would not hesitate to call Greek temples works of art but it is not clear that he would similarly regard cave paintings on cave walls as “art” in the same sense of the term, although it has to be said that they, in fact, do meet his basic criterion for such work, namely that the works concerned give sensuous expression to free spirit. Perhaps Hegel’s objections would be over whether the cave painters were in any sense “free” when they chose a special space in which to express themselves. Or perhaps, as is more likely, he would regard the choice of the motif of the paintings, bison, to be a”natural” form of existence ad devoid of the spirit of man.
There is surely a difference, however, between the serene free repose of the God in her temple and the massive shaggy bison and its connection to oral consumption. A Kleinian psychoanalyst interested in the broader strokes of cultural life may well suggest that there is no question here of mature object relations because oral objects are part objects which invite some form of attack. No sane Greek, it might be argued, would dream of attacking Athena in her temple. And yet we are still left with this idea of a transcendent space of the cave which once invited expression. Perhaps there is a continuum from transcendental space to the universal transcendental object that invites not oral gratification but a form of spirituality more aligned with Kantian and Hegelian ideas of freedom and rationality. In the repose of the Greek God, there is also a hint of passion for the universal good life(Eudaimonia) that can be shared by all men possessed of the divine spark of life. The psychoanalyst (Adrian Stokes)would certainly see in this example the “spirit ” of a healthy superego in a healthy relation to structures of mind such as the id and the Ego but also a constructive relation to such reality structures such as the external physical world.
We need to clarify what Hegel meant by “Spirit”. According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy(https://plato.stanford.edu/centres/hegel-aesthetics):
“spirit, as Hegel understands it (in his philosophy of subjective and objective spirit) is the activity of externalizing and expressing itself in images, words, actions, and institutions”
This definition does not, however, sufficiently characterize the ethical demand there is on Spirit and could well include(incorrectly on our view) the so-called “pre-art” of the cave paintings. As we saw above not just any image will suffice for the exteriorization of “Spirit”. Hegel, in the context of this discussion, thinks of art in terms of three categories: symbolic, classical, and romantic. He connects architecture with the symbolic, sculpture with classical art, and painting, music, and poetry with “romantic” art. He characterises Egyptian art, for example as symbolic art ad presents the triangular shape of the pyramids housing “the dead” as a type of art that fails to fully express Spirit in the way Greek art managed to do. We know, for example, that animals played a significant role in Egyptian art in the form of animal masks and the phoenix which mystically suggested the circle of life but not the idea of Spirit. Symbols in this kind of art appear to have the function of disguising or hiding the presence of something rather than revealing what a thing is in its essence. They require a work of interpretation that is more like cracking a code than discovering a meaning. The pyramid is a symbol of the realm of the dead. Hegel in this context points to the symbol of the Sphinx(head of a human, body of a lion) as an example of the emergence of spirit from its animal nature into a human form of existence.
Judaism is also conceived by Hegel to be pre-art because the Jewish God cannot reveal himself in the world in the way that the Greek gods could. It should be recalled, however, that representations of gods especially in the form of animals were anathema to the Jews who probably thereby felt as a consequence, that their religion was more philosophical(Yahweh, the lawmaker) than the Egyptian religion. Hegel also points to grammatical devices such as allegories and metaphors as pre-art mechanisms because these, too, are related only via the idea of “resemblance” to what they are metaphors or allegories of. This might explain why in Plato’s Republic there are no less than three allegories used to explain the idea of the Good. The third of these allegories incidentally is that of the famous Platonic cave which has since then functioned as a symbol of the freedom of the human spirit.
Classical art, best illustrated by Greek sculpture is the most beautiful of all art, Hegel claims. Greek art symbolizes absolute beauty. The visible shape of the Greek sculpted figure “reveals” or “expresses” the freedom of the spirit. The Greek gods, unfortunately, were not totally free in the way in which the Christian God was, they did not, that is, know themselves in the way that the Christian God did. Hegel also suggested that perhaps the Christian God cared more for his creation than the Greek Gods cared for the Greek people. With Christianity, we find ourselves in the realm of what Hegel referred to as “romantic” art. The problem with such art is that it is best expressed in religious stories of Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. Here the principal images change from repose and serenity to pain and suffering at the end of which there are residual attitudes of resignation and reconciliation. Hegel sees boundless love and soulfulness in Christian religious art. In this same category of the romantic Hegel includes the self-determination and freedom of Shakespeare’s heroes(?) Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth. One wonders whether Kant would have shared this view. “Freedom” to use others as a means to one’s ends to the point of murdering them is not in accordance with the second formulation of the categorical imperative. These “characters” may be spirited individuals in some sense akin to that in which Achilles was regarded as “spirited” by Homer but with the advent of the new philosophical hero Socrates, the paradigm of heroism shifted irrevocably toward the ethical sphere of human existence. In the light of the new paradigm instituted by the example of Socrates, it is difficult not to see in Hegel’s notion of “Spirit” some kind of regression which may signify a demotion of the ethical form of life to other social forms of life, but more especially a disconnection of the ethical from the realm of Fine Art. This regression may then have contributed to providing Fine Art with an autonomy that might have contributed to its subsequent demise in so-called “modern-art” where freedom appears to be equated with doing anything one pleases including questioning the very role of “work” in the phrase “work of art”. “Work ” had traditionally been associated with a life-long familiarity with the medium one is working with. On this point, Hegel specifically says that every part of a work of art is an organically unified whole resembling a human body with its organ system. Every aspect of the work must express its idea or its concept and every work of art must also express the march of progress toward the telos of absolute spirit. This is a very technical theoretical characterisation of Art which appears to exclude the absolute commitment to ethics we find in Kant.
The autonomy of art was obviously a significant moment in its history which Hegel conceptualised in terms of what he called “secularisation” and the “humanisation” of art. He points to the Reformation and its retreat from icons and images as well as its rejection of the authority of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church: an institution that had for a millennium and a half been a force for social control in Europe. In Hegel’s eyes, this was a decisive moment in which one no longer saw one’s fate tied to anything outside oneself. With these moves toward secularisation and humanizsation, Hegel argues Art becomes a thing of the past because it is no longer capable of revealing “truth” in the way it had done previously. Poetry is a casualty of this process and can no longer express the spirit of man’s freedom and rationality. There is involved in this tearing down of the pyramids of hierarchy a desire to be left alone to lead one’s life: an awareness that the mere leading of a normal life was a considerable achievement which could occupy the whole of the “spirit” of man. The inadequacies and limitations of leading such a life were no longer recognised as such and as a consequence was no longer to be recognised as limitations and inadequacies of the good. Art now imitates life instead of “forming” or “shaping” it. These latter tasks were to be left to Philosophy(a Philosophy without ethics). One cannot help wondering what Hegel would have made of our modern secularised world which in his eyes is marching toward the goal of an Absolute. Bosanquet perhaps provides us with a clue as to how Hegel might respond in his characterisation of Hegel’s view on the man who has no art, religion or conceptual thought:
“in such a condition man perceives external objects and has desires which he satisfies by consuming(e.g. eating) objects. At this stage, man views the world as a merely “sensuous” world, as no more than a collection of individual entities to be perceived and consumed. Correspondingly, man himself is merely a sensuous creature: he is not more than a series of sense perceptions and of sensuous, or physical desires and satisfactions. The state of man’s mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it. One might say that, for man at this stage, the absolute, the essence of the world or the world as it is in itself, is simply a collection of perceptibles and consumables”(Introduction ro Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, XIV-XV)
This could well serve as a description of the world we live in today and if this is so we clearly have not merely halted in our march toward the Absolute but have regressed. There is not much that popular commentators and academics agree on, but perhaps in the twentieth century they shared the view that our society had become what they called a “consumer society”. What the popular commentators lack in attaching this label to our modern form of life is an academic historical awareness of what man has evolved from, namely that state presented by Bosanquet. Psychoanalysts of the Kleinian school(Adrian Stokes) would speak instead in terms of an oral part-object world inhabited by oral personalities with aggressive destructive tendencies. Indeed Adrian Stokes lived in a time where these destructive tendencies played themselves out on the World stage in the form of two World wars and the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations. During this period, Art, Religion, and Philosophy were clearly in decline and under attack.
Hannah Arendt called the twentieth century “this terrible century” and this is indeed an appropriate description given the absence of counter-terroristic forces and the decline in humanistic and international content in the curriculums of our educational systems. This regression cannot but be regarded with astonishment and amazement and requires an explanation. Bosanquet provides the beginnings of such an explanation when he claims:
“Man cannot remain in this condition if he is a man rather than an animal. For his essential nature is to think, to think about the world, about himself, about the relationship between himself and the world, and indeed about his own thinking. But he cannot think directly in non-sensory conceptual terms, any more than we can do pure arithmetic before one has done such things as count one’s own fingers.”(XV)
Hannah Arendt aroused the wrath of the Jewish community when she claimed that the evil of Eichmann was a banal matter and amounted to no more than an inability to think. This flew in the face of conventional religious wisdom that saw in Eichman a monster, an animal, an incarnation of evil that killed children. Hannah Arendt was not underestimating what we call evil but rather providing us with an accurate estimation of the power of thought in human life: a power which, if absent in a collective can have cataclysmic consequences, especially if we fail to think correctly about dictators and popular political parties.
The decline in Art cannot be held responsible for the problems we are experiencing in our modern societies because Hegel clearly considered the possibility that the media of Art could exhaust itself in the attempt to constantly create new forms of expression. In this situation, he thought that world-spirit would then turn to Philosophy, and Philosophy would take us the rest of the way to our intended destination. Is it too early to say that this has not happened? Is the decline we are witnessing temporary? Kant was very long-sighted in his prediction relating to the progress of humanity. He envisaged a one hundred thousand year process which would obviously allow for regressions over perhaps even millennia.
In a sense, Hegel may well have predicted the phenomenon of modern -art when he claimed that the Great Art of all periods was Ironical in form. Given that he doubts whether the Romantic artist can adequately express his ironical detachment from society fully in his art, this could well create a problem for the future of Art. Duchamp’s “Fountain”, for example, is ironic on several levels. Firstly it is supposedly a sculpture but there is no sculpted work on display merely a mass-produced urinal. Secondly in calling the urinal a fountain there is an ironic tone hinting at the inversion of several important attitudes but in particular it points to either an inversion of the watery processes involved or it points again ironically to the “fountain” of urine that will be directed toward the bowl. In Hegel’s view, however, he would have understood the uproar from the critics and the subsequent discussion over whether this could even be called a work of art. This, he might have argued, points to the phenomenon that the medium of sculpture had exhausted itself and could no longer express “spirit” in the required way. Hegel might well have responded similarly to the critics of Hannah Arendt and her failure to convince popular and religious audiences of her philosophical analysis of the Eichman affair. Might Hegel, at this point have claimed that all the significant possibilities for Philosophy to express “Spirit” had been exhausted?
Self-consciousness is a key concept for Hegel and the following discussion is in the context of attempting to answer the question “Why does man need to produce works of art?”:
“The universal and absolute need out of which art, on its formal side, arises, has its source in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, ie. that he draws out of himself and makes explicit for himself, that which he is, and generally whatever is. The things of nature are only immediate and single, but man as mind reduplicates himself, inasmuch as prima facie he is like the things of nature, but in the second place just as really is for himself, perceives himself, has ideas of himself, thinks himself, and only thus is active self-realisedness. This consciousness of himself man obtains in a twofold way: in the first place theoretically insofar as has inwardly to bring himself into his own consciousness, with all that moves in the human breast, all that stirs and works therein, and generally, to observe and form an idea of himself, to fix before himself what thought ascertains to be his real being, and, in what is summoned out of his inner self as in what is received from without, to recognise only himself. Secondly, man is realised for himself by practical activity, inasmuch as he has the impulse, in the medium which is directly given to him, and externally presented before him, to produce himself, and therein at the same time to recognise himself. Man does this in order as a free subject to strip the world of its stubborn foreignness and to enjoy in the shape and fashion of things a more external reality of himself.”( Lectures P. 35-36)
Consciousness then manifests itself both theoretically in the form of thoughts and practically in the form of active products. Hegel does not in this context specifically mention action but we can perhaps attribute to him the view that man can indeed recognise his worth in his moral actions as Kant suggested. All action and all knowledge have its ground in free consciousness for Hegel. Art distinguishes itself from morality in that it aims at pleasure even when, as Hegel points out, we, in the theatre witness the macabre acts of Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth. For Hegel, the pleasure resides in witnessing individuals that override morality and pay for this privilege with their lives. Aristotle would have argued in this context, as would Kant, that we learn from such plays how important men with flawed characters engage in actions of considerable magnitude and suffer the terrible consequences on a cosmic scale.
For Kant, the normal antagonism that exists between men in everyday life, is magnified a hundredfold when we begin to tread the corridors of power. Good men like Thomas More become casualties when Kings wield their might. It is interesting to speculate upon why Shakespeare never wrote a play about the moral conflict between Henry 8th and Thomas More: was it out of concern for ethics, this being a clear case where the historical outcome for Thomas did not meet the demands of morality? The Philosophical Psychology of Kant, when considered in the context of Art, tends clearly in the direction of a process of catharsis of understanding of the kind we encounter in the work of Aristotle. Encapsulating a feeling such as fear in another feeling such as relief(where the understanding is not being used and we are witnessing a pendulum of emotion) is not the catharsis either Aristotle or Kant would be looking for from Tragic plays. Indeed Hegel partially acknowledges this difficulty by confirming that feelings are necessarily passive and happen to man, thus leaving no logical space for the more active movement of the spirit of freedom. In Kant’s discussion of this issue, there is the suggestion that the judgment of taste has a firm connection to the understanding. Hegel does not choose to talk about this aspect of Kant’s theory, preferring instead, a more psychological/existential approach which emphasises the role of the freedom of the imagination:
“thus the interest of art distinguishes itself from the practical interest of desire by the fact that it permits its object to subsist freely and in independence, while desire utilizes it in its own service by its destruction….For in the sensuous aspect of a work of art, the mind seeks neither the concrete framework of matter, that empirically thorough completeness and development of the organism which desire demands, nor the universal and merely ideal thought. What it requires is sensuous presence which, while not ceasing to be sensuous, is to be liberated from the appearances of its merely material nature. This semblance of the sensuous presents itself externally to the mind externally as the shape, the visible look, and the sonorous vibration of things…..In art these sensuous shapes and sounds present themselves not simply for their own sake and for that of their immediate structure, but with the purpose of affording in that shape satisfaction to higher spiritual interest, seeing that they are powerful to call forth a response and echo in the mind from all the depths of consciousness. It is thus, that, in art, the sensuous is spiritualized, i.e the sensuous appears in sensuous shape.”(Lectures P. 43-44)
The spiritual, Hegel argues, can also occur in the linguistic-pictorial form of religious works where narrative contains symbolic language that succeeds in conjuring up spiritual thought. Similarly in Philosophy, the spiritual is brought forth in a system of thought held together by logic that purports to represent the essence of the world.
There are, it has to be admitted, significant differences between the Kantian and Hegelian accounts of Philosophy in general which Hegel attempts to capture:
“In general, Kant treated as his foundation for the intelligence as for the will, the self-related rationality or freedom, the self-consciousness that finds and knows itself as infinite. This knowledge of the absoluteness of reason itself which has brought philosophy to its turning point in modern times, this absolute beginning, deserves recognition, even if we pronounce Kantian philosophy inadequate, and is an element in it which cannot be refuted. But in as far as Kant fell back again into the fixed antithesis of subjective thought and objective things. of the abstract universality and the sensuous individuality of the will, it was he who more especially strained to the highest possible pitch the above-mentioned contradiction called morality, seeing that he exalted the practical side of the mind above the theoretical”(Lectures P. 62)
Hegel then goes on to complain that in the idea of freedom that belongs to practical reason, the accomplishment of the end is left to a mere “ought”. This is a puzzling criticism principally because Kant looks upon the ought premises constituting the practical reason involved in the forming of intention and the decision to perform an action as a way of characterising the action that ought to have been done. There is nothing subjective about the categorical imperative insofar as Kant is concerned: the categorical imperative is the law governing moral action. Now it is no secret that not everyone behaves morally in circumstances that demand just moral action and this argument is often used to attempt to neutralise the categorical imperative. Let us, by way of illustration, consider a theoretical law of logic, the law of noncontradiction and ask whether the fact that we sometimes contradict ourselves somehow invalidates this law and that this phenomenon can serve as an argument for abandoning it? Philosophers have called for such action: we should, they argue abandon the force of the “Ought” in logic. Returning to the categorical imperative, the moral law only says what ought to be done but it does connect a penalty to not doing what one ought to do: ones dignity and worth as rational animal capable of discourse is at stake. These are not subjective matters to be compared with our “admiration” for Richard III’s determination, Othello’s passion, or Macbeth’s ambition.
The ought involved in the aesthetic judgment on the other hand, given that in the case of Fine Art we are judging the spirit of the work and the genius of the artist, falls under one “category” of the understanding, that of the beautiful, but with one qualification, the judgment is not grounded upon the art object itself but rather on the effect the art object has upon its appreciator: upon his faculties of understanding and imagination together. The power of the faculty of the understanding is registered in the fact that when we make the judgment “Giorgione’s Tempesta is a beautiful work of art” we nevertheless speak with what Kant terms a “universal voice” that hopes for agreement from everyone. Confronted by the businessman who fails to see anything of significance in Giorgione’s painting it is not clear what one is to say about this man’s judgment or his state of mind. One wonders whether the lack of spiritedness in such a mind would also extend to religious and philosophical works and perhaps also to his interpretation of his fellow mans actions(Eichmann?) The image of Cecil Rhodes looking into the night sky and wishing to colonise the planets arises interestingly in the work by Hannah Arendt entitled “The Origins of Totalitarianism”– a work written in the middle of the “terrible twentieth century”. One wonders whether Hegel would have interpreted the economic ambition of Rhodes as an expression modern man’s “spirit”.