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Culture Documents
Ulus Baker
Then comes the second stage, dominated by painting: one can see
how one of the three dimensions has gone, and painting is basically
two-dimensional. Other branches too tend to develop, but
fundamentally under the guidance of painting, from Middle Ages up to
the Renaissance and the Baroque. This two-dimensionality means that
the role of consciousness increases, since an abstraction and an
avoidance of pure symbolism occurs. It is certainly more difficult to
"understand" a picture than a sculpture, and even the knowledge of
symbols has been transformed: later, Johann Huizinga will describe
how there was a late medival struggle between the Church and popular
religion of the masses, the later endangering the authority of the
Church not by their lack of faith, but their overdose of faith into images
and icons. It was as if the religion was "crystallized into images", and
this was nothing but the waning of the middle ages.
To return to Hegel's aesthetics, the third and last stage comes when
music and poetry dominate: this is certainly the Romantic epoch, when
the intimate friends of Hegel the Philosopher were poets like Goethe,
Hölderlin and Lessing, and great musicians like Mozart and Beethoven.
The consciousness or the Spirit functioning through the "particular" is
here in its highest possible level and power. Music is not "dimensional",
it is fully abstract, disinterested and pure. And in poetry, everything is
reduced to pure consciousness, to the language in which peoples and
individuals are born. This is the ultimate stage of the art, almost its
"end" or "telos". One could even say that this was nothing more than
Hegel's courtesy to his poet friends.
Yet Hegel is rather concerned, when talking about the "end of the
history of art" (history, according to Hegel, is ending everywhere, as it
is achieved in the Prussian state where Hegel is living, and the age of
philosophy starts with Hegel), with a question: in what sense the art, as
the realm of the particular, should pass into the universal and the
general? When he declares the birth of an age of aesthetics and the
end of the history of art, he assumes that the universality will reign
from now on, and it is nothing less than a philosophical concept.
Hence, philosophy is something beyond art, for the latter has always
remained as the realm of the particulars --things, perceptions, singular
objects, events etc. It is difficult that art "thinks", since it cannot
generalize, universalize. It depicts something particular, and the
entirety of the Idea is only revealed in art as a "part". Thus, the "age of
aesthetics" to come is not a higher stage of the history of art, but the
lower stage of the age of philosophy, declares Hegel. Aesthetics is
philosophical, rather than artistic.
Hence, we believe that the Hegelian aesthetics and the way in which it
terminates the "history of art" to declare the age of aesthetics have
something to tell us about the new "technical" materiality of arts. We
have already mentioned that photography was born approximately
when Hegel was about to die. This means that no one can know what
would Hegel say about the age of technical images, determined by the
birth of photography, which has developed its own cultural and artistic
norms. From photography to the "cinématographe" of Lumière, up to
the television-video and digital imaging techniques, everything which
pertains to "modern" images (as Hegel himself declares that we enter
into the "modern age" only through his philosophical system) belongs
to the "age of aesthetics" declared by Hegel. And they are already
defined by their "ambiguity" --an image which is fundamentally
different from the image of the painter, usually taken by a "hunter" of
images and visions, rather than by a painter who chooses his or her
mise-en-scène and completely renders it into his or her painting.
--fundamental implication of the Hegelian thesis for the “new
materials” of Nineteenth century: photography and cinematography as
“ambiguous” materials... the age of aesthetics –up to aestheticism...
Hegelian vision criticized: the Kantian Sublime returned... philosophies
of Aesthetics –notably in Nineteenth century there emerges an anti-
systematic (therefore Anti-Hegelian wisdom of aesthetic philosophies –
especially with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard...)