Hegel and the ‘end of art’

G.W.F. Hegel. Portrait by
Jakob Schlesinger, 1831

Hegel was heavily influenced by Kant and Schiller, and influenced in turn such key figures as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno. His aesthetic theory is systematic and impressive, but it is less widely appreciated than Kant’s. The theme that is mentioned ahead of all others these days is his so-called ‘end of art thesis’. This is probably the most contentious notion in his aesthetics, and it has been presented by some commentators as a death sentence to art. The Italian aesthetician Benedetto Croce declared:

The German refused to evade the logical exigencies of his system and proclaimed the mortality, nay the very death, of art... He passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave, leaving philosophy to write its epitaph.¹

Even the less dramatic interpretations (such as Arthur Danto’s) have sometimes claimed that Hegel thought we had outgrown art.

These are misrepresentations of Hegel, who never uses the phrase ‘the end of art’, let alone proclaiming art’s ‘death’. There have been various attempts since the 1960s to theorise an ‘end of art’ which claim some inspiration from his alleged thesis. To explain what Hegel really meant, we must look at his philosophical outlook and its relation to art, and along the way we will get an opportunity to learn a bit more about his aesthetics. 

Hegel’s system

For Hegel, everything real and finite exists by virtue of the Idea (dialectical reason inherent in being), which grounds physical matter. Life is more rational than the non-living because it is self-determining; human beings, uniquely, are able to think and reflect upon themselves. Hegel called this self-reflection ‘spirit’, by which he meant not a cosmic world-consciousness, or individual minds (subjective spirit) so much as a cultural, collective human thought (objective spirit) built on law and morality. The world is a complex, structured, organic unity and human beings are one part of that whole; we should be capable, through reason, of discovering the principles behind the world and grasping its totality.

Hegel conceived his philosophical system as a ‘circle of circles’: each philosophical topic forms a complete circle in itself, bounded within a totality that is a wider circle that contains them.²

Subjects like phenomenology, logic, politics or biology are discrete topics, limited to themselves, which tend to split nature into parts. A systematic philosophy contains ‘all particular principles within itself’.³

The part, if it is to be something true, must be not an isolated member merely, but itself an organic whole. The entire field of philosophy therefore really forms a single science; but it may also be viewed as a total, composed of several particular sciences.⁴

Through such a philosophy, Hegel hopes that human beings can discover the unified, structured whole that is the world (the ‘absolute’ or the ‘truth’). History is the process by which human self-reflection upon our general nature, values and interests deepens our understanding both of ourselves and of the world. Along the way, we find out which social and political forms are most agreeable to attaining our ultimate vocation, namely freedom. When this self-reflection goes beyond the particular and contingent to the shared organising principles of all things, Hegel calls it ‘absolute spirit’: the highest and fullest form of reflection through which spirit will finally come to know itself.

Absolute spirit has three basic forms of the highest self-reflection: art, religion and philosophy. They are not individual acts of reflection but social ones. Each is a different approach to understanding ourselves and the world we live in.

1. Art: through immediate, sensuous objects made by human beings.
2. Religion: through the feeling and imagery of faith.
3. Philosophy: through conceptual knowledge.

The three forms sit in a hierarchy of how adequately they can understand the truth. Art tries to make it sensible through representations; religion goes further by applying universals; philosophy goes furthest by applying concepts, making it best suited of the three for understanding the absolute. Only philosophy can entirely understand the parts, the whole, and the relation between them. But this doesn’t mean we can discard the other two forms. We need all three – sensuousness, feeling and understanding – as distinct approaches to the truth.

Let’s focus on art. When Hegel talks about art, he is interested in it as a means of discovering the absolute:

The universal need for art... is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognises again his own self.⁵

The role of art is to express spirit through human-made objects for the senses, standing in the middle between sensuousness and ideal thought⁶. It is spirit’s sensuous manifestation. Art’s aim for Hegel, as summarised by the SEP, is not

to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. It is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom – images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art’s purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are. Art is there not just for art’s sake, but for beauty’s sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding.⁷

Beauty is the sensuous expression or appearance of the Idea or the ‘true’;⁸ it is objective, not a matter of subjective taste and feeling as in Kant, and it is based on the relation between art and spirit at a given point in history. Hegel is often seen as rebalancing Kant by restoring content alongside form as part of a work’s unified whole. As concrete and sensuous beings we need beauty as a concrete and sensuous point of contact with truth and freedom, and art presents this to us through our own works.

For Hegel the self-discovery of the spirit is a historical process during which the conceptual complexity of thought increases. During the ‘classical’ era of ancient Greece, the best means for grasping the truth was art. During the post-Roman, medieval world, the best means was religion. As for the modern world, its conceptual complexity requires philosophy. This is a gradual unfolding of the spirit towards self-awareness and freedom. This idea of spirit coming to know itself is not just an odd, abstract notion – when we think for example of the development of subjectivity in the modern era, and the consequent advent of psychology, etc, we can see that our insight into ourselves really can increase across history, in the same way that an adult has greater self-knowledge than a child.

Art helps a community become aware of its collective self-knowledge across history. Through history, art advances in stages or forms (Kunstformen) – symbolic, classical, romantic – of increasing complexity and conceptuality, and thus increasing capacity to reflect upon the absolute. The development from one form to another comprises the history of art.

1. Symbolic: In the symbolic stage (e.g. India, Persia and Egypt prior to ancient Greece), artists’ understanding of the spirit was not yet advanced enough – however fine their technical skills – to express the absolute. The religion of these cultures was too poorly determined. The supreme case was the art of ancient Egypt, whose mysterious gods of death could not be clearly manifested in art. 

2. Classical: In the ‘classical’ world of ancient Greece, assisted by the interest in the harmony of mind and body and the philosophical quest for beauty, artists achieved a balance of sensuous liveliness and spiritual self-containment that realised a perfect expression of free spirit. Again, the fundamental was the Greeks’ conception of religion: their gods were active free individuals, more readily manifested in art objects.

Greek art achieved perfect beauty, but fell short of the profoundest expression of the spirit, as it had not yet discovered the inwardness that Hegel thought necessary.

3. Romantic: In the modern world, the introduction of (bourgeois) subjectivity meant we could now think of selfhood in new, inward-looking ways, as expressed in romantic art. (This is not the customary ‘Romantic’ periodisation dated to roughly the 1770s–1830s, but begins in the late Middle Ages.) This era is associated with Christianity, which for Hegel offers the best religious grasp of the truth, as the incarnation of Jesus brought together divine and human action. Romantic art explored subjectivity to the limit, through characters with complex psychology and an urge for personal freedom.

This, for Hegel, was where art reached its limits as a means for grasping the whole.

The spirit of our world today, or, more particularly, of our religion and the development of our reason, appears as beyond the stage at which art is the supreme mode of our knowledge of the Absolute. The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fills our highest need. We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them. The impression they make is of a more reflective kind, and what they arouse in us needs a higher touchstone and a different test. (p10)

As religion under Protestantism took more interest in inner faith, art – as the representation of the Idea in external objects – lost touch with the divine and became secular. It acquired autonomy at the cost of its vocation. For this reason, the highest truths of spirit could no longer be expressed through art, and were now better expressed in religion and philosophy.

The alleged ‘end of art’

The ‘end of art thesis’ sometimes attributed to Hegel derives from two main sources in the Lectures. The first occurs early in the Introduction, where he is discussing art’s ability to bring awareness of the spirit:

Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. (p11, my emphasis)

Hegel is not saying that art has ‘ended’, let alone ‘died’; rather, that its peak historical moment is past. He is making the modest claim that art is no longer the most effective way of struggling to grasp the complex, organic whole of reality. Since the Reformation, art has become secular and we no longer ‘venerate’ artworks. ‘Art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it’ (p10), as in ancient Greece when it was still tied to the divine. Instead, we must now look to higher forms of knowledge, namely religion and philosophy.

Nonetheless, we humans are sensuous beings as well as rational ones, and we need art to give freedom concrete, sensuous expression through the beauty of human-made objects (which of course also appeal to the mind). Art therefore remains one of the forms of ‘absolute spirit’ that help us understand ourselves and the world, and continues to be not just valuable but essential. Artists will continue to make art, even great art, and it will not lose its capacity to reveal truths about our society. In fact Hegel says positively that

we may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection. (p103)

The other main source for the ‘end of art’ thesis is Hegel’s discussion of the dissolution [Auflösung] of Romantic art (p593). However, to dissolve is not necessarily to die. In the context of Hegel’s dialectics, when a historical stage fades, something new comes in to replace it. We may see this in terms not of death but of new possibilities. The philosophy professor Craig Matarrese has suggested one such:

It may be that modern art has an important function in showing us the many levels of fragmentation and dispersion that characterise the modern heterogeneous and pluralistic state; even if modern artists are alienated and unable to do more than represent their own idiosyncrasies, their work may still help us understand some of the key features of our world.⁹

Only in one specific sense does art come to an ‘end’. Hegel has his own idiosyncratic position that genuine works of art aim for the sensuous expression of freedom of spirit (see p7). Many works of modernity do not – for example those that seek only a prosaic realism, or humour – and therefore are not proper art in Hegel’s view.

We should try to represent his elaborate theory accurately, whether or not we agree with it. If theorists wish to make theories about the ‘end of art’, they are free to do so, but they should be wary of appealing to the authority of Hegel.

The liberation of art

For Hegel genuine art is still possible. In fact, modern artists have a promising future, laid out in the final section of Volume 1 of the Lectures. They need not feel constrained by the three Kunstformen of the past and may work freely in any manner they please:

In our day, in the case of almost all peoples, criticism, the cultivation of reflection, and, in our German case, freedom of thought have mastered the artists too, and have made them, so to say, a tabula rasa in respect of the material and the form of their productions, after the necessary particular stages of the romantic art-form have been traversed. Bondage to a particular subject-matter and a mode of portrayal suitable for this material alone are for artists today something past, and art therefore has become a free instrument which the artist can wield in proportion to his subjective skill in relation to any material of whatever kind. The artist thus stands above specific consecrated forms and configurations and moves freely on his own account, independent of the subject-matter and mode of conception in which the holy and eternal was previously made visible to human apprehension. No content, no form, is any longer immediately identical with the inwardness, the nature, the unconscious substantial essence of the artist; every material may be indifferent to him if only it does not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful [überhaupt schön] and capable of artistic treatment. (p605)

Again, there is no ‘death of art’ here. Hegel has a positive vision of artistic freedom: art can pursue new forms, new relationships, new content. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has called this the ‘liberation of art as art.’¹⁰ Art transcends itself and can embrace any aspect of the human spirit.

Art strips away from itself all fixed restriction to a specific range of content and treatment, and makes Humanus its new holy of holies: i.e. the depths and heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates. (p607)

Hegel’s caveat would be that art should always try to depict the freedom of human spirit, and obey the ‘formal law of being simply beautiful’. For many contemporary artists, beauty falls outside their consideration altogether, and it is doubtful whether Hegel would have liked jarring work like Manzoni’s infamous ninety tin cans of shit... He could not have foreseen how far artists would take their freedom.

Hegel is often seen as a conservative, but his remarks are sometimes prescient. His insistence on beauty is proscriptive, but in his call for the freedom to dip into artistic styles and for a self-reflective art – ‘art invites us to intellectual consideration... for knowing philosophically what art is’ (p11) – we detect a foreshadowing of self-aware and conceptual modern art movements. For example Arthur Danto, in a (flawed) 1999 article on the ‘end of art thesis’ in Hegel, commented:

Only late in the twentieth century, through the realisation in artistic practice of the freedom Hegel foresaw, is his philosophy of art once again at the centre of aesthetic discussion.¹¹

The academic Martin Donougho made another point concerning its contemporary relevance:

[The theme] suits our late modern (or postmodern) climate, a time of cultural crisis when contemporary art seems either to have run its course or to be of interest to just the few.¹²

Well, in a way. But our conception and practice of art is historical and therefore always in flux, and Hegel’s theory has dated. We no longer give credence to strange stuff about absolute Ideas, and his definition of art as a kind of fine art that fuses sensuousness and spirit through beauty was too narrow. The advent of new forms such as photography, cinema, pop music and digital animation shows that art is not at all a ‘thing of the past’, and there is no good reason to think its ability to reveal our humanity to us is diminished. Nor is there any need to place it in an arbitrary hierarchy: we are sceptical of his estimation of art as a lesser means to ‘truth’ compared to religion or philosophy. But I am not trying here to assess Hegelian aesthetics for the modern day. I am merely hoping to correct a common misrepresentation. 

Meanwhile it would help if people used more appropriate and less sensational labels than ‘the end of art’ for theories which don’t actually involve art ending. Just a thought.

Notes

Hegel: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, translated by T.M. Knox (1975). Page numbers refer to this edition.

1. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic (1902).
2. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic §15. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slintro.htm#SL15
3. Ibid., §14.
4. Ibid., §16.
5. Hegel, Introduction to Lectures on Fine Art, §5d, p31. All quotes are from the Knox translation.
6. Ibid., p38.
7. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/ 
8. Hegel Lectures, p111.
9. Craig Matarrese, Starting with Hegel (2010), p157.
10. Cited in Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (2002), p103.
11. Arthur Danto, ‘Hegel’s End-of-Art Thesis’ in A New History of German Literature, eds. D.E. Wellbery and J. Ryan (2004). Danto has his own ‘end of art’ theory in which he claims that linear art history is over and has been replaced by a pluralism in which anything goes. This theory does not involve the actual ‘end’ of art any more than Hegel’s aesthetics does.
12. Martin Donougho, ‘Art and History: Hegel on the End, the Beginning and the Future of Art’ in Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Arts (2007).