"Art, considered in it's highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into ideas instead of maintaining it's earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place." (Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. Knox, 1975, p.11)
Perhaps nothing will make me rue my thesis to a greater extent than having to digest the material contained therein. Nevertheless I will attempt to honor the text and choice of text, along with a certain bitterness concordant with the text. It may be that this was, and is the thesis of a young man who looked into the world of studio art and found it to be inhabited by a certain weakness of intellect, ideas that were wishy-washy, lacking some kind of training that would situate them in a genuine context of history, world history, seeking relevance.
I cherish the idea that art actually speaks with a gesture to some aspect that cannot be denied in terms of it's greatness: it is singular, it strives for singularity. This is why the calligraphy of a master calligrapher in many forms of Asian art earns a great sense of respect (at least as I experienced this art in Western galleries: particularly the Norton Simon Museum, 2009, 2010 and an exhibition of art related to Shinnyo-En founder Shinjo Ito in Westwood 2009). Uniform alphabetic writing, written here via the computer strives for singularity through a display of style: something happens that is remarkable when writing is excellent that transfers it once again out of the sameness of the letters. A unique shape begins to emerge through the micro-chiselings of language as writer-text-reader interact.
But in this thesis I seem to plunge ahead with the direct dismissal of art: art is representation, and old forms of representation have been replaced by more accurate techniques (photography, motion pictures, etc.). But this seems to me dreadfully callous. It is the cold, hard edge of technology bearing down on us, about to bite off our shadows and steal our very souls.
At the time of this thesis I had already spent a great deal of energy attempting to read Heidegger and Nietzsche from as many different perspectives as I could. I was greatly impressed with Heidegger's and Nietzsche's "Romanticism" or "Heideggerism:" something rugged and natural. Yet the favorite thesis topic of so many students had been Nietzsche, or Heidegger. Nietzsche was a passionate favorite, but he seemed to abandon history, and having some sense of the struggle and growth of history. On the other hand reading Hegel promised to be a challenge and a form of profound education that would illuminate my love of these later thinkers.
I believe that Hegel would point to the sense that a philosophic idea, The Philosophic Idea, that he believed we lived in, in superseding art carried it's fullness, it's vitality. The greatness of spirit would be part of Hegel's genius integrating Romanticism with Enlightenment thinking and Rationalism: and greatness of spirit would mean a greatness of suffering as well.
Certainly if we look into a current understanding of "genuine truth and life," these words would mean very little if the sacrifice of art were not felt. Perhaps there is little left, when one steps into that ultimate meditation on spirit without art.
The suggestion that the natural world is a thing of the past is also anathema. This would also be a Heideggerian turning, for me: a relation to place, a relation to the earth. This is not a mere turning of ideas.
The turning of earth into ideas has produced a potential catastrophe. The ideas need to be turned into the earth so that they can grow fertile, and so that the beauty of the earth can continue to be replenished.
This is why it is not enough to simply provide you with the sepulchral image of the blank white page with the first scribblings of a student-knowledge.
Is there an image here aside from death, a very temporary triumph of an idea, seeming to leap above the mortal clay of this planet?
"...a vital transition piece, transcending the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment..."
The vitality was in the idea: and in a warring conflict between ideas, a development between ideas: first the Enlightenment, rationalism, followed by a Romantic reaction to the depletion of vitality, replaced by logic, followed by Hegel, who attempted to synthesize the two.
It was in many sense the wash of the extreme of Romanticism that impelled me to write about Hegel as being aware of the "shadow" from the extremes of romanticism. And I must pay the debt to CG Jung for his understanding of the "shadow." The shadow of Romanticism and the pure movement of affect is also a threatened lack of sobriety in the movement of thought. For the Romantics, as I myself might identify myself among them, celebrating them, the threat is that the passionate searching for life through art, culture, civilization... still may do harm. It is not enough to be or remain in any state without successful questioning, self-conscience, with regard to the state.
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