1990, Thesis on Hegel: Memory of an Education

I would like to begin with looking back.

I would like to look back at an element that eluded my speaking in the previous entry, and that is the title of this work:

"Hegel and the Death of Art"

At the time I was writing this thesis, I was certainly on the edge of the play of these words: Perhaps this meant that art had somehow died and capitulated to philosophy, that beauty was no longer capable of transcending philosophy. There is no more "anima," there is only meaning. The anima animates, so in saying this I am saying that there is no more motion, no more confusion, no more "history." It was, after all 1990 and it was the "end of history" according to Francis Fukuyama. whom both Oppermann and I repudiated. I believe that I may have rejected making any mention of Fukuyama in my dissertation, his philosophy being to me nothing more than a passing fad not worthy of mention. When I look at my bibliography, I would say that I had taken this particular penchant to an extreme: only regarding the greatest works of philosophy as mentionable in my listing of references for books. This I have come to feel is incorrect: there is always a quality of a particular singular niche of literature, where secondary and tertiary authors and epigons should be mentioned: a particular turning of their style that is great in it's own singular nature and should not be simply exempted from the monolythic "cannon" of "great books." (The cannon of "great books" always seemed oppressive and soul-crushing an instrument of domestification and docilification of academics: it's as though we are only supposed to write about Plato or Hegel, and not honor the cry of the soul written on a subway wall.) ("The words of the prophet are written on a subway wall//Concert Hall" --Rush, "Tom Sawyer" from Moving Pictures 1981.) (My beloved spouse intensely dislikes the high tenor voice of the lead singer Geddy Lee.) (Is this personal reverie relevant? --It is a counter-stroke to the force of my senior thesis: Hegel and the Death of Art: I cannot help but find both the real poetry and the soul as well as the devil in the details of my life, and it is why I have had such a profound difficulty with making the bridge to academic life, I would have to lobotomize the parts of consciousness that are associated with a simple work: at bottom I believe that the only people who really care to read ONLY about Hegel, Hegel and the Death of Art, or some sort of senior thesis or whatever, may well be dead inside, and need to talk about their wives, children and animals in the essays they are writing, spinning into hopefully flourid discussions of beliefs and whole landscapes of what they have experienced in their lives....) (!) (enough.)

(toward an ecological phenomenology of knowledge, one bitter and broken association at a time...)

Hegel and the death of Art means that the thesis of this work suggests that Art is dead. This would be a terrible show-stopper. I don't think I can abide by this principle, since I am attached to art. My father wanted me to complete my basic education with a studio art degree, but he wanted to hold philosophy and meaning over my head, like something in which he was inimitably superior, that all artists are just talent, and you have to simply wait and get older to be a philosopher, because there is a horrible, howling growl from the center of our broken civilization: "Everybody knows, everybody knows..."

So I studied philosophy in a manner of defending myself against the grim and overwhelming evidence everywhere of my father's worldly success. And in many ways I became a better scholar than he did. My becoming a better scholar has led me down a path that is many times burned, scorched with cynicism about the process of being in the world, and it has denied me the worldly success in some ways that he might have wished for me: be the artist, be the fool, make beauty.

My father's success is, for me, legendary. This thesis was a step toward my own success, but it also shut the door, it was a death. It was the death of art.

And is there a Death in Art? Is there a not-so-subtle sense of dying to some beauty at hand? Is the death of art the fact that Death belongs to art, and that dying is a matter of aesthetics. Might there be a "Death of Philosophy" as well? The death of art pulls on the heart strings, for without looking at the world as potentially capable of beauty, of moving toward the beautiful, the elegant, the sublime... we look at a grey place of ashes.

"the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of dusk..." (I just discovered and corrected my typographical "own of Minerva," in fact I may be owning a lot of my relation to Minerva in writing all this.) But the owl flies into the gray ashen dusk, the dying embers of the day.

Do you remember, Oppermann, how you helped me to remember the words of Hölderlin?

"Despise not the ashes, for they are the diadem of the heart and the ash of all that endures." (Moreinus, Jung c.w. vol. 14, p.194). "Remember thou art dust." (origin of this phrase is uncertain, apparently Latin.) "Everything is broken." (Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy,, 1989). "The center will not hold." (I apologize, this phrase from Yeats is almost risible, certainly as the pain and sentiment of this essay pours on, yet I will cite: Yeats, "the Second Coming" first printed in The Dial in 1920) ...Not even the center of "Beauty."

All of this is broken, and the Death of Art would be no less of a thesis. But art remains as all things that remain after beauty, after judgement, after the notion of "sublime" and after the discussions of aesthetics and taste. We contemplate the corpse of Christ (Kristeva's essay on "Holbein's Christ" in Zone's Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 1989) or read once again the story from Baudelaire: "Une Charogne," (Les Fleurs de Mal, 1857) a bloated, festering corpse at the side of the road. All of this, even revulsion, vomiting, nausea: all of this in order to save art, to treasure and conserve art at it's limit, the extreme: the communion wafer, still sacred, vomited in the gutter with the broken glass, condoms and cigarette butts.

Nevertheless I will end with Hölderlin's poem (1796-98), unable to comment on it after owing to the problems with change of fonts and styles. The owl of Minerva, and the ownership of Minerva gives us gray, silent taloned death of a field-mouse, but not necessarily death of a man. That is our chance. We may use this "chance" to get away, to escape, to make an escape and to create our world into a better landscape. But praise to the landscape with owls, for death is in the landscape, an open-shut case: no dialog when life is cut short by the swoop of a wing, nevertheless, praises to the landscape.

We would do well to pay the field-mouse heed. Perhaps this owl comes down towards our eyes because of the threat we humans might pose to the owl's nest. Perhaps it is simply the terrifying descent of dusk (as Jung frequently speaks about an "abaissement de niveau mental,")

Abaissement du niveau mental can be the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of which the last has a particularly deleterious effect on one's self-assurance. The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole. It reduces one's self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing egocentricity, narrows the mental horizon [ "Concerning Rebirth, " CW 9i, pars. 213f.]

The unknown duration and endurance of the darkness continues. It is a darkness that continues to grow and deepen alongside the life of each human soul (Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) poem "Yo no soy Yo," Bly translation 1973). The conservancy of such an intense, rich shadow (remaining, as shadows always are, on the edge of palpability, moving from a bare outline in bright light, an undefined, indeterminate structure) is the work of a human life.

Die Kürze

»Warum bist du so kurz? liebst du, wie vormals, denn

Nun nicht mehr den Gesang? fandst du, als Jüngling, doch,

In den Tagen der Hoffnung,

Wenn du sangest, das Ende nie!«

Wie mein Glück, ist mein Lied. - Willst du im Abendrot

Froh dich baden? hinweg ists! und die Erd ist kalt,

Und der Vogel der Nacht schwirrt

Unbequem vor das Auge dir.