Lovers of Sophia
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In the first of these periods nature itself was regarded as divine,
and what he cal s “natural meanings” were expressed in vegetable,
human and animal symbolism, which presumably adorned the
architecture which Hegel views as the quintessential art form of this period. In the second of these periods, sculpture is the quintessential art form and it celebrates the divinity of human individuality, but
only in a corporeal form whose nature it is to be bound by fate.
Final y, the third stage sees the realization of the subjective inner
depth of human individuality and emotions such as love, valor,
fidelity, etc., in contrast to the merely corporeal and natural, which is deemphasized or even viewed negatively. Hegel acknowledges
that these art forms do not strictly exclude each other, but that one
or another of them is emphasized in a certain historical epoch and
that borrowed elements of another or others are either superficial
adornments or are anticipations of a transition.
According to Hegel each of these stages is not merely a ‘style’
but a world-view that infuses every aspect of the culture of a people
at a certain time and constitutes their religion, what he cal s: “the
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substantial spirit of people and ages.” It is merely the task of art to epitomize this spirit, in a radicalization of the way that any man
should reflect in his works the spirit of his society and age.73
Hegel inquires into the need for art, wondering whether it is a
mere fancy, if it is an extraneous means to ends best fulfilled in other ways, or whether there are not higher aims of man than those which
can be fulfilled by art. He then goes on to explain that art is rooted in the unique nature of human ontology. Human beings exist as objects
of the natural world, however, they are unique in that they also exist for themselves. In other words, they become conscious of their own existence. The striving to realize self-consciousness can be seen
from the earliest childhood, in such behavior as a child’s throwing of a rock into a pond in order to have the ripples formed on its surface
reflect back to him, and to gain recognition from others like himself, the fact that he exists and has objective power in the world.
Humans alter objects of the natural environment in order to
become conscious of themselves in the mirror of the altered objects.
Hegel notes that this extends to the alteration of the human body
itself, qua natural object, by means of cosmetics or disfigurement
of various kinds. Thus art is the means of making the inner life of
human consciousness explicitly aware of itself through outward
manifestations that are apprehended by the intuition [Anschauung]
and knowledge [Erkenntnis]. However, according to Hegel this
“free rationality of man in which all acting and knowing… have
their basis and necessary origin,” is not uniquely characteristic
of art, as opposed to other types of action that are a means to
self-consciousness, such as the “political and moral… religious
representation and scientific knowledge”.74
After announcing that art does not aim merely at arousing
feelings, Hegel launches into a semi-historical critique of preceding
aesthetic theories. He believes that most aestheticians worthy of the
73 G.W.F. Hegel, “Lectures on Fine Art” in The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetics and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel. Edited by David Simpson. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 380; 383.
74 Ibid., 360-361.
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name realize that the study of works of art should not focus upon
the vague and sometimes indistinguishable feelings to which they
give rise in those who experience them, thereby losing sight of the
art object itself. Aestheticians realized that art, if it is to admitted as such, must more precisely be viewed as affecting the observer with a
feeling of the beautiful. It was understood that such a feeling cannot be as natural or instinctual as others, but requires at least some
degree of education [Bildung]. Thus for a time aesthetics focused on
imparting taste by means of education, as a means of understanding and hence evaluating the status of a given production as a work of
art (or not).
However, according to Hegel, the mere combination of “sensing
and abstract reflections” not only is incapable of plumbing the
depths of the work of art, it is even offended and scared away by
the force of true genius, since the latter’s work often scorns learnable conventions and thus cannot be comfortably anticipated by one
schooled in them. Thus the attempt to inculcate taste was replaced
by connoisseurship, which sought to provide a better appreciation and understanding of the work of art through scholarship in
respect to circumstances and conditions of its origins, such as its
historical context and the biography and character of its creator,
other individuals who might have influenced him, etc. Yet Hegel
criticizes even mere connoisseurship for its tendency to avoid
or even discourage engagement with the deeper aspects of an
artwork, the essence that is more than the sum of the parts rendered
comprehensible through scholarship.75
Hegel goes on to contrast our relation to the work of art with both
our relation to natural objects of desire and our relation to objects
of scientific inquiry. While the work of art is a sensuous object, it
is unlike an object of desire in that it is not intended to be used or consumed. A mere sculpture of an animal will not satiate hunger
and a picture of logs will not build a house. Consequently, what
Hegel cal s “practical desire” will view art as useless and of less value than “organic and inorganic individual things in nature”, because it
75 Ibid., 362-363.
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cannot “let the object persist in its freedom”. For such desire, a thing is only real if it can be canceled out in its independence and thereby consumed. Indeed, the work of art should be useless, in the sense of being left to be appreciated just as it is in its completion. It should be sensuous only in the superficial sense of mere appearance, as it is essential y intended for spiritual apprehension.76
Scientific inquiry is also not concerned with the sensuous
individuality or use of any given product of nature. Even if it can
explain how a particular object took on a certain color or shape,
in so doing it moves beyond the object and leaves it behind in
the development or demonstration of a universal law. However,
the Reason by means of which this theoretical understanding is
exercised, is a universal faculty and is not unique to any given
individual. Consequently, it also attributes no value to the
individuality of the sensuous objects of its theoretical studies. Hegel sees this as the key difference between science and art, which are
similar in their transcendence of practical desire. Art, unlike science, depends on a free or uninterested spiritual relation to the sensuous
appearances in their individuality. Hegel writes:
From the practical interest of desire, the interest of art is
distinguished by the fact that it lets its object persist freely and
on its own account, while desire converts it to its own use by
destroying it. O
n the other hand, the reflection on the work of
art differs in an opposite way from theoretical consideration
[Betrachtung] by scientific intelligence, since it cherishes an
interest in the object in its individual existence and does not
struggle to change it into its universal thought and concept.77
Hegel sees the work of art as lying between immediate sensuousness
and pure thought. It transcends the former in that it addresses only
the senses of sight and hearing, and not smel , taste, and touch –
which concern themselves with the pure materiality of an object. Nor
76 Ibid., 364-365.
77 Ibid., 366.
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should one ascribe this limitation to “impotence” on behalf of the
artist, rather it would be a failing of a work of art if it were to address the same senses as practical desire, which seeks only to manipulate
or consume its object. Even the sensuous appearances [ Schein] of a work of art are to become something ideal and transcendent of the
material medium in which they are expressed.78
On the other hand, the artist must always express the universal
in terms of some concrete situation or imagery drawn from a store
of particular instances in lived experience. He is still incapable of
drawing general conclusions or principles from the sum of these,
though he intuitively understands the interrelationships between the
imagery involved in various significant events and can reproduce
them in novel combinations.79 This is not to say that the artist comes up with a certain theme and then adorns it with poetic imagery,
rhyme and meter, in such a way as the latter only serve as a means
of expression for an otherwise “prosaic thought”. Hegel says this is
sure to produce only bad poetry, because the true artistic production requires a oneness of the sensuous and spiritual in imagination
[ Phantasie] from start to finish.80
In order for this to be the case the artist must be endowed with a
natural talent that works in him unconsciously, as a force of “instinct-like productiveness” or “natural activity” belonging to “the natural
side of man”, so that the work of art is only partly the expression of conscious intent. While acknowledging that everyone is capable
of some kind of artistic production, Hegel thinks that beyond a
certain point, “an inborn, higher talent for art is necessary.” He does not believe that any true talent of this kind exists in the sciences,
which requires only the universal capacity for rational thought in
order to abstract from all natural activity in an artificial manner.
Furthermore, the intentional or “spiritual” aspect of the artist
must always be inclined to express itself in a sensuous medium.
Someone with the inborn talent for art will consequently take hold
78 Ibid., 366.
79 Ibid., 367-368.
80 Ibid., 367.
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of clay or paint, or make use of their voice melodiously, from the
earliest years, in order to give form to and express, often with great effortlessness, “whatever rouses and moves them inwardly”.81 The
work of art also eschews pure thought in that in its subject matter it is also derived from the sensuous realm of nature. Hegel writes: “…
even if the subject is of a spiritual kind, it can still be grasped only by displaying spiritual things, like human relationships, in the shape of phenomena possessed of external reality.”82
Each of the stages of art is not merely a ‘style’ but also a world-
view that infuses every aspect of the culture of a people at a certain time and constitutes their religion, what Hegel cal s: “the substantial spirit of people and ages.” It is merely the task of art to epitomize
this spirit, in a radicalization of the way that any man should reflect in his works the spirit of his society and age.83 Hegel claims that the present inability of artists to continue to fulfill this role is not merely on account of the apathetic, uninspired or prosaic character of the
times. (This is to view the situation backwards.) Instead, art itself
must be held responsible for bringing its content before intuition as
an object, in such a way that over a series of stages art frees itself from the content that it represents and becomes purely formal.84
Hegel also more concretely attributes this to the rise of criticism [ die Kritik] and free thought in European civilization. Even artists have come to be acquainted with Aesthetics in their critical reflection
on what was the content of art from the symbolic to the romantic
period, and have become conscious of art as changing over the
course of periods of time, which brings forth the realization that it is not atemporal y wedded to any given content.
The profound significance of this stark contrast between, on
the one hand, Hegel’s theory of art history as an expression of the
rationalization of consciousness and, on the other hand, Merleau-
Ponty’s claim that artists have an insight into a deeper dimension
81 Ibid., 368.
82 Ibid., 368.
83 Ibid., 380, 383.
84 Ibid., 381.
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of nature and human experience that will forever be denied to
objectifying scientists, can be brought to light by setting it within the context of Hegel’s conception of humor as the final and most self-conscious stage of art in his Lectures on Aesthetics.
Hegel insists a work of art exists only to “set forth in an adequate
sensuous present what is itself inherently rich in content.”85 Thus
he believes that the divine remains the absolute subject matter of
art, but now the divine content of art assumes the formless form
of “the depths and heights of the human heart as such, universal
humanity in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, its deeds…expressing
the infinity of its feelings and situations.”86 This transformation is effected by none other than humor, which allows art to transcend
itself. In its irreverent reflection on everything and anything that
was formerly an absolutely determinative content, humor forces
man within himself to the source of this content, to meditate on
it in such a way that the artist qua human being becomes “self-determining and considering.”87 Hegel eloquently describes this
effect of humor as “the liberation of subjectivity, in accordance with its inner contingency.”88
In other words, humor irreverently engages emotional
and intellectual constructions that, so long as they remained
unapproachable due to their sanctity, were also imperative and
thereby deprived us of genuinely free expression. The latter
only becomes possible when these constructs are reevaluated as
relative to the use they may have for us as objects of our subjective
consciousness, which transcends them. Hegel reiterates this at the
conclusion of his discussion of “the spiritual work of art” in sections 743 to 747 of his Phenomenology of Spirit, where he writes of Comedy in distinction from preceding art forms:
85 Ibid., 387.
86 Ibid., 384.
87 Ibid., 383-384.
88 Ibid., 384-385.
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…[t]he religion of art is fulfilled and consummated…the
individual consciousness in its certainty of self…has lost the form
of something…ideal y sepa
rated from and alien to consciousness
in general – as were the statue and also the living embodiment of
beauty or the content of the Epic and the powers and persons of
Tragedy…rather the self proper of the actor coincides with the
part he impersonates, just as the onlooker is perfectly at home
in what is represented before him, and sees himself playing in
the drama before him. What this self consciousness beholds, is
that whatever assumes the form of essentiality as against self-
consciousness, is instead dissolved within it – within its thought,
its existence and action, – and is quite at its mercy. It is the
return of everything universal into certainty of self, a certainty
which, in consequence, is this complete loss of fear of everything
strange and alien, and complete loss of substantial reality on
the part of what is alien and external. Such certainty is a state
of spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto, on the
part of consciousness, in a way that, outside this kind of comedy,
is not to be found anywhere.89
But what if it were the case that the comedic overcomes the power
of rational comprehension, and not the other way around? What if
the ultimate paranormal phenomenon is the power of a diabolical
trickster who appears to have a cosmic scope of influence and can
act to undermine the authority of Science’s totemic kosmotheoros?
As far as archetypes go, that of the Trickster is a cultural
universal. In a sense, this is paradoxical because the Trickster
archetype appears to be a de-structuring force that undermines the
binary oppositions defining the taboos of various cultures. George
P. Hansen has shown how this spectral force defies the distinctions between Life and Death, Spirit and Matter, Sacred and Profane, Male
and Female, Clean and Unclean, King and Pauper.90 In his study
89 A.V. Miller, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 450-454.
90 George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris Corporation, 2001).
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“On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure”, Carl Jung notes how the
alchemical figure of Mercurius or “Mercury”, which evolved out of the Latin assimilation of Hermes, takes the archetype of the trickster back into primordial shamanic roots. The fondness for sly jokes and