Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Art: The Hotho Transcript of the 1823 Berlin Lectures.

Wood, Robert E.

HEGEL, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Art: The Hotho Transcript of the 1823 Berlin Lectures. Introduction by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert. Edited and translated by R. Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014. xiii+ 508 pp.--After Hegel's death, his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho took over his course on aesthetics. The standard English translation by T. M. Knox of Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures of Fine Art is actually the version produced by Hotho in 1835 and revised in 1842.

One hundred seventy-six pages of the current work are devoted to an essay by Gethmann-Siefert on the 1823 transcript. There are forty-six pages of glossary, bibliography, and index; the actual Hotho text is 263 pages. The Knox translation is 1,237 pages--which adds almost 1,000 pages to the 1823 lectures. The difficulty is sorting out what is Hegel's and what is Hotho's.

Gethmann-Siefert notes that Hotho's views differed in important ways from Hegel's and that he imposed his own views as Hegel's in the text we have as the standard English text. Hotho himself admits to "drastic interventions" in constructing the 1835 text. So we should go back to a direct transcription of Hegel's lectures.

Hegel's several posthumously published works were based upon his own notes and also, rather extensively, upon student notes. Student notes also appear in some works Hegel published--Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Encyclopaedia of Philosophic Sciences--in smaller print as Zusdtze or additions. It is astonishing how much the students were able to retain in their notes. Hotho especially is a devoted scribe, hence the current edition based on his notes for the 1823 lecture series on aesthetics to get a relatively Hotho-free text through Hotho's own scribal fidelity.

The first quarter of Gethmann-Siefert's introduction focuses first upon the contemporary importance of Hegel's aesthetics. Some view his phenomenological presentation and his sometimes revolutionary insights into the nature of art as significantly more important than his systematic approach; and, of course, some view it in the opposite manner. The author attributes the difference in part to the sometimes contradictory character of what Hegel has to say. (One wishes that she had given some examples.)

Concerning the famous claim to "the end of art," she notes that one should also speak of the "interminable future" of art in Hegel's view. The qualification "in its highest mission" should be added, for that mission is taken over by revealed religion and the state, but art still has its future in them.

She goes on to delineate the genesis of the Aesthetics from the four Berlin lecture courses in 1820-21, 1823, 1826, and 1828-29. Hotho had also transcribed the 1826 lecture series (which is no longer extant) and used it in his construction of the 1835 Hegel/Hotho text. Georg Lasson's critical edition stopped with the General Part (which in the Hotho transcription includes what later became the Particular Part, that is, the epochs of art: symbolic, classical, romantic) and did not include the Individual Part (individual art forms, called "Particular Part" in the current work). In Lasson's work, Hotho's additions are placed in parentheses.

Hotho admits that, in developing the Aesthetics, he had to go beyond Hegel's expressed views to the system that it implied. In his Encyclopaedia Hegel presented his system within which he lightly sketched the main lines of his aesthetics. Poggeler suggests that Hegel himself could have supported Hotho's more extensive efforts in this respect.

In the second section, Gethmann-Siefert traces the genesis of Hegel's views on aesthetic matters from the 1797 "The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism" up to his Berlin lectures from 1821 on. In 1818 the first version of the Encyclopaedia contained the sketch of aesthetics within the now emergent system and not yet separated from religion. (Intriguingly, philosophy is presented in the last version as the synthesis of art and religion.)

With that as background, the author examines the various notes taken by students: she continues with a discussion of the Hotho transcript reproduced in the current volume. She notes that, in this and in his other transcripts, his "astonishing capacity for grasping the sequence of thought in its essentials, and for reiterating it precisely in individual points, can be established beyond all doubt." The text is "reader-friendly, well- organized, and elaborated in detail." Here Hotho adds only his own "concise conceptual style."

In the third section the author notes that the four lecture series "are already so essentially different from one another that we can no longer speak of the aesthetics of Hegel." The 1828-29 series particularly is "essentially reoriented." Hegel's use of the systematic occurs "without overwhelming the phenomenon by the concept," in the author's opinion a justified reproach made by some against Hotho's two publications of the Aesthetics.

In a section on "The Systematics and the Formal Structure of the Aesthetics," the author lists the charges against Hegel's views: overwhelming history by the concept, classicism, conceptual favoritism regarding the particular arts, and the thesis of the end of art. She attributes them to Hotho's hand and sees Hegel himself as "the non- dogmatic thinker of history." It would seem to be difficult to square this with the Encyclopaedia system. However, the author notes that Hegel "forgoes that direct approach for good reason, favoring instead a 'thematic' presentation." He grants to art "the mediation of a merely historical being-consciousness of truth," "representing 'his own time' and, in doing so, 'grasping in thought' the decisive elements of the culture." "A phenomenological Hegel, one who grasps the history of the arts, seems to win out over the systematizer."

The end of art thesis is founded on "structurally distinguishing art's function as it varies across different cultures." For Hegel art is both mirror and promoter of a given cultural context. Classicism for him is not an evaluative concept but a description of the function of art in the time surrounding Periclean Athens. Hegel's model is not works of art but the function of art within a given culture. In the Hotho transcript Hegel begins directly with the phenomenon, the representation that there are works of art. Only at the classical state is art capable of being the adequate content of art. Revealed religion, announcing the infinite, means that art is no longer able to be the adequate conveyer of its content.

In the Aesthetics, "the Ideal" is "the sensuous appearing of the idea": in this the author claims "we see Hegel's entire aesthetics brought to conceptual form." However, she also speaks in the next paragraph of "the contaminating definition of the ideal," attributing it to Hotho. The 1823 series presents the General Part in greater breadth and complexity than he did subsequently, but presents "virtually no grounds for directly linking pure sensuousness and idea." Art is "a way of making spirit aware of its interests," but "not the highest way of expressing truth." Art is "the organ of the soul, the manifestation of it." In art, sensory appearance through the two ideal senses, seeing and hearing, is higher than everyday appearance. Art is the "spiritualized sensuous" and the "sensualized spiritual." But poetry "has cut itself loose from merely sensuous material and has relegated that material to being as its own sign." Transitioning into prose, art reaches its highest level.

The third part of the Aesthetics, dealing with the individual art forms, is considered a "phenomenology of art" where Hegel is said to have "jettisoned the rigid dogmatism of his system of absolute knowledge." Yet, the Encyclopaedia system "remains the approach and foundation of the philosophy of art, and should also serve for critiquing it."

The author points to changes in point of view in the 1826 lectures where Hegel intensifies his engagement with the particular art forms, only to have many of the views presented retracted in final lecture series.

In treating the individual art forms, Hegel views architecture as the work of a people in the service of the divinity which shows the ethical bond that makes them a people. Epic displays as well the ethical life of the people, with Homer and Hesiod giving the Greeks their gods. Not simply beauty but more basically historical meaning is expressed, especially in sculpture. Painting brings itself about as visibility freed from natural three-dimensionality. In Christian times, the objects treated as beautiful are the Madonna and Child as well as Maiy Magdalen. Presentations of the Crucified are not considered beautiful. All forms are intended to be useful in devotion; their presentation in museums no longer serves that purpose. Music at its best serves the word, else it can lead to self-indulgence in subjective feeling. Inwardness is best portrayed in poetry.

There is tension between Hegel's and Hotho's assessments of Dutch paintings. Hotho saw them as depicting "the commonplace, inferior and nasty," while Hegel saw them as reaching "the highest level of accomplishment in all of painting." They capture the vitality and musicality of art. Regarding music, Hotho shows "demonstrable improvement in the philosophical concept of music," but restricts his praise to the classical, while Hegel saw value also in entertaining forms of music such as that of Rossini. Opera is presented as a Gesamtkunst which produces "genuinely beautiful art in the modern world."

Poetry is "the most perfect art," "the universal, all-embracing art, art ascended to the highest spirituality." Its content is "universal humanity, the human heart in its fullness." It is in large measure the art of the modern era. He has Goethe and Schiller especially in mind, with Schiller as the greatest of the modern poets whose work is no longer beautiful and Goethe still able to produce beautiful art. Hotho's lectures give the highest place to Goethe. For Hegel Goethe's Divan of East and West makes possible thinking one's way into foreign culture. Hegel suspends his judgment of the end of art by pointing to beautiful art in the modern world.

The Hotho/Hegel Aesthetics exhibits frequent evaluations, praising or condemning, which are not found in the lecture transcripts. Praising the accuracy of Hotho's transcription, Gethmann-Siefert points to "the astonishing discrepancy between their [the various transcribers'] own notes and recollections, and the posthumously published Aesthetics. Though the current translation of the 1823 transcript gives us a more accurate Hegel than the latter, nonetheless, it doesn't give us the whole Hegel on aesthetics because his thought went through various changes in the course of the four series of lectures.

What we do have in the Hotho/Hegel Aesthetics is a rich development from the somewhat bald assertions, especially on the individual artforms, in the 1823 transcript. It is worthwhile from a scholarly point of view to try to separate Hegel from Hotho, but in terms of "the things themselves," the later work is more stimulating. I suggest reissuing the Aesthetics under the joint authorship and continuing to appreciate what it manifests.--Robert E. Wood, Institute of Philosophic Studies, University of Dallas