[“…the real is the rational and the rational is the real.”]
However we interpret Hegel, it was part of his metaphysics that there is a mutual implication between reality and reason. Hegel obviously didn’t see this as a fallacy, and I can just as well imagine someone asserting the convertibility of the future and the desirable or the past and the desirable is no fallacy at all, but rather a philosophical thesis or an ideological position that can be defended.
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G.W.F. Hegel’s aesthetics, or philosophy of art, forms part of the extraordinarily rich German aesthetic tradition that stretches from J.J. Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) and G.E. Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) through Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) and (in the twentieth century) Martin Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–6) and T.W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970). Hegel was influenced in particular by Winckelmann, Kant and Schiller, and his own thesis of the “end of art” (or what has been taken to be that thesis) has itself been the focus of close attention by Heidegger and Adorno. Hegel’s philosophy of art is a wide ranging account of beauty in art, the historical development of art, and the individual arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. It contains distinctive and influential analyses of Egyptian art, Greek sculpture, and ancient and modern tragedy, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest aesthetic theories to have been produced since Aristotle’s Poetics.
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[A conjecture: The kind of art that was dying - in my opinion, for the good of us all - was “art” as monopolized by the Church and monarchies. Democracy in America was fundamentally affecting the social dynamics in Europe, which struggled and continued to… struggle as the free-systems of new art materialized perceptually. Radically, he grasped the potential, even as he lamented the transitional effects on established hierarchies of “refinement” or “taste” or Christian power-over image. The utility of art was changing, and the attractions and resistances comprised a tension that is no less intense today as it was in Hegel’s era, as the top-down/bottom-up struggle continues. Imperial-religious art for colonization and enslavement was and is flip-flopping on itself, and this is not a phenomenon limited to the West. - PJM]
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However, this is only one – misleading – side of the story. There are moments – moments of crisis for the hegemonic discourse – when one should take the risk of provoking the disintegration of appearances. Such a moment was described by the young Marx in 1843. In ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, he diagnosed the decay of the German ancien regime in the 1830s and 1840s as a farcical repetition of the tragic fall of the French ancien regime. The French regime was tragic ‘as long as it believed and had to believe in its own justification’. The German regime ‘only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world imagine the same thing. If it believed in its own essence, would it … seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien regime is rather only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead.’ In such a situation, shame is a weapon: ‘The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicising it.’
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![Hegel’s Holiday: 1958. Oil on canvas. 61 x 50 cm. Private collection.
[Note by Jay Thompson, Kenyon Review]
Magritte, in a letter, wrote of this painting:
My latest painting began with the question: how to show a glass of water in a painting in such a way that it would not be indifferent? Or whimsical, or arbitrary, or weak—but, allow us to use the word, with genius? (Without false modesty.) I began by drawing many glasses of water, always with a linear mark on the glass. This line, after the 100th or 150th drawing, widened out and finally took the form of an umbrella. The umbrella was then put into the glass, and to conclude, underneath the glass. Which is the exact solution to the thought that Hegel (another genius) would have been very sensitive to this object which has two opposing functions: at the same time not to admit any water (repelling it) and to admit it (containing it). He would have been delighted, I think, or amused (as on a vacation) and I call the painting Hegel’s Holiday.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf9rh5LzxT1qeay3bo1_500.jpg)
Hegel’s Holiday: 1958. Oil on canvas. 61 x 50 cm. Private collection.
[Note by Jay Thompson, Kenyon Review]
Magritte, in a letter, wrote of this painting:
My latest painting began with the question: how to show a glass of water in a painting in such a way that it would not be indifferent? Or whimsical, or arbitrary, or weak—but, allow us to use the word, with genius? (Without false modesty.) I began by drawing many glasses of water, always with a linear mark on the glass. This line, after the 100th or 150th drawing, widened out and finally took the form of an umbrella. The umbrella was then put into the glass, and to conclude, underneath the glass. Which is the exact solution to the thought that Hegel (another genius) would have been very sensitive to this object which has two opposing functions: at the same time not to admit any water (repelling it) and to admit it (containing it). He would have been delighted, I think, or amused (as on a vacation) and I call the painting Hegel’s Holiday.
![[Image from a Google Image scan, page identified by Google as an “attack page.”]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lg07bmpNsP1qeay3bo1_500.jpg)
