Rob van Gerwen

HEGEL'S DIALECTICS WAS GEARED TO ART. HE HAD NO BUSINESS 'ENDING' IT.

In this paper I try to defend what Hegel called >autonomous< art against Hegels own view that it is an inadequate vehicle for what is at stake in human self-realization.1 argue that Hegels notion of dialectics is tailor-made for autonomous art and that his reason for referring art to the past, or, as some have put it, to proclaim the end of art or of art history might just as well have induced him to put art at the summit of culture.

On Exemplary Art as the Symbol of Morality. Making Sense of Kant's Ideal of Beauty

1. According to Kant the experience of knowledge of the world depends on the categories of our understanding and the forms of our intuition. What exceeds this experience, the supersensible, comes in two guises: either as the substrate of appearances, the thing in itself; or as the moral law within us. Metaphysics is one way to deal with this transcendentally unknowable: a centrifugal effort to look at the world from a God’s eye point of view. Art is, I think, the other: a centripetal effort to deal with the supersensible from our own point of view. In what follows, I shall be concerned with the second project only. As scholars of Kant’s philosophical aesthetics, we tend both to stress the issue of aesthetic judgements’ claim to universal validity, and to neglect the sheer intimacy of our encounters with beauty or artistic merit. The question is: how can we claim a universal validity to something as private as our encounter with a beautiful work of art? Dangers lurk in this corner: is the judgement of beauty merely an expression of personal preference? No, it isn’t. Should we be subjectivist relativists? I don’t think so. Kant perceived his challenge as having to address the subjectivity of beauty without giving up its assent to universal validity. Approaching the intimacy of aesthetic judgement without giving up the search for a notion of correctness motivates my present discussion of Kant’s centripetal effort to think the analogy of art (sic) to morality. 2. Both explicitly and implicitly, Kant has held positions with regard to each of the three intersections which Jerrold Levinson recently distinguished between aesthetics and ethics. The first of these intersections concerns the