Aesthetics

I came to this hoping for an aesthetic system sufficiently proto-Marxist to show me a way past regarding texts as ineffable systems for the exchange of meaning with no last instance without getting too structuralist, specifically in a way that would help me model what modernity does to literature in more philosophical terms. I set out to read Hegel and Sartre's aesthetic writings when I was writing my thesis because I knew that they were dense and probably had plenty of models I could make use of, but for various reasons this was impossible by the time I had to submit.

When there was nothing of the kind on offer here I was relieved, in finding that this wasn't the missing ingredient that would have squared everything I was trying to do in my research, but also disappointed that I didn't have anything I could bring forward into something else. Hegel has very conservative taste in art and is of the opinion that art peaked in antiquity, specifically in Greece, with marble statues and tragic theatre which perfectly express the juvenile, pre-Christian stage of mind that human civilisation had at that stage reached.

Hegel is writing from nineteenth century Germany at romanticism's high point, at once appreciating Goethe's talent but also on some level appalled by his works' inwardness and subjectivism (that will over the next century metastisise into the European avant-gardes) and it is this that encourages him to take against that which is disproportionate, overly subjective and irrational in cultural expression, recommending instead more harmony, joyousness and rationality in line with the requirements of the over-riding abstract idea or concept of a particular epoch.

I'm sure there are scholars or critics who have made use of this system (for which I am giving this book four stars) for more radical ends, expanding the idea of the concept in modernity beyond Hegel's proscrpition, Lukács being the primary example, but this is a hermeneutics fundamentally hostile to contemporaneity he singles out Shakespeare's tragedies and discordant music as for criticism and as a social account it's not very deep either, his explanation for Dutch realism depends on the joyousness of the Dutch national character.

The triumph of Hegel's system is his capacity to subsume contingency within the logic of mind so the only way to make sense of anything is to regard it as unfolding as part of something larger, but in the realm of aesthetics, we're back on the level of contingency and Hegel is no better than Marx at speaking to the residuals.