Putting Ourselves in Play: Hegel on Art and the Self
In this essay, I further develop the argument, originally articulated in my Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism, for giving Part III of Hegel’s lectures on art more attention on its own terms. Part III includes Hegel’s argument that architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry allow us t...
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| Formaat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Taal: | Français |
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2024
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| Online toegang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Samenvatting: | In this essay, I further develop the argument, originally articulated in my Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism, for giving Part III of Hegel’s lectures on art more attention on its own terms. Part III includes Hegel’s argument that architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry allow us to contemplate the ontological status of crucial concepts such as space, time, personhood, and feeling. In particular, I explore how the concept of play might be used to understand how Hegel understands each individual art. Given the predominance of play in both Kant and Schiller’s aesthetic philosophies, Hegel’s relative neglect of the concept is surprising. But, inspired by Georg Bertram’s suggestion that humans always put themselves “in play” through aesthetic experience, I suggest how each individual art from architecture to poetry allows us to play by drawing our attention to our mutual formation of the world with things we hear, see, or otherwise sense. I focus on Hegel’s differentiation among different kinds of poetry as art’s highest instantiation, considering the differences among epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry and their respective ramifications for the formation of selfhood. I end by considering drama’s ability to put our idea of ourselves as agents in play, concluding that our pleasure in this kind of play explains, to some extent, our love of art. |
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