Julia Peters’s book joins a select number of recent publications in English consulting student transcripts of Hegel’s Berlin lectures, at least those so far published, from 1823 and 1826. Peters furnishes a novel perspective on Hegel’s Aesthetics: she brings Hegel’s ‘Anthropology’ (part of the Encyclopædia’s ‘Philosophy of Spirit’) to bear upon the interpretation of Hegel’s theory of beauty. The connection may have been made before, though never as directly as here. Peters uses it to argue that Hegel’s conception of beauty does not privilege art over nature: on the contrary, art serves to bring out the inherent beauty of human nature, in the shape of an idealized human body taken as expression of mind.
Besides the main thesis there are two subsidiary lines of argument, in Chapter 4 (‘The Beautiful Character and its Limits’) and Chapter 6 (‘Modern Beauty’), both somewhat abbreviated and less cogent than the first. The author holds (91–94) that Hegel does not limit beauty to classical corporeal figure but finds it also in modern (subjective or formal) character, as well as in the painterly Schein whether of Dutch art (132–38) or—a far greater challenge—of modernist abstraction (138–42). Modern character and abstraction can be beautiful, in other words; beauty develops beyond classicism.
Peters makes a strong case, which is not to deny that her work is open to criticism on various counts, or that one may interpret matters quite differently. She hews closely to an explication of Hegelian texts, largely avoiding historical contextualizing and even reference to individual artworks or artists (Sophocles’ Antigone is the exception). Thematically Hegel on Beauty might seem at first glance like a return to an older view of Hegel as a classicist, belated adherent of the ancient Greek cult of beauty, but that is misleading. In her Introduction Peters helpfully applies Helmut Kuhn’s distinction between ‘naïve’ and ‘reflective’ versions of neoclassicism. Winckelmann would fall under the first, Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe or Humboldt under the second. She sees Hegel as taking the reflective approach still further, shunning all nostalgia for antiquity. The classical Ideal turns out to be intrinsically flawed; its replication ought not to be attempted at home. While continuing to invest classical beauty and art with exemplary—indeed, unique—standing, Hegel acknowledges that we no longer ‘bend the knee’. Peters wishes to claim, however, that this does not render artistic beauty a mere museum piece in the Hegelian system. Against commentators such as Henrich and Pippin, who understand Hegel as articulating how art attempts to interpret a modernity turned thoroughly prosaic or disenchanted, beholden to formal autonomy rather than beauty, she contends that a Hegelian perspective still allows a place for the beautiful in art. It does that, she argues, by making explicit something already presaged in the classical Ideal. In post-classical art, the human body–soul identity, essentially at home with itself, starts to reflect on its own condition, so announcing a subjective freedom in nature.
To summarize Part 1 of the book: For Hegel, the model of beauty is found in the human body, or rather, in the expression of mindedness in and as the body: art merely imitates (and tidies up) what it finds already in nature. Hegel’s ‘Anthropology’, especially through its attention to ‘habit’ or inculcated disposition, supports this view, which surfaces also in the Aesthetics via ‘human expression in face, eyes, posture and gesture’ (433). Art—prototypically classical art—captures how the soul represents or signifies itself in bodily shape. Like Catherine Malabou (Reference Malabou2004: e.g., 25), Peters cites Encyclopædia §411 on the ‘actual soul’, whose corporeal externality with its ‘pathognomic and physiognomic expression’ is dubbed ‘the soul’s work of art’. She makes two points. First, the ensouled human body, in contrast to the opaque ‘symbolism’ typical of the animal organism, can be described as ‘self-signifying’, transparent to soul or mind: we immediately perceive rather than decipher or ‘interpret’ its meaning. Second, the soul’s inhabiting and habituating of its body amounts to an active production or work, an achievement the artist in turn can discern through his or her own work. Peters concludes that for Hegel art proper is continuous with (human) nature, not its negation or transcendence, pace what she takes to be the prevailing view of the Aesthetics—that art is a human rather than natural product. Moreover, Hegel takes human corporeality to signify mindedness for others, for ‘spectators’ of this self-signifying embodiment (63–7). Unlike Brigitte Hilmer (1997) Peters makes little of this—wary perhaps of the possible effect of ‘the beholder’s share’ on the vaunted self-sufficiency of classical beauty. Last but not least, she argues that for Hegel corporeal expression is experienced subjectively as a ‘being at home’ with oneself; and by extension spectators can find satisfaction in perceiving instances of such mind/body fusion.
In closing Chapter 3 (70) Peters raises the question which art might be best suited to capture and present such exemplary self-satisfaction, or self-possession. Hegel’s answer, of course, is sculpture. Yet sculpture remains blind to the dynamism of corporeal mindedness, that is, to motion and activity. The art best capable of showing individuals in action is drama, chief topic of Chapter 4 (‘The Beautiful Character and its Limits’). Not simply tranquil self-possession but also intentional action become the hallmark of the Ideal. Ancient Greeks understood action to exemplify character (ethos). The hero identifies wholly with his or her pathos or principle. Deeds should accord with universal character; one does what one is. Yet a tension emerges between the subjective freedom to embrace a norm and solidarity with community (the polis), while in addition ethical norms potentially conflict with one another. Ethical ‘competence’ (88) entails admitting that particular norms are valid at best conditionally. Heroes and heroines by contrast display a certain ‘ethical inflexibility’ in rigidly holding to the exclusive sway of just one norm, the norm embodied in character; they lack the subjective ability to reflect on customary values (90). A rift opens between aesthetic and ethical ideals. Non-heroic beautiful character is possible, however, if only in modern times, that is, when someone seeks to unify particular and contingent—rather than communal and putatively universal—purposes and dispositions in action. More broadly, art is capable of displaying inner division and pain, a disharmony between mind and body. This constitutes the main topic of Chapter 5 (‘Beyond Beauty: the Pain of Inner Division’), on the suffering portrayed in Greek tragedy and in ‘romantic’, i.e., post-classical, art.
Before getting to that, however, let me take brief stock. It is for one thing not at all evident from Peters’s text just how centrally sculpture figures in Hegel’s treatment of the classical artform in the Aesthetics, or indeed in his conception of Greek culture generally. Pericles, Achilles, even Socrates are framed as real-life ‘plastic individuals’, while Greek philosophy and drama too are called ‘plastic’. But Hegel uses ‘plastic’ also to capture the Ideal’s paradoxical mix of discreteness and fluidity—individual feature, profile, character and norm share in sheer universality. Despite her pronounced emphasis on habit as active embodiment, this sense of equivocity is easy to miss in Peters’s presentation. Habits can kill, says Hegel, or they can be made one’s own, so freeing the self from madness, even allowing it to emerge as subjectivity proper: the habituated body is what I am, but it’s also mine, something I have, and can perhaps change. Similarly, while Peters rightly privileges ‘the individual’ in Hegel’s account of Greek beauty, she fails to explain that, for Hegel, individuality is both particular feature and embodied universal, or rather, the movement between them. What Hegel calls the ‘miracle’ of Greek sculpture lies in the inconceivable way stone comes to life under the artist’s hand: fixed features are rendered universal.
Chapter 5 (‘Beyond Beauty’) returns to tragedy, considered in the dual aspect of suffering and reconciliation on the part of the protagonists. Spectators too experience a reconciliation, according to Hegel (102). Peters explores some of the voluminous commentary on this ‘astonishing’ claim before putting forward her own resolution, which focuses on Hegel’s reading via Antigone’s suffering and acceptance, in his account of the play (105–11). Briefly, Antigone’s pain stems from her felt distance from the natural body and disposition she had formerly identified with, a pain assuaged through her partial distancing from and negation of the deities she had called her own. We get ‘a form of reconciliation that is experienced by Antigone herself’ rather than by spectators onstage or in the audience (110). The reflective distance so gained entails both a deepened subjectivity and loss of beauty. Second, so-called ‘romantic’ art can represent painful experiences—an inward distancing from the body in Christian art—as well as various secular forms, love being the exemplar (116). Against Houlgate’s suggestion that art proves unable to capture pure inwardness completely, or Jaeschke’s linkage of that inadequacy with the ‘end of art,’ the author adduces Hilmer’s argument that secular love is fully accessible to the romantic artist. She ventures no opinion on whether that constitutes, as Hilmer thinks, a paradigm shift from individual subjectivity to modern intersubjectivity. Nor does she say much about the abundance of romantic topics Hegel explores (chivalry, honour, romance, humour, the novel, landscape, etc.).
A final chapter (‘Modern Beauty’) maintains that for Hegel non-classical beauty is indeed possible, thus avoiding the ‘partiality’ or ‘redundancy’ some have found in a Hegelian perspective on modern art. Art can furthermore be considered ‘indispensable to modern culture,’ Peters argues, which means that it is not just a contingent way of dealing with various modern topics or, as Gethmann-Siefert has argued, of performing a socializing function. Following Hegel’s hints on semblance—in Dutch still life or genre painting—she takes abstract art as showcasing its self-signifying, non-representational character. That is to go beyond Pippin’s claim that abstract art can capture a distinctly modern normative abstraction and autonomy, and it avoids Houlgate’s attack on abstraction as merely ‘symbolic’. The argument pertains to others’ arguments, in ‘meta’ fashion it must be said, and we are granted no illustrations of modernist abstraction. Moreover, the book ends abruptly, its precise upshot unclear.
I can take up only a few points from these last chapters, beginning with Peters’ attention to pain (Schmerz, Qual). ‘Art is beautiful by representing perfectly beautiful figures’ (97), she writes. Yet Greek tragedy offers an artistic, even beautiful, treatment of non-beautiful events, that is, of agents’ experiences of pain and devastation. Emphasis falls here less on form than on tragic thematics in Hegel. Her approach involves a reconstruction (106) of Antigone’s subjective experience of pain, essentially as what Aristotle terms ‘sparagmos’, tearing apart. Peters admits (119, note) that her reading is not expressly found in Hegel’s text but is intended solely to make sense of §470 of the Phenomenology, in particular its citing of Sophocles’ famous line ‘Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred’. Although plausible in itself, the reading runs counter to Hegel’s later stance in chapter VII of the Phenomenology, which aligns reconciliation with the players’ and playwright’s self-deception (based on ‘forgetfulness’ and ‘hypocrisy’) that all is well. Moreover, it results in the incongruous idea that Antigone acknowledges the sway of another sort of norm while doing so ‘unwittingly’ (104), ‘not fully aware’ (107) of the community’s claim on her. What Allen Speight (Reference Speight2001: ch. 2) nicely terms ‘retrospectivity’—reassessment of a heroic deed—goes only so far, and is really for spectators of the play, not for the agent herself. A similar slippage emerges in Peters’s mention of Hegel’s chorus (118, note), which she rightly says remains above the fray yet which she names also as a ‘protagonist’, so pointing ‘to a perspective beyond the limited, particular ones held by the individual heroes, from which the ideal of reconciliation can at least be envisaged’. Peters tends to read a lot into Antigone’s subjectivity, just as she imputes a notion of personal freedom to the polis (95–6, note).
The final chapter sharply criticizes several recent approaches, while advancing its own suggestion that, for Hegel, the painterly or abstractionist Schein of art retains for art a certain subjective beauty. Such art is self-referential, ‘self-signifying’: we admire the artist’s skill, or the work’s formal play of colour, light and shape. Very near the end (141–42) Peters briefly examines Pippin’s suggestion that abstract art reveals how sensuous meaning is constituted in the modern world, objecting that by making art equal to philosophy in its synthetic power he renders it redundant or dispensable: philosophy could do the job just as well. I do not think that does proper justice to Pippin, and it is unfortunate that Peters could take no account of his later views in After the Beautiful (2014), where he appeals to such ideas as acknowledgement of others, painterly ‘address’, or our ‘amphibian’ status as minded bodies. Not least, Peters leaves the concept of beauty somewhat vague—all the more regrettably given various recent proclamations that ‘beauty is back’. Readers will likely demand to know more about the stakes involved in resort to a putative modernist beauty.
It would be unfair to end on a discordant note, however, when all in all this book provides so much to admire, in its opening chapters especially. The author has fastened on a theme little noticed in the literature and she succeeds in showing its importance for Hegel’s conception of beauty in art.
