Hegel: Aesthetic Feeling

In this paper, I consider how it would be possible to think about the historicity of music through Hegel’s thought. I will compare Hegel’s idea with a historical event that is considered relevant in the history of music: Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, taken here also as a model of immanent negation and Aufhebung of tonal system in music. Furthermore, I will take Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music as an instance and wonder about the role of music and its history in the sociocultural formation (...) (or, in Hegelian words, in the absolute Geist). I divide the exposition into four parts, namely: (1) the position of art before the absolute Geist; (2) a general exposition of art in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, placing music as a singular form of art; (3) an analysis of the characteristics of music in Hegel and (4) the comparison with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. I conclude that music, as an artistic form, brings the form of an internal feeling of a social subjectivity – a way to feel and understand sounds that transforms itself through history; in turn, both music and the form of an internal feeling of social subjectivity, have a historicity that can be understood as developed dialectically. Along these lines, the beginning of the Twentieth Century in music reveals, through Schoenberg and other composers, new intuitive configurations of this social subjectivity. (shrink)

Hegel's Aesthetics is the first comprehensive interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of art in English in thirty years. It gives a new analysis of his notorious "end of art" thesis, shows the indispensability of his aesthetics to his philosophy generally, and argues for his theory's relevance today.

Hegel's critique of the Early German Romantic figures of Fr. Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher resonates to the very core of his work and is as essential to understanding his vision of Science as Plato's polemic against the Sophists is to comprehending his philosophy. Hegel's presentation of romantic irony may not be faithful to its Romantic conception but it is deeply insightful in apprehending irony's postmodern threat to systematic philosophy.