Hegel's aesthetics 1 - some basic Hegelian concepts

hello I would like to talk to you today about the philosophy of a Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and specifically I'd like to talk to you about some of his ideas around the nature of art and aesthetic theory this is kind of tricky thing to do Hegel is notoriously inaccessible as a thinker his writing is turgid it is impenetrable and it is deeply deeply systemic that's unfortunate because this guy has an enormous amount of insight I mean he is he is I think one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century even if he's lost a little bit of cash in the 20th century and his ideas have an enormous amount of power to offer to them so if he's an important guy to understand but he is more than just a little bit difficult to read how he's supposed to approach that what are we going to do about that well here's what I propose as much as this guy is really hard to to digest in many ways I don't think that the gist of Hegel is all that hard to get and this is why he's had so much impact in the 19th century what I'd like to do is I'd like to get at some of the central concepts in Hegel I'm not going to give a thorough analysis of what they mean but I do want to give a sense of how one might take them how to approach them and from that we can begin to see how you might apply these ideas to his his notions of art and aesthetic theory and see what some of those insights I'm so excited about are so to begin well where does one start with Hegel I guess there are a number of cornerstone terms that he has dialectic history idea but if there's a place I would start it would probably be with the notion of rationality what is rationality for Hegel well let me say a little about what it's not a lot of times when we when you think about the word rationality I find people sort of make an association of dry almost mathematical reasoning they they think of mr. Spock from Star Trek they think of thinking without any sort of emotion this isn't I don't think this is exclusive of in our it doesn't preclude what what Hagel sang but it's not really what he's got in mind either um when Hagel talks about rationality he's talking more about if you like raishin allottee that is proportions and ratios between concepts and the reason why he's doing that is because for Hagel the nature of identity is fundamentally ratio now not just rational but ratio now let me explain let's take a very simple seemingly simple concept like the concept white okay so the color or shade I guess it is white now if I ask you a question like what exactly is it that makes white white you probably say well I always thought that white was white because it's white and it has whiteness and that's what makes it white and that's about all I got to say about it that's not unreasonable but when Hegel talks about white he'd say well there's a couple of things to consider about it yeah there's the immediate what he would call concrete qualities of it just the the the way once you encounter the properties of whiteness so brightness holding all colors things like that and then and that's and that's certainly part of it but that's on the surface because the other thing that Hegel recognizes he says well you know well yeah there's what you perceive with white but there's also what you associate whiteness with there's you know there's moral and aesthetic things you associate it with goodness purity possibility illumination reflection you know all sorts of different things like that and what Hagel wants to say is how is that possible how do how does this concept get hooked up into all these other different things what's the mechanism that happens with well you'll say here's the thing something like white doesn't just have these concrete qualities inside of them white is what it is also because it is not its opposite that is white is white not just simply because it has the concrete qualities of being white but also because it's not black now again you might say okay that's still kind of obvious but here's here's the thing that that comes from this Hegel says that everything that has an identity has this had identity in terms of that dynamic dynamic opposition between things so white is white both by being white concretely and not being black black is black in the way that it is both by having the concrete qualities of black and not being white and the two are in this this dynamic opposition that is the identities are struggling with one another they're they're trying to contradict one another in some sense maybe trying isn't the right word because it gives them a sense of intention but but in being what they are they oppose what they are not and this is the nature of their identity and everything is like this the identity of everything is in this dynamic opposition Hegel makes up words for these applies words for this when he talks about what something is in this case my example white it's a thesis when he talks about the opposing force right the thing that's going against it santé thesis so thesis antithesis and the thesis and the antithesis are in a dynamic rational opposition to one another this is the way in which identity of all things work you are what you are both by being new and not being what you are not right the United States is what it is by being what it is and not being what it's not mathematics is love is cherry coke is I mean anything that has identity is on we write the motion one we any bit of these things are now that might simply stand as it was if it were not for the fact that these opposition's these apparent contradictions are like I was saying dynamic they are shifting they're changing they're happening they are slipping into the future to quote a song from the 1970s they are finding a way in which to push push themselves forward and and literally realize themselves in the world what happens with black and white in the dynamic opposition between one another well they contradict one another and form from thisis white and at iThis is black a synthesis or a sim thesis a combination of the two gray and with this new identity gray there is you have a new thesis a new way of being a new entity in the world that has an opposition what's the opposition colors right so there's gray there's colors and then these form new opposition's shades I suppose on on like that um I what's important things it's important to realize with this is you might say well I don't think it's any particular time that black and white and color and shades came into the world they've always been there and Hagel would say no of course there's no time that they came into the world rather what it is though is that there's these it's the rational order the ratio izing of them this proportioning of dynamic opposition that allows them to be I know this is kind of extensive but the thing you got to realize is is that everything that is is in a state for Hegel of evolving and not just evolving physically that's this most superficial aspect of it it's evolving conceptually it's evolving rationally it is moving towards what hey go the idea the pure absolute possibility of all things being realized in their totality right everything that is is in this dynamic opposition that's moving towards that a couple terms to introduce now with regard to this and these terms are dialectic and history dialectic dialectic is in many ways kind of the easy term here Hegel's the agel is not the only philosopher use dialectic lots of philosophers have done this from Plato onwards but but dialectic means basically reasoning in a in a matter analogous to dialogue so I say this you say this I say this you say this that's a dialectic well this dynamic rational opposition between entities right this is dialectical thesis antithesis synthesis new thesis antithesis synthesis that that's dialectic that's Hegel's dialectic and that process of of moving through through identity that is what Hegel calls history very important concept here because history for Hegel is not just what happened yesterday or last week or last year or a hundred years ago or whatever history is for Hegel a force it is the rational force of all of these entities within the dialectic all these theses within the dialectic evolving literally realizing their possibility in this dynamic opposition with one another that's what they are and they're evolving towards infinity they're involving towards what Hegel calls the whole idea so what do we got here well we've got we got rationality we got dialectic we have history and finally we have the idea the idea what is the idea the idea is what all history is moving towards the idea is the totality of all possibilities that may be realized within this dialectical process because here's the thing you can see if you think about this that there are all sorts of concepts that have a kind of potential for being expressed at up at some point within this dialectical process but can't be at you know White's got the possibility of color yeah sure but that color can't can when you're just thinking about white well it can't come out quite yet it has to go through a few different dynamic opposition's right till you get to the black and you get the gray and then that's the color and then there's the shades and then all these things and then at that point as its evolved the idea of color in relation to white comes in well in the same way that that's what the possibility is with regard to two colors and light and shade and so forth the evolution of the concept of light and white so it is that any concept any concept is in a state of evolution let me repeat that any concept such as it's real isn't a state of evolution for Hegel it's an evolution within the dialectic it's an evolution within history it has these possibilities but these possibilities have to be realized rationally and the total possibility that the totality of any single thing that any or any pocket the the entire possibility of all identity within any concept is held within the idea that's the that infinitely far away condition that makes it possible for all things to be Hegel calls this the thought in the mind of God borrowing largely from I suppose from Aristotle although I don't know that he would admit that but he's he's saying that that there is this way that every single entity is moving towards that and moving towards realization and must have that end to move towards so history is this rational dance of concepts coming to be what they can be in the face of history it is understanding ourselves within that and through that that we begin to have a concept of what a sense of what the role of art aesthetic theory is with that and I'll get to that with the next lecture

Channel: Seth Tichenor

Views: 20,334

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Keywords: philosophy, dialectic, history, rationality, art, aesthetics, Romanticism, German, General, philosophical, background, 19th Century, Seth Tichenor, G.W.F. Hegel, Philosofarian

Id: Twb9JgLG_Hg

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2011