Showing posts with label Hegel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hegel. Show all posts

Friday, 11 February 2011

The happening of a work of art

"It is precisely in great art - and only such art is under consideration here - that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge." (Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Cooper 237)

See Bhagavan Shree Rajneesh / Osho in The Messiah commenting on something similar: some works simply emerge from the artist - like Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (and, I would add, Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things which, she says, just rolled off her typewriter with hardly any corrections). Osho also says that usually this happens once - perhaps the first time. The subsequent works betray effort, and never measure up to the first. This happened in the case of Gibran as well as Roy.

Note also that Heidegger - like Hegel - refuses to have anything to do with aesthetics as concerned with beauty. 

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Hegel's Sittlichkeit vs Kant's abstract morality

Sittlichkeit: it would seem that it was Hegel who gave coin to this word, by placing it against the pure abstract 'morality' of Kant, what Caputo calls "the formal universality of doing yourself only what can be universalized into a rule for everyone." Caputo translates Sittlichkeit as 'ethical life,' talks about it in terms of concrete universality, and describes it as "the real rules and rich customs and concrete practices of cultural and social life in which rational morals are actually embodied.

So that just might be the context against which to understand Droysen's Sittlichkeit, translated by Grondin and others as the 'moral life'. Caputo's description brings out the meaning better, also by its contrast to the abstract and universal morality of Kant. (Caputo, Philosophy and Theology 39)

Note that Caputo upholds Hegel as the first great philosopher of history, the philosopher who put history on philosophy's map:
Hegel insisted against the Enlightenment that the ideas and ideals of 'pure reason' have a coefficient in time and history where they are embodied in the flesh and blood, the sweat and tears, of concrete peoples. So Hegel introduced a distinction beetween what he called Verstand, abstract understanding, and Vernunft, the more concrete embrace of a robustly historical reason. Abstract understanding is one-sided, purely formal and ahistorical, and how right he was. (Ibid. 38-39)