Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

What Was Abstract Art?

This book is corrected and edited by Al-Hassanain (p) Institue for Islamic Heritage and Thought

What Was Abstract Art?

(From the Point of View of Hegel)

by

Robert B. Pippin

University of Chicago

Table of Contents

I 3

II 5

III 7

IV 10

V 11

VI 14

VII 17

VIII 20

Notes 23

I

The emergence of abstract art, first in the early part of the century with Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, and then in the much more celebrated case of America in the fifties (Rothko, Pollock, et. al.) remains puzzling. Such a great shift in aesthetic standards and taste is not only unprecedented in its radicality. The fact that non-figurative art, without identifiable content in any traditional sense, was produced, appreciated and, finally, eagerly bought, and even, finally, triumphantly hung in the lobbies of banks and insurance companies, provokes understandable questions about both social and cultural history, as well as about the history of art. The endlessly disputed category of modernism itself and its eventual fate seems at issue.

Whatever else is going on in abstraction as a movement in painting, it is relatively uncontroversial that an accelerating and intensifying self-consciousness about what it is to paint, how painting works, a transformation of painting itself into the object of painting (issues already in play since impressionism), are clearly at issue. Given that heightened conceptual dimension, one might turn for some perspective on such developments to that theorist for whom “the historical development of self-consciousness” amounts to the grand narrative of history itself. Even if for many, Hegel is, together with Locke,the bourgeois philosopher (the philosopher of thearrière-garde ), he is also the art theorist for whom the link between modernity and an intensifying self-consciousness, both within art production and philosophically, about art itself, is the most important. And the fairly natural idea of abstraction as a kind of logical culmination of modernist self-consciousness itself, that way of accounting for the phenomenon, is the kind of idea that we owe to Hegel. More broadly, the very existence of abstract art represents some kind of accusation against the entire tradition of image-based art, involves some sort of claim that the conditions of the very intelligibility of what Hegel calls the “highest” philosophical issues have changed, such that traditional, image based art is no longer an adequate vehicle of meaning for us now, given how we have come to understand ourselves, have come to understand understanding.  And Hegel was the only prominent modern philosopher who in some way gave voice to that accusation, who argued - at the time, outrageously - that traditional art had become "a thing of the past" and that it no longer served "the highest needs of human spirit." (That is, it still served lots of extremely important human needs, but not “the highest.”)

Of course, all these ideas - that a form of art could be in some sense historically required by some sort of conceptual dissonance in a prior form, that a historical form of self-understanding could be called progressive, an advance over an earlier stage, that various activities “of spirit,” art, politics, religion, could be accounted for as linked efforts in a common project (the achievement of self-knowledge and therewith the “realization of freedom”) and so forth - are now likely to seem naïve, vestigial, of mere historical interest. But the justifiability of that reaction depends a great deal, as in all such cases, on how such Hegelian claims are understood. For example, it is no part at all of any of the standard interpretations of Hegel’s theory that, by closing this particular door on the philosophical significance of traditional art, he meant thereby to open the door to, to begin to conceptualize the necessity of, non-image-based art. And, given when Hegel died, it is obviously no part of his own self-understanding. But there is nevertheless a basis in his philosophical history of art for theorizing these later modern developments. Or so I want to argue.

II

Consider the most obvious relevance:  the general trajectory of Hegel’s account. The history of art for Hegel represents a kind of gradual de-materialization or developing spiritualization of all forms of self-understanding. Put in the terms of our topic, the basic narrative direction in Hegel’s history of art is towards what could be called something like greater “abstraction” in the means of representation -  “from” architecture and sculpture, “towards” painting, music and finally poetry - and greater reflexivity in aesthetic themes. Within the narrative of developing self-consciousness presented by Hegel, not only would it not be surprising to hear that at some point in its history, art might come more and more to be about "abstract" objects, like "paintingness" or some such, but we might also hope to find some explanation of why the development of art might have brought us to this point. There will be much that remains surprising, especially the dialectical claim that with such a topic the capacities of art itself would be exhausted, would no longer be adequate to its own object, but the cluster of topics raised by the question of the meaning of abstraction naturally invites an extension of Hegel's narrative.[1]

Sketching this trajectory already indicates what would be the philosophical significance of this development for Hegel: that human beings require, less and less, sensible, representative imagery in order to understand themselves (with respect to “the highest issue” -  for Hegel, their being free subjects), that such a natural embodiment is less and less adequate an expression of such a genuinely free life; especially since the essential component of such a free life is an adequate self-understanding. 

It is within this narrative that we hear the final, famous Hegelian verdict that artistic expression in Western modernity, tied as it ever was to a sensible medium, could no longer bear a major burden of the work in the human struggle toward self-understanding, was no longer as world historically important as it once was, no longer as necessary as it once was to the realization of freedom. (Hegel’s claim is thus not about the end of art, however much he is associated with that phrase, but the end of a way of art’s mattering, something he thinks he can show by presenting a kind of history and logic and phenomenology of anything “mattering” to human beings, within which art plays a distinct and changing role.[2](Said another way, the prior question for Hegel is always the human need for art.)[3]Again, the claim is not that there will not be art, or that it won’t matter at all, but that art can no longer play the social role in did in Greece and Rome, in medieval and Renaissance Christianity, or in romantic aspirations for the role of art in liberation andBildung . Each of these historical worlds has come to a kind of end, and, or so the claim is, there is no equivalently powerful role in  bourgeois modernity. (In a way, what could be more obvious?) Accordingly, if Hegel’s account is roughly correct, art must either accept such a (comparatively) diminished, subsidiary role (whatever that would mean), or somehow take account of its new status by assuming some new stance, perhaps “about” its own altered status, or perhaps by being about, exclusively and purely, its formal properties and potentials, perhaps by being about opticality as such, or perhaps about purely painterly experiments as the final assertion of the complete autonomy of art, or perhaps by still announcing some form of divine revelation after the death of God, a revelation, but without content and indifferent to audience (as perhaps in the work of Rothko).[4]It could then matter in all these different ways that there be art, a way not like its prior roles and one more consistent with the situation of European modernity, but a way not imagined by the historical Hegel, even though some such altered stance might be said to have been anticipated in his theory.

III

It is certainly true that Hegel seems to have had some presentiment of the great changes that were to come in post-Romantic art, and to have appreciated the significance of those changes, to have realized that they amounted to much more than a change in artistic fashion. Contemporary artists, Hegel says, “after the necessary particular stages of the romantic art-form have been traversed,” have liberated themselves from subject-matter, from any non-aesthetically prescribed determinate content.

Bondage to a particular subject-matter and a mode of portrayal suitable for this material alone, are for artists today something past, and art therefore has become a free instrument which the artist can wield in proportion to his subjective skill in relation to any material of whatever kind. The artist thus stands above consecrated forms and configurations and moves freely on his own account (frei für sich ), independent of the subject-matter and mode of conception  in which the holy and eternal was previously made visible to human apprehension…From the very beginning, before he embarks on production, his great and free soul must know and possess its own ground, must be sure of itself and confident in itself. (A, 605-6)[5]

Admittedly, again, the historical Hegel would never have imagined the extent of the “freedom” claimed by modernists and would no doubt have been horrified by abstract art. He was a pretty conservative fellow. But the principle articulated in this quotation, as well as the link to freedom as the decisive issue, is what is important for our purposes. And Hegel seemed to have foreseen the shift in the modernist understanding of artistic experience, away from the sensuous and beautiful and towards the conceptual and reflexive.

Thephilosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art itself yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration (denkenden Betrachtung ), and that, not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is. (A, 11)

Art (like the modern social world itself) had thus “become philosophical,” invites more of a philosophical than purely aesthetic response, and so, for that reason, could be said now to be superceded in world-historical terms by philosophy itself, by the very philosophy it itself calls for.

This is certainly a distinctive, bold candidate among other more familiar explanations. It competes with what can loosely be called the Marxist claim about the dissolving coherence of late bourgeois culture reflected in the self-images expressed in such art, or the neo-Marxist claim about the active “negation” of that culture by an art produced so that it could not be assimilated, consumed (or even understood) within it. (A link between modernism in the arts and resistance to the cultural logic of capitalism - not just expressive of it and its failure to make sense - is also characteristic of the sophisticated new account by T.J. Clark.[6])It competes as well with more so-called essentialist or reductionist accounts, like Greenberg’s: how painting, threatened with absorption by the mass culture and entertainment industries retreated (or advanced, depending on your point of view) to the “essence” of painting as such, flatness and the composition of flat surface, an insistence on art’s purity and autonomy as a way of resisting such absorption or colonization by other, especially narrative, art forms. And there is Michael Fried’s compelling emphasis on the attempt by modernists to continue to makegreat art, art that did not at all reject or refuse its tradition, and aspired to be an art that could  stand together with the great art of the past. Such art had to be produced under such radically different historical conditions as to make this most unlikely, especially conditions of intense, expanding and deepening self-consciousness about the painting itself both as artificial object beheld and as directing the beholder to the painting’s intentional object. Given such self-consciousness, painters had to respond by creating a different sort of painterly presence, and by solving in ever more complicated ways what Fried has called the problem of the painting’s “theatricality.” Hegel’s account of our growing awareness of the limitations of a traditionally representationalist notion of intelligibility (for the expression of “the highest things”), and the consequences of this development for the status of visual art in our culture (its way of mattering) is a bold entrant in such a sweepstakes. The core of that case is Hegel’s argument for the explanatory priority of the notion of spirit,Geist , a collective subjectivity, and its development, that such notions amount to a more comprehensive and fundamentalexplicans in accounting for conceptual, political and aesthetic change than appeals to “capitalism,” “negation,” the “essence” of painting, and so forth. This in turn obviously commits him to showing just how such an appeal to spirit’s self-alienation, externalization and eventual reconciliation does in fact account for fundamental shifts in aesthetic values, especially in what is for Hegel its end game.

There are of course hundreds of elements in such claims that specialists and philosophers will want to attack. There are no grander grand narratives than Hegelian ones, and his have been put to such strange and implausible uses that one might be advised to stay well clear of any claim about abstraction as the culmination or completion or exhaustion of the western art tradition.[7]But there must besomething of some generality and scope that we can say about the historical experience of the inadequacy of traditional representational art, just then and just there (that is, at the forefront of European modernization), and whatever there is to say, it is unlikely we will get a handle on it without understanding the relation between this momentous, epochal shift in art history and the history of modernity itself, as well as corresponding changes in religious, institutional and socio-political life.

Sowhy then did traditional, representational art come to be experienced as inadequate, a kind of historical relic rather than a living presence? To understand Hegel’s (or “the Hegelian”) answer to this question, we also face right away the difficult question of gaining any adequate access to the twelve hundred pages of lecture notes organized by his student Hotho in what we now know as the standard edition of Hegel’s lectures.[8]But we can start reconstructing a Hegelian reaction to abstractionism by noting several peculiarities of Hegel’s aesthetic theory. I note four such distinct peculiarities because, I will try to show, they are the most important in understanding a comprehensive Hegelian view (or possible view) on the issue of abstractionism.

IV

The first and most peculiar is how Hegel ties art ubiquitously, in all cases, tothe divine . In a way that greatly complicates his use of the term, Hegel does not confine that issue solely to explicitly religious art of the classical Greek, Roman, medieval, Renaissance and early modern periods. All art, no matter the subject matter, from still life to portrait to landscape to historical scenes, is understood as an attempt “to portray the divine.” This ought right away to alert us that this sweeping reference is, to say the least, non-standard and will require considerable interpretation. Art is called “one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of spirit (Geist ). (A, 7) This set of appositives appears to gloss the divineas “the deepest interests of mankind and the most comprehensive truths of spirit” rather than vice-versa, and this quite radical humanism (or divinization of the human) is prominent elsewhere in the lectures too. The divine is often treated as if its relevant synonyms weredas Wahre anddas Wahrhaftige , the true or the  “real truth,” and art is regularly treated as the attempt by spirit to externalize its self-understanding in a sensible form, and thereby to appropriate such externality as its own, to be at home therein, and to express more successfully such a self-understanding.  (And all ofthat is called an expression of the divinity in man. As Hegel is wont to put it, this is the truth that the Christian religion tries to express in its “representation” of a father-god externalized in his son.) Art in other words is treated as a vehicle for the self-education of human being about itself, ultimately about what it means to be a free, self-determining being, and when Hegel callsthat dimension of aesthetic meaning divine, he seems to be rather flattering the seriousness and finality of the enterprise (its independence from sensual need, utilitarian interest and so forth; its “absolute” importance) than in any sense worrying about the God of revealed religion. Another way to put Hegel’s quite heretical view would be to say that for Hegel artistic activity is not about representing divinity, butexpressing divinity . "God," he says," is more honored by what spirit makes than by the productions and formations of nature," and this because "there is something divine in man, but it is active in him in a form appropriate to the being of God in a totally different and higher manner than it is in nature." (A, 30)[9](This is all the basis of Hegel’s fantastic, extravagant claim that in effectreligion is an inadequate vehicle of the divine.[10])

V

Likewise, secondly, Hegel is one of the very few philosophers or writers or artists of this period - I would guess the only one - for whomthe beauty of nature was of no significance whatsoever . Nature’s  status as anens creatum, as a reflection of God, or natural beauty as an indication of purposiveness, are of no importance to him, and he expresses this while evincing no Gnostic antipathy to nature itself as fallen or evil. Nature is simply “spiritless,”geistlos ; or without meaning, even boring. (Hegel goes so far as to claim that a landscape painting is the proper object of human attention and speculative contemplation, not a natural landscape itself (A, 29), or, in a near-Kafkaesque claim,  that a portrait of a person can be more like the individual than the actual individual himself. (A 866-7)[11]) When a natural object or event is portrayed aesthetically it acquires a distinct sort of meaning, what it is within and for a human community, that it would not have had just as such an object itself. (Hegel is, after all, an idealist of sorts, and we shall return to this reflexivity or doubled meaning of art objects below.) The object becomes suffused for the first time with a human meaning.[12]In a memorable passage, Hegel notes that it is as if an artistic treatment transforms every visible surface into an eye, the visible seat of the soul's meaning, such that in looking at such painted surfaces - looking at, he says, "the thousand-eyed Argos" - we search for what we search for in looking into another human's eye. It is crucial to note that Hegel describes looking at art objects this way, as if each one had eyes (which, whatever it means, does not mean we are lookingthrough the image to a source or original; a human soul is not literally visible inside the eye). Nor are we looking at art-objects the way subjects look at objects. That would be like looking atpersons that way, and suggests a different sort of link between art and morality than what Kant wanted to suggest.[13](A, 153)  And this is all also part of Hegel’s case that painting is the first “romantic art” (in his hierarchy of art), and therewith first on the way to an adequate expression of human freedom. This is so because, for example, in a painting the object “does not remain an actual spatial natural existent, but becomes a reflection (Widerschein ) of spirit.” The “real” is thus said to be “cancelled” and transformed into something “in the domain of spirit for the apprehension by spirit” (which natural objects are not). (A 805)[14]

This touches on an important point thatis part of the traditional Hegel reading: that Hegel played a very large role in shifting aesthetic appreciation from one founded on taste, beauty and pleasure to one concerned with criticism, with meaning, and with a kind of self-education.  But the point here about the importance of Hegel’s indifference to nature and beauty introduces a more radical one.[15]In fact, fine art, and especially its history, Hegel claims, should be understood as aliberation from nature , not a rejection of its (or our) inherent inadequacy, but the achievement of a mode of self-understanding and self-determination no longer set, or limited by nature as such, as well as a humanizing transformation of the natural into a human world. (Art is said to enable a "free subject" to "strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself." (A, 31))[16]Hegel starts out from a premise in which art is treated cognitively, as a way of becoming more self-conscious about aspects of intelligibility, meaning and about the activity of meaning-making itself, and so is said to bethe sensible shining or appearing of the Idea , where “the Idea” is that comprehensive, sought-after self-conscious understanding of “rendering intelligible.” And it isthis function that is treated as partaking of a kind of divinity. ("The universal need for art, that is, to say, is man's rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self." (A, 31).) From there he proceeds to a conclusion that runs so counter to contemporaries like Kant, Schiller, and Schelling; that art "liberates man …from the power of sensuousness " and art "lifts [man] with its gentle hands (mit milden Händen ) out of and above imprisonment in nature." (A, 49)

In what we now characterize as the romantic dimension of post-Kantianism, most visible in Schiller, the significance of beauty and art, its mattering as it does, was an expression and experience of an original harmony between our corporeality or natural fate and our agency, spontaneity, and freedom, a harmony partially lost in the assertion of modern autonomy or self-rule, but that could be recovered in the “play” of the imagination’s spontaneity “at work” in, not on, the sensuous immediacy of perception and delight. Hegel’s formulation indicates that if there is to be such a reconciliation it must achieved rather than recovered, and that part of that process will be an active negation in some way of the “power” of sensuousness and “imprisonment” in nature (not, it should be stressed, “nature” as such). Nature will not be lost or rendered a mere object in this process (which is, after all, “gentle”), but transformed, remade into a “second nature.”[17]A standard example of such a transformation is Hegel’s account of the habits of mind and unreflective practices of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit ), and another might be, I am suggesting, the achievement of those habits of mind, sorts of lived embodiment, for which modernism in the arts becomes timely, appropriate.

Likewise in Hegel’s account this development is not, for example, a result of a growing realization of the inadequacy of the iconic relation to a transcendent God, as Alain Besançon has recently claimed.[18]What Hegel describes is a much more practical struggle with the natural world, such that the achievement of various forms of real independence from natural determination is reflected in the self-images manifested in art. There is, in other words,  no negative theology in Hegel’s strange humanistic theology. His progressivism is everywhere decisive; we havebroken free of dependence on such sensible images not so much because oftheir inadequacy as because ofour having made ourselves independent of them, and art must be understood as part and parcel of that work.  (None of this means that we become, or realize we always were, supernatural beings, or that we can now ignore our corporeality.  We remain finite; constrained in all the obvious ways by natural limitations. But the experience of, the very meaning of, such naturality is now to be regarded as a human achievement, in the way that the natural desire to reproduce has become inseparable from romantic values and the norms of familial and social existence. (Or inseparable from egoistic or hedonistic or any other such value. The unavailability of mere nature, as such, within experience, is the point at issue.) As Hegel puts it in a famous passage,

No matter how excellent we find the statues of Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father, Christ and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is of no help; we bend our knee[19]no longer [before these images] (A, 103)

VI

Third, Hegel is well known as the philosophical founder of the historical study of art, the most important proponent of the idea that art works must be understood as “of their time,” where such a time could itself be understood comprehensively as an integrated whole, a point of view orWeltanschauung . And this premise contributes as well, in quite an unusual and unexpected way, to the thesis that art cannot matter for us now as it used to, that representational art has become a “thing of the past.” We can begin to see how this works by noting that Hegel, although associated with the philosophical romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany, veers off that course pretty radically on this historical issue. He sees "what his age requires," what is a “need of spirit,” in quite a different way, and that will be quite important for the “fate of art” issue.

By contrast, Kant, for example, fits the romantic pattern much better and provides a useful foil for appreciating this point. Kant had denigrated the importance of fine art because the experience of fine art involved not a wholly ‘free” but what Kant called a “dependent” beauty, and so inevitably, he claimed, was too much a matter of concepts and conceptualizing. An art product was always of a kind, produced with a certain, recognizable intention, within a school, after a style, etc. And this hindered (though it did not absolutely prevent) the “free play” of the faculties that Kant thought essential to aesthetic pleasure. Art works tend to be instances of kinds, and recognizing and cataloguing instances was not what the experience of the beautiful was about. Aesthetic experience involved precisely a kind of inconceivability, together, nonetheless, with some intimation of harmony and meaning, all of which the rule-governed production of fine art made very difficult. This was all connected in Kant to much larger issues, especially his attempt to distinguish the separate contributions of sensibility and the understanding, contra the Leibnizean school. And because Kant insisted on the limited role of the understanding in aesthetic intelligibility, he was somewhat unwittingly preparing the way for a much stronger emphasis on artistic autonomy and even on the aesthetic as asuperior mode of intelligibility.[20]

The historical Kant clearly intended by such an argument (especially in his insisting on beauty’s dependence on some extra-human source of significance, on the “super-sensible”) to accentuate the theological and moral importance of natural beauty. However, Kant’s legacy for the art world was to accentuate the greater importance of genius and the sublime in fine art, the former because the unprecedented, inimitable creation of the genius allowed a kind of novelty or delightful surprise that Kant thought essential to aesthetic experience, and the latter because the defeat of our imagination by the magnitude, dynamism or in later romantic versions, the horror of the sublime, also allowed a kind of intelligibility and experience not rule-bound or intellectualizable.[21]One might hypothesize that such a notion corresponded to a new modern need, for a kind of divine significance without any determinate transcendent realm, without the metaphysics that Kant’s firstCritique removed from the philosophical agenda, a place marked out from and higher than, the utilitarian calculation and mass politics already on the horizon, or from the “iron cage” beginning to descend on European societies.

       The contrast with Hegel could not be sharper, more anti-romantic. Hegel regarded the experience of the sublime as historically regressive,  an indication of a much less well developed understanding of “the divine,” in all the manifold, elusive senses discussed above. Vague intimations of an indeterminate, horrifying power were, by virtue of their very indeterminacy, already an indication of a much less self-conscious and even less free stage of being in the world. Products of genius also traded, for Hegel, on a kind of indeterminacy and elusiveness that he thought amounted to mereSchwärmerei , or romantic clap-trap, which were only vestigial in the modern age.

Of course at this point one might wonder, if Hegel is right that such suspicion of indeterminacy, mystery, ineffability, the awe-inspiring and so forth do comprise our starting position with respect to the “spirit of the times,” what thencould be said for the contemporary role of art, the way it might matter (as high art, not decoration or monuments from the past)? Without further ado, it might seem that Hegel almost treats the domain of art itself as atavistic, as if a bit like reading bird entrails, or astrology. As we have seen, the question at issue for Hegel is not the end of art making and appreciating, but something like a shift in its status and social role. But we can now see that this modern displacement occurs for him for an unusual reason. Put simply, one of the main reasons for Hegel 's view that image or content based art seems to matter less and less derives from his comprehensive view of the nature of the modern world. It is, he repeats frequently, aprosaic , unheroic world, not much of a subject for the divinizing or at least idealizing transformations of aesthetic portrayal at all. (The “Idea”need not “sensibly shine” any longer because it can be grasped conceptually; norms get their grip on us without primary reliance on the sensual. But, said the other way around, itcannot ; the sensible appearances of modern ethical life themselves are not fit vehicles for such “shining” because they and our very sensual lives have themselves been rationalized, transformed into practices, habits, and institutions with some sort of rational transparency to themselves.)[22]The modern social world itself may be rational, in other words, but it is, to say it all at once, just thereby not very beautiful, and its “meaning” is not very mysterious. It has its own kind of domestic, and rather small-screen beauty, we can say - hence all that Hegelian praise for Dutch celebrations of the bourgeoisie -  but the “sacredness” of orderly city streets, piano playing, milk pouring, needlework and fine clothing, does not, given that Hegel's aesthetics is so content driven[23],  satisfy very lofty aesthetic ambitions. (“Spirit only occupies itself with objects so long as there is something secret (Geheimes ), not revealed (nicht Offenbares ), in them…[but now] “everything is revealed and nothing obscure.”(A, 604-5))

This introduces a complicated topic in Hegel studies, especially with regard to his political theory, because such a position represents quite a change from Hegel's younger days and his Hölderlin-intoxicated hopes for a beautiful Christian community of love. He appears to have become quite impressed with the altered situation of modern individuals, with the, let us say, "dispersed" character of individuality in modern societies, all reflecting an acknowledgement of the spiritual effects of ever more divided labor first apparent in Rousseau. In such a world, no one simply could be heroically responsible for much of anything (and so could not be beautiful in action), and the legal and administrative tasks, the daily life, of modern society are indeed, in his favorite word, prosaic. We have already discussed the aesthetic consequences of a disenchanted nature. And it is a striking oddity in Hegel’s project that the full realization of artas art should occur quite early in his story about art, that he should insist that Greek art, the art of the Greek polis,qua art is “better” art, but that modern romantic art is simply better, a greater human accomplishment. But however complicated the issue and Hegel's reasons for this alteration, such an anti-sentimental, realist modernism (Hegel does not even credit what would be Baudelaire's aesthetics of the beauty of modern speed and instability), together with Hegel's Protestant secularization of the divine, together with his view that art evinces the self-image of an age, are all clearly playing a role in Hegel's restraint with regard to the social and spiritual role of traditional art. This represents a kind of wager on Hegel's part that the satisfactions of modern (or bourgeois) romantic, familial, economic and political life were, in a sense,enough , that we could do without beautiful depictions of ourselves and our lives or even sublime warnings about its potential emptiness, and so could do without the living role for fine art imagined later. I think that it is fairly clear by now that, to say the least, this was a bad bet, as the whole phenomenon of aesthetic politics (especially in fascism) demonstrates, but that is surely another and a longer story.