Between Transcendence and Historicism

THE PRINCIPAL purpose of this book is to offer a sympathetic explication of the main features of Hegel's aesthetics. At the same time it sets out to plead for the contemporary relevance of Hegelian aesthetic theory in opposition to a certain construal of modernist aesthetics in the twentieth century. While the Introduction establishes the basic terms of debate, Part I elaborates on what the author considers to be the necessary balance struck within Hegel's aesthetics between historicist relativism and idealist absolutism. Hegel's position is contrasted unfavourably with what is held to be a complete capitulation to relativism and abrogation of all tradition on the part of aesthetic modernism (or occasionally ‘postmodernism’). Parts II and III then proceed to give a detailed account of Hegel's analysis of the fundamental types of art (painting and sculpture, music, poetry, and architecture) and the relationship between art, ethics, and religion. As a whole the text offers two quite different approaches. First, it can be read as a basic and perhaps introductory text to Hegel's aesthetics. Approached in this way the author has been largely successful. His writing is clear and historically well informed, offering many illuminating comparisons and valid local criticisms. While the reader with only cursory background knowledge will undoubtedly gain a coherent general understanding of Hegel's aesthetics, the polemical introduction and periodic interludes are likely either to confirm prejudices or be ignored. For such a reader much of the detail concerning the relation between art and ethics and religion is likely to remain enigmatic and opaque. This is at least in part the case for the very reason Etter repeatedly states, namely the uncoupling of the ethical and the aesthetic in the Western tradition from the late eighteenth century on

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Explication · Hegelianism · Historicism · Literature · Modernism (music · Objectivity (philosophy · Relativism · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy