Friday, March 27, 2015

Interpreting and Misinterpreting Hegel's "Aesthetics"

Jackson Pollock Number 8 (1949)
Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas (86.6 x 180.9 cm.)
Neuberger Museum, State University of New York

It should be well noted at the outset that the interpretive problems associated with the Lectures are so extraordinarily complex that we simply cannot be sure about the precise relationship between the Knox translation and Hegel’s own thought.  Besides the difficulties common to any translation of a complex philosophical work, the text from which Knox worked consists of a heavily edited edition of Hegel’s lecture notes rather than a treatise, and therefore reflects the process of Hegel’s thought working itself out rather than a finished, polished facet of his system.  That in turn has been filtered through the perceptions and concerns of the note takers and the editor. “We know from Hegel’s correspondences that although he hoped to publish a work on the philosophy of art he “was” not yet ready to do so.  Gethmann-Siefert has urged that we should see his aesthetics as ‘a work in progress,’ subject to continual rewriting over the different lecture series” (Gaiger, 2006:162):

“Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802–1873) published the three-volume Ästhetik (1835) four years after the death of Hegel. From archive research it has become clear that in the ‘compilation’ of his Hegelian Ästhetik Hotho employed mainly his own lectures of 1823. This has  led to the view that Hothos’s 1823 lectures taken all together actually constitute Hegelian aesthetics. [Weiss’] article seeks to challenge this notion. Hegel gave four series of lectures on aesthetics in Berlin in 1820/21, 1823, 1826, and 1828/29. Since he never wrote his own work on aesthetics, one might consider the edition of four series of lectures to be the ‘real’ Hegelian Ästhetik.”[1]



[1]. János Weiss, “Auf den Spuren der richtigen Hegelschen Ästhetik” (abstract) from Knihovna Akademie věd Česká republika http://dlib.lib.cas.cz/2745/ (accessed 10/15/08)

No comments:

Post a Comment