I'm starting off my study for field examinations this summer (which you all will have the benefit of witnessing, as I post some of my notes) with a little remark on Hegel. He says the following at the very beginning of his introduction to his lectures on the aesthetic:
The name "aesthetic " in its natural sense is not quite appropriate to this subject. "Aesthetic" means more precisely the science of sensation or feeling. Thus understood, it arose as a new science, or rather as something that was to become a branch of philosophy for the first time, in the school of Wolff, at the epoch when works of art were being considered in Germany in the light of the feelings which they were supposed to evoke — feelings of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, etc. The name was so inappropriate, or, strictly speaking, so superficial, that for this reason it was attempted to form other names, e.g. "kallistic." But this name, again, was unsatisfactory, for the science to be designated does not treat of beauty in general, but merely of artistic beauty. We shall, therefore, permit the name aesthetic to stand, because it is nothing but a name, and so is indifferent to us, and, moreover, has up to a certain point passed into common language. As a name, therefore, it may be retained. The proper expression, however, for our science is the "philosophy of art," or, more definitely, the "philosophy of fine art."-Introduction to
Lectures on the Aesthetic, Bosanquet's (actually very nice) translation.
Hegel does not like the name "aesthetic." It is insufficient,
ungenügend. Yet he preserves it since it is "
nothing but a name, and so is indifferent"--or, since
indifferent is a significant "technical" word for Hegel, and he does not use it here, the name is therefore no matter, all the same,
gleichgültig--"
to us." And, as if that weren't enough, we can keep it since it "
has passed into common language,"
die gemeine Sprache.
He then notes, as if in passing, the more appropriate word for this; he suggests, almost casually, another name. The proper word is not "aesthetics" but "'philosophy of art," or "philosophy of fine art." And in this apparently minor gesture we find he announces that his study of art, his science of it, is differentiated from all others
: the new name, as it were, signals how we will approach things, as unsere, our, Wissenschaft, our science deserves this other name. In this little name game is, then, there is a certain oblique attempt of Hegel to differentiate his treatment of a common subject matter--which is nothing less than the philosophic, scientific consideration of that subject matter, the demonstration of the actuality of the idea through and by its spiritual development in this area.
My point? Hegel wants to preserve the old name as if it is of no consequence--which is why he obliquely introduces his new name. Why? Because of what the old name designates: the science of sensuous feeling. The new name can supervene upon the province of what the old name designates, the sensuous, but it
only supervenes: in other words, the aesthetic (qua science of the sensuous) appropriately considered is going to be designated by the new name, which, significantly, does not refer to the sensuous but to spirit (
Geist, which is not only not sensuous, but also not supersensuous--i.e. it exceeds the opposition sensuous/non-sensuous, which is defectively conceived). And in this gesture, I'm claiming, we can already see what is at work in Hegel's consideration of the aesthetic which will follow: on the one hand he will derive the specificity of art from its sensuousness--the way it embodies the spiritual in the sensuous, in fact representing it there--but on the other saying that art is never purely reducible to this sensuous work. The study of art, then, is on the one hand the study only of sensuous embodiment, and on the other is only a philosophic study (science) of spirit.
Why does this matter? Simply because it begins to show Hegel's unique position with respect to the aesthetic: he is remarkably rebellious against any notion that art should be studied based upon how it presents itself to our direct sensuous intuition. In that respect, he carves out an area for the study of art that is completely anti-aesthetic. At the same time, this is accomplished precisely by making intuition itself non-sensuous, spiritual: at no point is there any break with the notion that art is not able to be intuited. Thus Hegel can say that art, like all things of this world, demonstrates its actuality precisely through its manifestation, through its ability to be intuited, if we consider manifestation or intuition rightly--that is, otherwise than as the grasping of an appearance that is distinct from the subject, that is a sensuous object opposed to a non-sensuous subjective spirit. In other words, as in work or labor (the birth of objective spirit), but explicitly, sensuousness itself is shown to be a function of the non-sensuous, such that it (the sensuousness) can no longer be considered the realm of manifestation and intuition. Art, more than work, is in fact precisely the sphere where we are taught explicitly to consider manifestation rightly, where manifestation and intuition are most explicitly shown to be spiritual as much as they are sensuous (since the former is the truth of the latter).
The anti-aesthetic is then pulled back into a process of demonstrating the truth of the aesthetic, and thereby remaining, just as the old name can be unproblematically preserved, still akin to aesthetics.
In short, it would be possible to demonstrate that, given its premises, the New Criticism was necessarily an interpretive criticism. But in fact it is scarcely necessary to make out such a case, for the most important and insidious legacy of the New Criticism is the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of the notion that the critic's job is to interpret literary works. Indeed, fulfillment of the interpretive task has come to be the touchstone by which other kinds of critical writing are judged, and reviewers inevitably ask of any work of literary theory, linguistic analysis, or historical scholarship, whether it actually assists us in our understanding of particular works. In this critical climate it is therefore important, if only as a means of loosening the grip which interpretation has on critical consciousness, to take up a tendentious position and to maintain that, while the experience of literature may be an experience of interpreting works, in fact the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature. To engage in the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one's understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse.
