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HEGEL, ART AND MIND

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)- cognitive theory of art

Philosophical importance of distinguishing between the fine arts and giving different
accounts of their nature and value.

Five fine arts he distinguished are music, painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture

Art in the modern period is effectively dead.


Conception in philosophy
a progressive development over time in which the human mind comes to understand itself
more adequately.
Human understanding differs in time and place,
heart of this development is religion,

Human knowledge and understanding is really self-knowledge, because it is knowledge of the


animating spirit that constitutes our true nature. Such knowledge makes us free.
The course of human development is marked in part by a progressive development from art
through religion to philosophy.
But these three modes of understanding are developmentally related such that art is a more
primitive mode
artreligionphilosophy

Greeks art
Medieval Christendom Religion
Modern world philosophy
Hegel ranks the five fine arts in a hierarchy of value. At the bottom is architecture, then
sculpture, then painting, then music, and finally, at the top, poetry.
Based on the degree to which the various forms of art are to be characterized by a
diminishing dependence on the material.
It is now possible to see why Hegel thought that the modern period would witness the end of
art.
The development of human understanding consists in a move from art to philosophy.
The development of art forms consists in a move from the most material (architecture) to the
least (poetry).
These two developments lead to a convergence. Poetry completes the movement from the
perceptual to the conceptual that is to be found within art; philosophy completes the movement

within human understanding to a wholly conceptual form of knowledge; the result is that art is
finally sublimated in philosophy.

ART AND THE WORLD

What then is this relation?


We first look at art and then, in the light of it, look at reality in order
to see it afresh.
WE NEED IMAGINATION
works of art are works of imagination,
Imagination of the artist can transform our experience by enabling us
to see, hear, touch, feel and think it more imaginatively, and thus
enrich our understanding of it.
Source of understanding
A genuine source of understanding,
we need generality.
Images and characters can be generalized
value = enables us to look at the people, circumstances and
relationships in our own experience.
Does this make us alive to new aspects of this sort of occasion?

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