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After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism
In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility—the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel’s approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in modernism. In After the Beautiful , Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through Hegel’s lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do.
While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it, art—he famously asserted—was “a thing of the past,” no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel’s position and its implications. He also shows that had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality, a mutuality of recognition, he would have had to explore a different, new role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetic approach in the path-breaking works of Manet, the “grandfather of modernism,” drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried to do so. He concludes with a look at Cézanne, the “father of modernism,” this time as his works illuminate the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel’s account of both modernity and art—Martin Heidegger.
Elegantly inter-weaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project. It gets at the core of the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history. Ultimately, it is a testament, via Hegel, to the distinctive philosophical achievements of modernist art in the unsettled, tumultuous era we have inherited.
While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it, art—he famously asserted—was “a thing of the past,” no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel’s position and its implications. He also shows that had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality, a mutuality of recognition, he would have had to explore a different, new role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetic approach in the path-breaking works of Manet, the “grandfather of modernism,” drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried to do so. He concludes with a look at Cézanne, the “father of modernism,” this time as his works illuminate the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel’s account of both modernity and art—Martin Heidegger.
Elegantly inter-weaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project. It gets at the core of the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history. Ultimately, it is a testament, via Hegel, to the distinctive philosophical achievements of modernist art in the unsettled, tumultuous era we have inherited.
- GenresPhilosophyArtNonfiction
176 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
Robert B. Pippin
49 books64 followersRobert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 26, 2022
I’m not sure that Pippin gets anything *wrong* in this book, but I’m also not convinced that he gets things right, that he actually penetrates to the crux of the matter (die Sache selbst) and discloses or unconceals (aletheia) the being of art for Hegel and Heidegger. (And, on a more serious note, his discussion of Kant, and his suggestion that Kant’s aesthetics is ahistorical, seems woefully inept. But so it goes.)
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January 21, 2024A few notes on Pippin on Hegel's philosophy of art for future reference:
1. The Hegelian view of art is a contribution to self-understanding in a particular way (i.e., not philosophy): "Art is the attempt by Geist to understand itself by means of a distinctly (though, of course, not exclusively) sensible mode of intelligibility" (p. 140).
2. Art is assessed in terms of "credibility, compellingness, conviction" (p. 135), which resonates with Cavell's reflections on fraudulence, etc.
3. Art is a type of social action: "the logic of aesthetic intelligibility is the logic, the social logic, of a deed" (p. 125); related to this, "the opposite of truth in this sense [the sense appropriate to artworks] is not falsity but fraudulence" (p. 103)
"the externalization of our ideas about ourselves in artworks is essential, not merely exemplifying. We don't know, in any determinate or 'living' detail, who we actually take ourselves to be except in such externalization, either in action or in such material productions such as artworks" (p. 41).
4. Social action, of which art is a form, is historically conditioned: "In visual works, the address to a beholder always has to embody some understanding of the work's relation to an audience, some determinate anticipation of the beholder's response, and this relation changes in Hegel's account as the general shared assumptions about such relations change in a society over time, as they come under various pressures and strains" (p. 96).
5. Thinking of art as a form of social action also means that it is possible to understand how art attempts can fail (maybe we can think of this in Austinian speech act terms, where when the felicity conditions aren't met, the act itself fails to occur). Pippin's example of this is Fried on the stakes of defeating theatricality: "For Fried the stakes are also very high, for the defeat of theatricality is an essential condition of the work's being an artwork; it is, as he says, an 'ontological' issue. The existence of painting as an art is at stake. (In this sense a 'failed painting' is a failed work of art; i.e., not a work of art.)" (p. 85)
1. The Hegelian view of art is a contribution to self-understanding in a particular way (i.e., not philosophy): "Art is the attempt by Geist to understand itself by means of a distinctly (though, of course, not exclusively) sensible mode of intelligibility" (p. 140).
2. Art is assessed in terms of "credibility, compellingness, conviction" (p. 135), which resonates with Cavell's reflections on fraudulence, etc.
3. Art is a type of social action: "the logic of aesthetic intelligibility is the logic, the social logic, of a deed" (p. 125); related to this, "the opposite of truth in this sense [the sense appropriate to artworks] is not falsity but fraudulence" (p. 103)
"the externalization of our ideas about ourselves in artworks is essential, not merely exemplifying. We don't know, in any determinate or 'living' detail, who we actually take ourselves to be except in such externalization, either in action or in such material productions such as artworks" (p. 41).
4. Social action, of which art is a form, is historically conditioned: "In visual works, the address to a beholder always has to embody some understanding of the work's relation to an audience, some determinate anticipation of the beholder's response, and this relation changes in Hegel's account as the general shared assumptions about such relations change in a society over time, as they come under various pressures and strains" (p. 96).
5. Thinking of art as a form of social action also means that it is possible to understand how art attempts can fail (maybe we can think of this in Austinian speech act terms, where when the felicity conditions aren't met, the act itself fails to occur). Pippin's example of this is Fried on the stakes of defeating theatricality: "For Fried the stakes are also very high, for the defeat of theatricality is an essential condition of the work's being an artwork; it is, as he says, an 'ontological' issue. The existence of painting as an art is at stake. (In this sense a 'failed painting' is a failed work of art; i.e., not a work of art.)" (p. 85)
March 4, 2022
This is the second Pippin book on art (and third of his overall) I've read and it contains all the clarity and thoughtfulness I've come to expect from him. After The Beautiful is narrower in scope than his more recent Philosophy by Other Means, focusing instead on visual art and painting specifically. In sum, he is putting forth a Hegelian explanation for modernist pictorial art as a response to a "crisis of theatricality" in which forms of "absorptive attention" became increasingly less credible within the painter/beholder relation. There is certainly a lot to unpack there but essentially, Pippin believes that a major shift in the norms governing art occurred around the mid to late 19th century, it was rooted in the broader normative changes occurring in society since the beginning of the modern (capitalist) era first noticed by Diderot and Rousseau, and the best chance at understanding why and how this happened is using the conceptual framework Hegel laid out in his system--especially his lectures on fine arts.
Many of the main points about modern art are made through the lens of two of Hegel's metaphors for the human condition (for lack of a better term). First, humanity's "amphibian" character as beings with both natural/determined elements and spiritual/free elements and, second, the image of the "thousand eyed Argus" which represents art's ability to embody intersubjective shared meaning. Seeing art through this lens and putting it into conversation with Heideggerian philosophy, Pippin provides penetrating insights into the works of Manet, Cezanne, Latour, and Chardin. Along the way he touches thoughtfully on broader issues of philosophy, history, and life.
Many of the main points about modern art are made through the lens of two of Hegel's metaphors for the human condition (for lack of a better term). First, humanity's "amphibian" character as beings with both natural/determined elements and spiritual/free elements and, second, the image of the "thousand eyed Argus" which represents art's ability to embody intersubjective shared meaning. Seeing art through this lens and putting it into conversation with Heideggerian philosophy, Pippin provides penetrating insights into the works of Manet, Cezanne, Latour, and Chardin. Along the way he touches thoughtfully on broader issues of philosophy, history, and life.
June 28, 2019
Beautiful and will reread
April 11, 2022
I had to read portions of this for a class, but I enjoyed it so I much I went back and read the whole thing!
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June 4, 2014Robert Pippin
The Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College
From Dialogo (Spring–Summer/14): "Robert Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College, examines modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through the lens of Hegel. Although Hegel died before the modernist era, he argued that art involves the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through time. Pippin seeks the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history."
The Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College
From Dialogo (Spring–Summer/14): "Robert Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College, examines modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through the lens of Hegel. Although Hegel died before the modernist era, he argued that art involves the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through time. Pippin seeks the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history."
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October 11, 2018Hegel's aesthetic theories were very prescient to have articulated the problems of modernism so early.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews