Richard Dien Winfield

Hegel, who pioneers presuppositionless, foundation-free autonomous reason in his _Science of Logic_ and the ethics of self-determination in his _Philosophy of Right_, might be expected to follow parallel itineraries in both works. Hegel develops logical determinacy into the three successive domains of the contrastive determinacy of the Logic of Being, the determined determinacy of the Logic of Essence, and the self-determined determinacy of the Logic of the Concept. On the other hand, he develops self-determined conduct as a self-ordered system of intersubjective structures of rights, falling into three domains: Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Community, dividing Ethical Community itself into the three spheres of family, social, and political ethical community. This chapter examines whether the division of the _Philosophy of Right_ has an intrinsic necessity and completeness and whether that necessity and completeness can be confirmed through any correlation with the categorial division of the _Science of Logic_.

The logical investigation of thinking must not be confused with inquiry into the mental reality of thought, which properly falls within the philosophy of mind. Hegel provides an important, but much neglected contribution towards accounting for the psychological conditions of reason by detailing in his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit how intelligence can progress from representation to thought. By thinking through Hegel’s argument, we can comprehend why thinking is a matter of intelligence rather than consciousness, why representation cannot provide the universality of conceptualization, and how semiotic imagination enables intelligence to leave representation behind and enter the domain of thought, unencumbered by the opposition of consciousness. Through this result, the philosophy of mind can account for the psychological conditions of its own theorizing.

Graphic art, broadly considered, includes all fine art that creates static visual images on a two-dimensional surface. These creations include paintings, drawings, all types of prints, etchings, and lithographs, tapestries, mosaics, computer made pictures, and works of still photography. Graphic art can be made on canvas, wood, paper, animal skins, textiles, and digital devices, as well as directly adorn the walls of buildings and caves, as well as the surfaces of artifacts, such as pottery, armor, weaponry, and vehicles. In every case, the graphic artist modifies some surface to alter its reflectivity of light so as to produce a visual image for an audience who can see it. What frequencies, intensities, and acuities of reflected light are visible to rational agents is a contingent matter of evolution. Whatever be that range, graphic artists can produce within it visual images on a two-dimensional surface that are differentiated by the fundamental properties of light. These include the contrasts of light and shade, as well as the further distinctions of color. A graphic work minimally makes use of light and shade, in which case its images employ white, black, and various shades of grey. Some graphic media are restricted to these colorless differentiations, such as drawings with uncolored pencil, chalk, and charcoal, as well as black and white photography. Other graphic media offer the artist the full range of color, with all its further relationships of primary colors, color complementarity, and color harmony, as well as differences of saturation and intensity. Artists have all these color variations at their disposal when they use colored pencils, chalks, inks, pastels, watercolors, textile threads, mosaics, color film, digital pixels, and the varieties of paint, such as oil, tempera, and acrylic.

Photography has had no trouble sweeping the modern world as a mass instrument of public and private reportage and memorialization, but it has never ceased facing special challenges to qualify as a bonafide branch of graphic fine art.To begin with, photography, whether relying on light-sensitive chemicals or electronic sensors, uses a mechanical apparatus, a camera of some sort, that reproduces the visual image that is reflected off objects and is received through its lens. The camera’s automatic reproductive receptivity stands in decisive contrast to the creative process of all other arts. Admittedly, artists in the other media all use tools, be they devices of architectural draftsmanship, chisels for sculpting stone, brushes to apply paint, instruments to make music, or pens or keyboards to write literature. These tools, however, produce no work of art unless the artist applies them in a creatively constructive manner, independently giving the work of art its form and content. A photographer need only push a camera button to have it automatically reproduce whatever given visual image is reflected through its lens.

The possibilities of painting in the Symbolic style obviously build upon the shapes taken by Symbolic sculpture. The way Symbolic sculptors give plastic configuration to their worldview of the divine and human has an elemental role to play in Symbolic graphic art. This is because what sculptors isolate in free-standing forms painters transpose into a contiguous picture space that contextualizes figures in pictorial detail and adds to their contours the inner light of an animated subjectivity. Accordingly, such landmark sculptures as the ancient Egyptian statues of gods and royalty, the fantastical figures of Hindu epics, the serene Buddhas of ancient India and the Far East, and the deities of pre-Columbian America become recreated in the pictured light and dark and color of painted walls, tombs, scrolls, and fabrics.Moreover, Symbolic painting, like Symbolic sculpture, can draw upon the stories of religious texts and national epics, both written and oral, and visually recreate such verbal creations. Painters can illustrate them in pictorial representations that visually capture the same spirit that literature depicts in its linguistic imagination.

Despite the universal scope of literature, every literary creation makes use of languages that belong to specific linguistic communities, whose shared values are reflected in the works of fine art that express or challenge the world view that there prevails. Linguistic communities may encompass politically united peoples or include a plurality of nations that may or may not have fundamental self-understandings in common. In all these cases, the subject matter of literature and the corresponding forms that give it fit artistic expression will be particularized. Until a global culture arises that embraces universal institutions of self-determination, literature will appear as bodies of national or linguistically defined literary tradition, distinguished by the different local culture that temporarily pervades its creations. These particular differences have a philosophically determinate character only insofar as the distinctions of literary communities map onto the fundamental world views with which rational animals can construe their ultimate condition. Whether this happens is a contingent matter of history. Consequently, the realization of literature in the different fundamental artforms is not equivalent to a differentiation of “national” or linguistically distinct literatures. Hegel acknowledges this, noting that “the same variety of differences is prominent also in the case of the historical periods in which poetry is composed”, since the world view and corresponding conventions of a nation or supra-national linguistic group can develop historically, engendering transformations in literary treatment.

Lyric, Epic, and Drama have perennially been acknowledged to be the fundamental genres of literature, but their defining identity and status has been embroiled in controversy. Although the division of literary genres may seem to be a simple matter, with lyric consisting in short poems, epic consisting in long narrative poems, and drama being literature that is presented on a stage, these identifications cannot suffice. Not all short poems are lyric in character, for some, like ballades, narrate stories in a very non-lyrical fashion. Nor can literature preclude prose pieces that are as lyrical as versified texts. Not all epic consists in long narrative poetry, for epic narratives can come in varying lengths. Further, much, and, indeed, more and more of epic literature is prose, such as the short story, novella, and novel. Finally, not all drama is fit for stage presentation, nor are lyric and epic works strangers to the theater, given the performances that poets and rhapsodists can deliver. Indeed, in the wake of Chekhov and Brecht’s “epic theater”, it has become commonplace for plays to be considered more lyric or epic than dramatic.

Language poses great challenges and great opportunities as a medium of fine art. These challenges and opportunities apply to both form and content.The form of language is radically distinct from that of the visual arts and the art of sound because language is a purely conventional medium whose sensuous appearance consists of signs. The visual arts present viewers with visible imagery whose shape, shades, and colors directly convey either a pictorial transfiguration of reality or an expression of the artist’s emotions that have significance worthy of aesthetic appreciation. Music confronts its listeners with a soundscape whose rhythm, pitch, timbre, harmony, and thematic organization give direct expression to the profoundest movements of the soul. By contrast, language appears to its audience in intuitable marks that signify meanings that have no connection to the intuitable appearance of the signs that convey them. Symbols symbolize a meaning that is connected to the intuitable content of the symbol, as, for example, a lion, as apex predator of the savannah, can convey the royalty of a monarch. Signs, unlike symbols, have an intuitive content that bears no connection to what they signify. What signs mean is purely a construct of semiotic imagination, which chooses to connect a sign with a certain meaning. To become intersubjectively intelligible, that semiotic connection must be available to a plurality of rational animals who comprehend its semantic relation of sign and object signified. Consequently, unlike the visual arts and music, the fine art of language must rely upon semiotic imagination, shared by a linguistic community, to comprehend the meaning and imagery that words represent.

Music, more than any other fine art, seems to have a direct hold on our humanity. Whereas we can walk through buildings with little notice of their architecture, ignore sculptures and paintings that surround us in a gallery, disregard dance and theatrical performances we attend, and leave texts unread, the presence of music can immediately move us whether we like it or not, just as we may find ourselves breaking out in tune almost unconsciously.Music’s soundscape penetrates our soul so long as it can reach our hearing with sufficient artistry to make it a vessel of beauty, but understanding how it does so poses a perplexing challenge that the philosophy of fine art has labored hard to surmount.

All the preceding considerations apply to music as an individual art and are ingredient in any of its stylistic realizations. The systematic consideration of the musical medium must determine how these generic features of music become specifically actual in the different fundamental styles of the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms.Although Hegel, more than any other historical aesthetician, has investigated these particular modes of joining meaning and configuration, he has virtually nothing to say about how music takes on the stylistic forms expressing the fundamental world views that distinguish civilizations. In part this reflects his categorial conflation of artform and individual art, which leads him to identify music as an art essentially wedded to the Romantic artform. This explains why he makes no mention of music in a Symbolic style and only refers to music in a Classical style as an aesthetically deficient phenomena that at best serves to accompany Classical drama. As we have seen, Hegel does mention how ancient Greek music used certain modes, mentioned by Plato and Aristotle, but Hegel does not consider how these modes are employed in Greek music, let alone how their specific musical development has any connection to the Classical world view. If he did discuss that, as he does regarding Symbolic and Classical style architecture and Symbolic and Romantic style sculpture, Hegel would be undermining his claims that all these arts are exclusively tied to a single artform.

The final, most concrete, and most challenging part of aesthetics is the philosophy of the individual arts. Conceiving the individual arts concerns the different media made use of by artistic expression. Their investigation has aesthetic significance by addressing how different media distinctly embody the fundamental aspects of fine art. This involves determining how each medium gives special actuality first to what is common to fine art in general and then, secondly, to what is particular to the art forms, whose modes connect meaning and configuration in function of the world views that distinguish the basic options of civilization.

Hegel considers sculpture to be so fundamentally suited to the Classical style that he dismisses any Symbolic or Romantic sculptural efforts as devoid of aesthetically noteworthy achievement. Nonetheless, Hegel himself describes statuary embodying Symbolic and Romantic styles in ways that do unite meaning and configuration in accord with their underlying worldviews. Although these descriptions are much briefer than Hegel’s extensive account of Classical sculpture, they provide us with important guideposts for conceiving how sculptors can, and, of course, have created works of true artistic genius in Symbolic and Romantic styles.

The individual arts each seem to be a perennial option for artistic creation, at least so long as the means for producing them are available. The contingencies of technological development have spawned new arts, such as still photography, film, and video, which increasingly attract armies of practitioners, bountiful resources, and eager audiences, while other arts struggle to be practiced and noticed. Sculpture stands out as an art that seems to have lost the commanding presence it once enjoyed. Sculptors have not ceased to work and the turbulent rise and fall of new world orders has toppled many statues off their pedestals and pressed artists to replace them with new occupants. Nonetheless, few would deny that the stature of sculpture has starkly diminished compared to its venerated position in the Classical age of plastic creation. Then no temple could fail to enclose majestic statues, no battlefield could be left without a memorializing sculpture, and no artist could be more honored than a Myron, Polykleitos, Praxiteles or Phidias. And few could dispute that the accomplishment of such sculpture far eclipsed that of its contemporaneous painting.

A systematic investigation of the individual arts must begin with all the conceptual resources necessary to determine any individual art whatsoever, but not presuppose anything specific to an individual art.On the one hand, aesthetics must already dispose of two philosophical endowments. First, aesthetics must have at its disposal the entire gamut of logical, natural, and psychological determinations presupposed by and incorporated in the conception and reality of fine art. Second, aesthetics must have already established the features universal to aesthetic worth and the fundamental particular modes by which meaning and configuration can be united in the being, creation, and reception of fine art. Otherwise, the philosophy of fine art is in no position to comprehend what constitutes any individual art.

Lukács is not alone is singling out architecture for a special attachment to universal “social” interests and a corresponding adherence to artistic tradition. Nicolai Hartmann makes a similar argument. Given the ubiquitous need for buildings, the collective effort underlying architectural design and construction, and the public impact of architectural creation, it is particularly difficult for creators of architecture to deviate from established norms of design. As a consequence, Hartmann maintains, architects, more than sculptors, painters, or writers, find themselves compelled to operate within the style their community has embraced, rather than breaking free in a completely novel direction.

Few can deny that today motion pictures have become an art of unrivaled public attention and unrivaled mobilization of creative resources. Whether relying upon chemical or digital photography and video, with distribution through cinemas, television, and internet streaming, motion pictures have achieved global preeminence as the most popular and influential contemporary art.With the advance of sound recording technology, motion pictures have displaced opera and musical theater as the modern world’s dominant “total” art, combining the temporal sequencing of two-dimensional images with music and the spoken and written word. Cinema now kinetically encompasses not only the visual imagery of two-dimensional graphic art and photography, but that of architecture and sculpture, as well as that of mime and dance. Further adding music and language, cinema now “adapts” every musical and literary form to its motion pictures. The art of the moving image has thus become a total hybrid art, whose character cannot be understood without first comprehending the “pure”, unmixed arts of which it is composed. The systematic theory of the individual arts, which conceives the “pure” arts in their undivided singularity, provides the theoretical prerequisite for conceiving the aesthetic reality of the art of moving images in its full-fledged hybrid actuality as a “total” art that draws upon visual artistry, music, and literature.

All the preceding specifications of film and film genres pertain to pure cinema, that is, to motion pictures independently of any admixture of other artistic media. Consequently, these specifications all are incorporated in the hybrid forms of movies, where sound and language are added. Not only are they ingredient in every type and stage of hybrid cinema, but they set an aesthetic proviso. Namely, whatever other artistic media become conjoined to film, they must do so in ways that are compatible with the essential features of motion pictures as fine art. Moreover, the very limits of pure cinema provide the basis for the addition of sound and language.

This chapter examines why and how life undergoes an evolution of species, drawing upon Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, as well as more recent thinkers, such as Hans Jonas, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. The discussion begins by examining Aristotle’s ladder of life forms to shed light on the problems of how to differentiate the fundamental forms of life and how their differentiation bears upon the order of their emergence. The special individuality of living things is addressed in connection with their species being and how heredity plays a role in the diversification of species. The fundamental stages of evolutionary development are then outlined, taking into account how differences in metabolism affect the order of evolution. The chapter concludes by considering how rational animals can affect the course of evolution through ethical concern and genetic engineering.

This chapter examines what is essential to animal life and how animal life brings mind into the universe. The discussion draws upon Jonas’ account of how the mediated metabolism of animal life provides the basis for the perception at a distance, motility, and emotion that distinguishes animals from plants. After examining whether Jonas’ account involves anthropomorphic distortions, the chapter turns to Hegel’s parallel but more extensive account of animals as the consummating form of life. The chapter explores to what extent Hegel’s understanding of the developed subjectivity of animal life properly informs the basic anatomy, metabolism, and reproduction of animal life, and how it involves a mental existence necessarily absent in plants. With the completion of this examination, we have arrived at the threshold of the rational animal that is capable of developing universal biology.

This chapter investigates how nature becomes a biosphere, an inhabitable environment in which life can emerge and abide. Hegel’s account of the biosphere as a geological organism is examined critically in comparison with the Gaia Thesis, which considers the earth in analogy to a self-sustaining organism. The astrophysical and geological preconditions of the emergence of life are thereby identified in order to provide the basis for an account of the emergence of life. How life originates and why it first is unicellular and prokaryote in form is then considered. DNA and RNA are examined as particular, contingent examples of the chemical means that cells must acquire to sustain themselves and reproduce. The mistaken view that DNA operates as a blueprint is refuted.

This chapter focuses on how plant life comprises a fundamental form of life. The discussion begins by examining the contributions of Aristotle’s account of plant life. On this basis, the chapter turns to Hegel’s more developed treatment of plants, which conceives the distinctive metabolism, organic unity, and reproduction of plant life in respect to the incomplete subjectivity distinguishing plants. Each of these basic life processes of plants is examined in detail from the philosophical perspective of a universal botany.

This chapter turns to Kant’s account of the internal teleology life to conceive the basic life processes: the complementary functionality of organic unity, metabolism, and reproduction. The chapter further explores the dynamic self-centered individuality of the organism by drawing upon Jonas’ investigation of metabolism. The difference between machines and organisms is then examined, shedding light on why no organism can be a product of intelligent design and why DNA does not function as a blueprint of life.

The introduction introduces the project of a universal biology, which unravels the mystery of life by employing the categories specific to biological process, instead of relying on those suited for conceiving mechanics, electromagetism, and chemistry. Organic unity, metabolism, and reproduction all involve an internal teleology, with which we can understand what nature must provide to become a biosphere, how life can arise and evolve, and what fundamental forms life can take anywhere in the universe. The following chapters will address these issues by mining the important contributions of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel to the understanding of life.

This book defies the reigning dismissal of the philosophy of nature by turning to what Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel have had to say about nature and critically thinking through their arguments so as to reconstruct a comprehensive account of the universe. Aided by the contributions of more recent thinkers, such as Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Michael B. Foster, and Hans Jonas, Conceiving Nature shows how the mechanics of matter in motion, the physics of electromagnetism, and chemical process provide all that is needed for life to emerge and give rise to rational animals capable of knowing nature in truth. The work contains detailed discussions of much of Aristotle's writing on nature, of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature.