ABSTRACT
Art plays a complex role in Hegel's Phenomenology. On one hand, it is an object of analysis, and its role seems circumscribed within the logic of a narrative that treats it in terms of its capacity to provide us with an adequate presentation of the movement of the concept. Gradually emerging from out of its intertwining with religion and eventually reaching the state of “absolute art”, art appears a moment that belongs solely to Greece.
On the other hand, the Phenomenology draws on artworks as operators, epistemological grids or models for thought at strategically located junctures in the text, and in this respect, they are no tied to any particular stage. And in fact, the thesis that art would belong to the past just as much opens onto another understanding, which would be art's proper modernity: disengaging from religion, art enters into the sphere of aesthetic autonomy where its connections to philosophy remain to be decided.
The chapter explores the shifting role of art and artworks in the Phenomenology, as well as providing links to the later Berlin lectures on aesthetics and to various ways of interpreting Hegel's aesthetics. The thesisyuyu6 of the “pastness” of art, it is argued, might most fruitfully be read as prefiguring the new position of art in modernity.
