The cunning of odysseus: a theme in hegel, lukacs, and adorno

Martin Donoughothe cunning of odysseus: a themein hegel, lukacs, and adorno

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&dquo;The realm of fine art is the realm of absolute spirit.&dquo;’ Soruns the well-known declaration near the beginning ofHegel’s Aesthetics, for which project indeed it is ax-

iomatic (or as Hegel puts it &dquo;lemmatic&dquo;). For its validationHegel refers us to his Encyclopaedia, where art is putalongside religion and philosophy, all of them forms of ab-solute spirit.2 Yet the surprising thing is that, far from

demonstrating or at least confirming its absolute status,Hegel there appears systematically to reduce art to

something finite, immediate and relative. Thus it is saidon the one hand to be a fact of common existence, fallingapart into the duality of production and reception, of artistand audience; on the other, art becomes merely the &dquo;intui-tion&dquo; (Anschauung) of what is already given (§556). Thishardly squares with its claim to be called absolute.

The contradiction is too large a theme for a brief treat-ment. I shall instead focus on just one aspect, namely, theway in which Hegel treats the idea of &dquo;nature.&dquo; As Adornopoints out, accurately enough, &dquo;Hegel deduces art...fromthe inadequacy of nature.&dquo;’ ¡ Art qualifies as absolute

precisely because (in a sense that needs much filling out)it has overcome natural limitation. But once again the En-cyclopaedia tends to take away with one hand what it hasgranted with the other, by systematically aligning art andGreek art-religion with nature (physis, or the given). Art issaid merely to imitate a natural formation, on which ac-count we may call it mimesis of nature (§558, Anm.). It is

said to originate in natural inspiration or subjectivegenius, a product of a mere technical working uponnatural matter (§560). In sum, for all that Hegel’s purposeconsists of raising religion above art on an absolute scale,



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little remains of his original contention placing art une-quivocally beyond the natural realm. Rather art is judgedinferior just because it is still immured within nature.

I shall argue that this perplexity forms the dialectical cen-tre of Hegel’s conception of art and aesthetics. My mainaim, however, will be to argue that it sheds light also onMarxist aesthetics, in particular upon the opposing posi-tions represented by Georg Lukacs and T. W. Adorno.

Nature has traditionally been the thorn in the flesh of

Marxist theory, as it were. That is no less the case foraesthetics: nature is problematic for both Lukacs and

Adorno, though in very different ways. The early Lukacs,for example, adopted a Schillerian view of man’s unitywith nature, but later shifted to a position holding art to beabout human socio-historical reality and not at all aboutnatural man. If Luk~cs’ Theory of the Novel (1916) beginsfrom Hegel’s thesis that art is past, Adorno on the con-trary begins from the thesis of the pastness of Hegeliantheory itself. Adorno resists what he sees as the sub-

jugating of nature to subjectivity in Hegel’s aesthetics,arguing that art imitates, not social reality, but nature.

I shall argue that as we move from the young Lukacs’romantic utopianism through his later humanist realismto Adorno’s astringent critical theory, we witness anitinerary which does no more than elaborate momentsfound in Hegel himself: in his organicist description of artand the Ideal art presents, in his sublating of nature intospirit, and finally (and most surprisingly perhaps) in his

ascribing of a &dquo;negative dialectics&dquo; to art, Hegel’s argu-ment foreshadows all these adventures in the Marxist

dialectic of art, adventures which I argue revolve aroundthe polarity nature-versus-spirit. Accordingly I shall first

introduce Hegel’s theory of the Ideal, so influential onMarx as well as on Lukacs, then take up Lukacs’ doubleposition, early and late, followed by Adorno’s critique ofEnlightenment anthropomorphism. In conclusion I shall

argue that, properly interpreted, Hegel’s aesthetics under-pins this last development too.

’

i .

&dquo;A natural perspective, that is and is note

Hegel’s Aesthetics designates as the theme proper to artthe Ideal, and more specifically, the classical Ideal

located in ancient Greece and its ethical constitution (Sitt-lichkeit). The question running through the present sec-



15

tion will be this: whether Sittlichkeit forms part of or elselies in opposition to the realm of nature.

If Hegel’s answer to this question is ambiguous, that

derives in the first place from the ambiguity he sees in theterm ’nature’ itself, or rather, from its double ambiguity.Thus, on the one hand we speak of man in his natural

state (Naturzustand), his animal aspect; on the other wespeak of human nature or &dquo;essence,&dquo;-e.g., the nature ofman lies in his spiritual, rational qualities.&dquo; Yet even in thelatter sense ambiguity persists. For if we take a spiritual-ly, humanly constituted existence such as Sittlichkeit, it

can still give the appearance of being organic, given,hence &dquo;natural;&dquo; that is why Aristotle, and following him,Hegel, could describe ethos (character, custom) as a &dquo;se-

cond nature.&dquo;&dquo; More generally, all systems based uponhuman rather than natural laws display such a self-subsistent appearance, as a world &dquo;of spirit brought forthout of itself like a second nature.’&dquo; And as a final twist,spirit may appear in alien form as a world opposed tospirit: the world of &dquo;culture&dquo; (Bildung), which fetters the in-dividual less by natural instincts than by social relationsand roles (on which account Lukács terms it &dquo;second

nature,&dquo; though in a sense quite different from Hegel’s).The world of spirit may thus seem like nature not justbecause it is given but equally because, as in the state ofnature, it imposes an external necessity.

This general ambiguity bears directly upon Hegelianaesthetics, I would argue, for ambiguity is built in to

Hegel’s various accounts of the classical Ideal, as weshall now see.

On the face of it, the Ideal escapes the realm of nature,just as the Greeks’ &dquo;religion of beauty&dquo; transcends onen-tal nature-religion: the Greeks worshipped man, humanrather than natural beauty. Yet what is equally clear is thatthe Ideal is thought of as divine, or (as Goethe put it)theomorphic rather than anthropomorphic. Beauty simplyis, as something aesthetically given, ordained by the godor nature. (The deeper, the dialectical, point for Hegel is

that such an aesthetic existence is posited as given; I

shall return to the relation between &dquo;for us&dquo; and &dquo;for itself&dquo;in section iv, below.)

The ambivalent status that Hegel accords Greek civiliza-tion may be documented more readily in such texts as the

Philosophy of Religion or the Philosophy of History thanin the Aesthetics.&dquo; That is hardly surprising, however,when we recall the trouble Hegel there takes to distance



16

art and its Ideal from nature or merely natural beauty. Artand the Ideal, as it were, reiterate Oedipus’ solution to theriddle posed by the Egyptian sphinx, and hence by natureitself: the answer is &dquo;Man.&dquo; The beauty of the Ideal is fun-damentally human, just as the work of art originates fromman, as a communication directed to other men.&dquo; Yet

despite this one-sidedness in Hegel’s approach, I hope inwhat follows to show that things are not so clear-cut, andthat Hegel’s very terms embody the ambivalence I have

been talking about.

Take for instance the central category of Hegel’s Ideal,&dquo;action&dquo; (Handlung). In context this means ethical (sitt-liche) action, that is, deeds performed in conformity withsome absolute norm or a divine sanction. The heroic

agent identifies himself and his willed deed with the realmof the given, even though &dquo;for us&dquo; it is plain that he is

humanly responsible. Ethical action is thus almost a con-tradiction in terms, one which can persist only through anelision of the agent’s thesis into the realm of physis.&dquo;’

We may trace the same ambiguity in a more general termwhich is important also for Lukacs’ aesthetic theory,namely, the &dquo;universal world-condition&dquo; (Weltzustand),that is, the indeterminate basis from which ethical action

begins. It is clear that Hegel equates &dquo;Zustand&dquo; with asocial rather than natural state of affairs.&dquo; &dquo;Weltzustand&dquo;is defined, for example, as the objective existence of thewill (13,235;179). Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie makes &dquo;will&dquo;

fundamental to right:

The basis of right is, in general, spirit; its precise placeand point of origin is the will...the system of right is therealm of freedom made actual, the world of spirit brought tforth out of itself like a second nature. 1 2

If Hegel’s words once again recall Aristotle’s, the con-text - a clear demarcation of nature and freedom - none-

theless effects a decisive break with ancient natural law

theory, which, in its modern version beginning with

Hobbes and continuing via Rousseau to Kant and Fichte,asserts man’s rights against nature while still callingthese rights &dquo;natural.&dquo; Man is &dquo;by nature&dquo; rational, hencefree from nature (the first ambiguity noted above). I mightadd that this inversion of natural law theory is retained bythe Rechtsphilosophie, the subtitle of which runs

&dquo;Naturgesetz und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse.&dquo;&dquo; ¡

The point here is that &dquo;world-condition,&dquo; as a spiritual con-dition of will and of right, is wholly free from determina-tion by nature.



17

Because art properly portrays such a social world-

condition, Hegel belittles genres such as the idyll(13,250-1;190-1) or the harking back to a mythical &dquo;GoldenAge&dquo; (13,335-6;259). These maintain too shallow an in-

terest for us; the loss of a sheep, unrequited love in a

pastoral setting, etc., are not what art is all about. (Lukácswe might note also demotes the idyll, using the same ex-amples as Hegel though with more a subtle reason, viz.,that it amounts to a merely wishful fusion of form andlife. 14 ) Art portrays human achievement, not just a happycondition in which we happen to find ourselves. The prop-er centre of the Ideal is what Hegel calls the &dquo;individualself-sufficiency&dquo; (individuelle Selbst5ndigkeit) of a heroicage, (13,236;179). It is this that constitutes what Hegelelsewhere calls the living or beautiful individuality of an-cient Greece. Although Hegel does not expressly draw thecomparison, we may equate this heroic world with theworld of primitive epic&dquo; and further with the tribal or

familial ethic of Sittlichkeit. What makes this worldaesthetic is the perceived sensuous unity of individualand community. Not merely does the heroic agent identifyhimself with the whole, he also experiences it as his own

deed and work. He is neither anarchically egoistic nor asyet obligated to a legal and so external authority: he sim-ply embodies and is seen to embody the universal ethicalnorms (aret6, says Hegel, not yet virtus). The justice in-

herent in such a condition is upheld through blood

vengeance rather than by institutionalized punishment;offences are perceived as being against what the Greekscalled &dquo;geras,&dquo; not yet against the rights or honour of theparticular person.

It will now be easier to grasp the ambiguity implicit withinthis epic world-condition. Nature is excluded from the

ethical, as the fate against which the hero must prove hisworth. Yet the hero’does not so much act as stand for hisdivine/familial norm; he remains static, more like a pieceof sculpture. Significantly Hegel reserves the word &dquo;ac-

tion&dquo; for the drama alone, subsuming epic to fate and tohappenstance or adventure (Begebenheit). The epic hero’scharacter is like his fate: given not made. One can wellunderstand why Lukacs calls the world of epic an &dquo;em-

pirical totality.&dquo;11> It is, as Hegel would say, like a secondnature.

To the heroic world-condition Hegel opposes two featurestypical of the post-Hellenic world. The first is that of a

legal regime (gesetzlichen Ordnung: 13,239;182) of the

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plicit already in the Greek polis with its competition be-tween norms and between familial and political authorityin particular. The second is that of modern social

organization, characterized by ramified functions and

anonymous interpersonal relations. This last, as a sec-ond, contrasting world-condition, Hegel calls &dquo;present-day prosaic conditions&dquo; (13,253;193), &dquo;the prose of theworld&dquo; (13,199;150), or the state of &dquo;universal cultivation&dquo;

(allgemeine Bildung: 13,336;260). But whether as abstractlaw or as modern society, the whole appears set overagainst the individual as an external necessity whichhems him in just as effectively as natural forces do. Againone can readily appreciate why LukAcs (if not Hegelhimself) dubs this world of alienated spirit a &dquo;secondnature.&dquo;

’Hegel’s contrasting of individual self-sufficiency and theprose of life has notably influenced Marxist theory, andlargely because it is formulated in terms of labour. True,Hegel describes the epic hero as self-possessed in otherrespects as well; in demeanour, deed and speech, thehero is as he appears, which is to say, the universal ethos.Nevertheless unalienated labour, work, remains the moststriking feature of the epic world, just as alienated labourand class division are prime features of modern industrialsociety. The several vivid passages in which Hegel por-trays the contrast have often enough been cited by Marx-ist commentators, and I need not reproduce them here I

would just point out that, in his philosophy of art at least,Hegel’s critique of society is aesthetic rather than

political, even if, with respect to an ultimate rationality,the two coincide. The reason why neither rich nor poor areaesthetically presentable is that they are unfree, bothsituated in a world they have not themselves made.

Adorno remarks that Hegel allots art the task of removingstrangeness (das Fremde) from the world.’&dquo; But modern

times are unfavourable to the production of art: the alienappearance of society proves even more intractable thanthat of nature itself, which can at least seem beautiful.

This thematic opposition of poetic and prosaic worlds, ofself-possessed and alienated spirit, has its formal

equivalent in Hegel’s comparison of epic and novel.

Where epic depicts the heroic world of the classical Ideal,the genre best able to do justice to the &dquo;prose of life&dquo; is

itself prosaic in form: &dquo;the novel, the modern bourgeois(burgerliche) epopoeia&dquo; (15,392;1092). Such comparison ofthe two genres was by Hegel’s time almost a com-

monptace.&dquo; What is new and most striking, however, is



19

Hegel’s identification of the novel as a displaced epic.&dquo;Displacement&dquo; is Northrop Frye’s word for the gradualshifting of an original mythic mode or pattern towardsrealism.l&dquo; Frye further notes that this distancing ordinarilylends a certain parodistic or ironic atmosphere, to theform if not to the content; Lukacs similarly views the novelin an ironic perspective.!1

In Hegel’s theory of epic, the hero comes face to face withalien nature, whether as fate or as an Oriental power (theEast being the realm of nature). This original patternundergoes successive displacements, first as medieval

romance, then as secularized tales of chivalry and adven-ture (and their parody by Ariosto and Cervantes), and final-ly in the shape of the modern novel. 12 Here the scene of

struggle has shifted from nature to the pseudo-nature ofbourgeois society, against which background the hero’sadventures are presented. The immediate model is the oldchivalric ideal; but let me quote Hegel’s own words:

The novel is chivalry taken seriously once more and madean actual theme. The contingency of external existencehas been transformed Into the fixed, secure regime ofbourgeois society and the state, so that now police,courts, the army, government take the place of the

chimerical ends the knight set for himself. Hence theknightly quality of the active heroes in modern novels also

changes. As individuals with their subjective ends of love,honour, ambition, or with their ideals of world reform, theystand opposed to this subsisting order and prose of ac-tuality, which puts difficulties in their way at every turn.So sublective wishes and demands are, in this opposition,inflated to Immeasurable heights; for each finds beforehim an enchanted world quite alien to him, a world hemust battle because it stands in his way and Instead of

giving in to his passions inflexibly and fixedly interposes,as a hindrance, the will of a father, an aunt, bourgeoisrelations (borgerliche Verhältnisse), etc. Young people inparticular constitute these modern knights, who mustforce their way through the way of the world (den Weltlauf)which realizes itself rather than their ideals. They regard itas a misfortune that there Is family, bourgeois society,state, laws, professional businesses, etc., on the groundthat these substantive relations in life cruelly oppose withtheir limits the ideal and infinite rights of the heart. Nowthe thing is to breach this order of things, to change theworld, to Improve it or at least despite it to carve out a

heaven on earth: to seek the ideal girl...to find her andthen to woo her away from her wicked relatives or other



20

unpleasantnesses (Missverhä/tnissen), to conquer and

bully them. But in the modern world these fights arenothing more than an apprenticeship (Lehrjahre), the

education of the individual for existent actuality....However much he may have quarrelled with the world orhave been pushed about in it, he usually wins his girl atthe last along with some sort of position; he marries herand becomes as good a philistine as anyone else. Thewoman takes charge of the household, children do not failto arrive, and the adored wife-at first the only one, an

angel-looks pretty much like any other; the professionprovides labour and vexation, marriage brings its burdens(Hauskreuz), and so everything, the whole headache

(Katzenjammer), is there (14,219-20;593). ,

Hegel’s tone, as well as the fact that the descriptioncomes at the end of a series of displacements, togetherseem to dispel any thoughts that he believed reconcilia-tion, social or aesthetic, could be achieved in the novel.The novelist’s and his hero’s epic mission is thoroughlyundermined by a constituent irony. Nevertheless,elsewhere in the Aesthetics Hegel does seem to allowthat reconciliation between the ’poetry of the heart’ andthe ’prose of life’ is possible (if at the risk of preciosity andartifice).~’ To argue the point would require a separateessay, however, here I wish only to indicate its bearingupon LukAcs’ variant positions. Whereas the youngLukAcs sides with the view that sees in the novel elements

of displacement and irony, in his later writings he took thealternative view, seeing reconciliation as conceivable andnot generically doomed from the start: society is spiritual-ly, humanly constituted after all, so that the individual

ought in principle to be able to discover his own imagethere.&dquo;

Before proceeding to Lukacs, however, let me summarizethe present section. We observed how for Hegel the worldof spirit can seem natural or given simply because societyacquires a certain substantial weight, as a &dquo;second

nature.&dquo; Yet this may occur in two distinct ways. Either

society is given as the second nature Aristotle ascribed tocustom: a state in harmony with an individual who

discovers himself there; the world of Sittlichkeit,&dquo;beautiful individuality,&dquo; the epic or classical Ideal. Or it

seems given in the way fate confronts the epic hero, ab ex-tra : the world of positive law; political economy, complexsocial relations, or what Hegel calls prose and Lukacssecond nature (because as exigent as nature proper). Thefirst sort of givenness is portrayed in epic, the second in



21

the novel. But I should add that both sorts are implicit in

epic, which opposes ethical being and Nemesis; I shallreturn to their dialectic in section iv.

ii I

The Theory of the Novel, written in 1914-5 and first

published in article form in 1916, is a seminal document,not merely in its focusing of a number of influencesbesides Hegel, (Simmel, Weber, Kant, Schiller, Novalisand Kierkegaard among them) but also for its 6clat amongGerman intellectuals.°° The presence of Hegel in the

essay hardly needs documentation. It is all the more per-vasive for being hidden (it is acknowledged only in the

preface to a 1963 reissue). Besides the controlling modelof epic givenness there is the nominal theme of

&dquo;transcendental homelessness,&dquo; which, while derived

directly from Novalis and Schiller, is also thoroughlyHegelian: we find it e.g., in Hegel’s descriptions of the&dquo;unhappy consciousness&dquo; and of the &dquo;Elend&dquo; that besets

the Roman world after the fall of Greece. Lukacs’ defini-

tion of the novel as &dquo;the epic of a world that has beenabandoned by God&dquo; (88) recalls the Phenomenology andits citing of &dquo;the grief that expresses itself through theharsh words, God is dead.&dquo; (The grief, I might add, is overthe death of the Greek god.) Even earlier, in Glauben undWissen (1802), Hegel refers to Pascal’s description of

nature (&dquo;un Dieu perdu,&dquo; &dquo;Gottlosigkeit&dquo;); a theme taken uponce more by a follower of the early Luk~cs, Lucien

Goldmann, in his study of the tragic Weltanschauung en-titled Le dieu cache.2’‘

Lukacs’ debt to Hegel nevertheless extends beyond a

classical model of organic integrity or the identification ofa subsequent worldliness. As we observed, Hegel linksthe novel to its ancestor, the epic, via a series of formal

displacements, and it is this that supplies LukAcs with a

guiding principle. For all romantic genres the problematicis this: how can the &dquo;hero&dquo; restore an epic &dquo;roundedness&dquo;to the world? He must give a &dquo;sense&dquo; to an alien reality sothat it both &dquo;makes sense&dquo; and is &dquo;sensed&dquo; as a unity(Lukacs plays on the aesthetic ambiguity just as Hegeldoes). But because the resultant form can only be

something imposed, not given, both the task and its

representation in art appear in an ironic light (againLukacs agrees with Hegel here). The hero is not really ahero, merely an agent who imitates the heroic ideal.

Many other Hegelian motifs and examples might be



22

traced in Lukacs’ text: the treatment of &dquo;humour;&dquo; the

similarity between what Lukacs calls the novel of abstractidealism and the phenomenon Hegel calls &dquo;the law of the

heart&dquo; or (as a third world-condition mediant between

heroic and prosaic) &dquo;the restoration of individual self-

sufficiency ;&dquo; the association of symbolism with natureand with estrangement; and so on.!7 It is easy enough tohunt out Luk6cs’ sources. But that would be an activityeven more fruitless than usual, for LukAcs displays an in-

genuity and critical subtlety quite his own. I want insteadto examine how LukAcs approaches the term &dquo;nature&dquo; andto ask in what sense the epic totality is &dquo;natural.&dquo;

Fredric Jameson has already alerted us to the way such aquestion works itself out dialectically in Lukacs’ subse-quent development.21 What is at first seen as a

metaphysical relation of man and externality, subject andobject, becomes historicized as the relation of men to

their conditioned society. The result is to shift Lukacs’ in-terests from a metaphysical typology of genres to

criticism of the realist novel. And there is a parallel shift inhis aesthetic theory, formulated some years later, towardsa stress on historicism and anthropomorphism.

As Jameson notes, Luk~cs’ treatment of &dquo;nature&dquo; is

especially clear in his comments on Tolstoyan epic at theend of The Theory of the Novel. Writing of Tolstoy’s prob-lematic return to ancient epic, Lukacs remarks that

Tolstoy was seeking an idealized nature, i.e., nature asnature and in deliberate opposition to society, a societyhe utterly rejected. By contrast, &dquo;The natural organicworld of the old epics was...a culture whose organiccharacter was its specific quality&dquo; (146), i.e., something in-trinsic and not posited. It was nature, but not as nature.Hence the paradox that to pose the question, Nature orCulture? is already to betray the sense in which epic isnature. The paradox stems from the problem of form itself.To speak of epic form is already to have moved beyond it;form originates only through separation from life. Lukácscomments that &dquo;thought can never arrive at a real defini-tion of life,&dquo; for which reason &dquo;the philosophy of art is somuch more adequate to tragedy than it is to the epic&dquo; (48);drama already contains a transcendent element, namely,the values and goals set in conflict. On the same groundsLukács argues that &dquo;any resurrection of the Greek world isa more or less conscious hypostatization of aesthetics in-to metaphysics&dquo; (38). As a corollary we might see Lukacsas attempting the reverse, viz. inserting formal distinc-tions into a totality where form is purely immanent, while



23

denying that this can properly be done.

Hegel too sees the ancient Greek world as aesthetic andcontrasts to its epic &dquo;Begebenheit&dquo; the dramatic collisionof aims and deeds emerging with the polis. Yet this

similarity should not mask the fact that Hegel’s version ofthe &dquo;paradox of origin&dquo; differs fundamentally from Lukacs’in assuming that emergent form and determinacy revealsthe truth immanent in indeterminate immediacy: thoughtcan define life. By contrast, Lukács holds fast to the ex-perience of the epic hero, viz., that form and life are con-tinuous with each other. Of course, to phrase it thus is

already to adopt a philosophical position such as Hegel’s.For Lukacs &dquo;nature&dquo; is that which cannot be mentioned

directly, or rather that which can be named or perceivedas such only in a necessarily hypostatized or degenerateform. Abstract symbolism, for example the symbolismused in drama (48-9), is a natural element (much as forHegel). Again, nature appears thematically for the lyric,the task of which is to fuse an inherently &dquo;senseless&dquo;

nature into momentary unity with the soul, so raisingnature to a transparently meaningful symbol (63) andrecapturing as it were the original unity found in epic. Forboth drama and lyric, nature is a moment of opposition, adeterminate form. In epic, by contrast, form seems imma-nent in nature; nature as such does not exist. Lukacs

names it only by claiming that there is in the hero’s accep-tance of an empirically given totality something &dquo;natural&dquo;

(49-59). The epic world is natural.

Such a miraculous being-at-one with nature contrasts ab-solutely with what Luk6cs terms the &dquo;second nature&dquo; of

the man-made structures of modern society, so rigid as todefy any lyric attempts at fusion of self and object. Wehave already noted the Hegelian provenance of the idea (ifnot the term). Here is Lukacs’ description:

This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yetsenseless like the first: it Is a complex of senses, mean-

ings, which has become rigid and strange and which nolonger awjkes interiority(as with the lyric]; It Is a charnel-house of long-dead interiorities...(64).

Here LukAcs announces a topic he will treat at greatlength in his History and Class Consciousness (written in1922), the phenomenon of reification.=&dquo; In that work he ex-pressly links his ideas with Hegel’s definition of the

romantic, post-Hellenic world as a state of universal

cultivation (Bildung), spirit in alienation. But the source isobvious even in the Theory of the Novel.



24

Now, as I have said, it is precisely this alienated world, theworld of bourgeois society, that concerns the later, Marx-ist Lukacs, both as critic (mainly of the novel) and astheorist (of art in general). Paradoxically, his materialistconcept of dialectic leads him to bring out how manmakes his own history, though on an independent and ob-jective basis. In place of the given harmony of man withnature ascribed to the epic world we have the moment ofspecifically human enterprise, the fashioning of an in-

tegrated existence. Of course this shift was thematic evenfor The Theory of the Novel: after the fall from an epic im-manence, sense and form had to be invented rather than

discovered. But what Lukacs now does is broaden the

scope of epic so as to include human history tout court,while putting the emphasis on an achieved society in-

stead of a given nature. Both emphases are warranted bythe ambiguous status of the Hegelian Ideal, as we haveseen: the &dquo;living individuality&dquo; or &dquo;individual self-

sufficiency&dquo; of epic pertains as much to homo faber as tonatural man. What is not warranted by the Hegelian modelof epic reconciliation (Vers6hnung) of subject and objectis its unmediated extension to modern conditions, condi-tions LukAcs had previously seen only in a tragic or ironiclight. For Hegel, modernity exists in a different mode fromthe ancient world.

Lukacs’ reasoning, though Marxist in inspiration, is never-theless indirectly Hegelian. For on the one hand it can be

argued that modern society is not merely alien to man butequally man’s self-alienation and hence that it harboursthe possibility of freedom, i.e., reconciliation with reality.But whereas Hegel locates such freedom solely in a

philosophical mode, a conceptual insight into the ra-

tionality of the present and of the state in particular,Lukacs thinks that art too can glimpse this ultimatefreedom behind the reification it depicts. On the otherhand, Hegel allows that the novel can after all present theindividual’s reconciliation with the rational elements in

objective spirit; this is the second interpretation of Hegelremarked upon at the end of the last section. The upshotfor Lukacs’ theory is that the realist novel displays a splitallegiance, to the hero’s utopian protest against prosaic,reified existence, and also to the fundamental oneness ofman with objective totality.

In many ways the dilemmas inherent in such a theory areprefigured in the references The Theory of the Novelmakes to Wilhelm Meister (132-143), which Lukacs

presents as a precarious and not wholly successful com- at UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA on August 31, 2015psc.sagepub.comDownloaded from


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promise between the two basic novel forms, the novel of&dquo;abstract idealism&dquo; and that of &dquo;romantic disillusion.&dquo; Thefirst type was said to correspond to Hegel’s third world-condition, &dquo;the restoration of individual self-sufficiency&dquo;which Hegel associates (as does Lukacs) with Don Quix-ote and with the dramatic heroes of the young Goethe andSchiller. HI Wilhelm Meister suggests to Lukacs the possi-ble unification, in form and content, of the poetry of theheart and the prose of the world. The remarks he offersforeshadow not merely his later admiration for Weimar

classicism but also the problem his theory of the novel(and of art generally) was to face: how can the individualbe &dquo;educated&dquo; into society without losing a certain criticaldistance? how can he adopt a Goethean attitude of

&dquo;resignation&dquo; without becoming as good a philistine asanyone else? in sum, is the ideal of &dquo;Humanit5t&dquo; tenable?

By defining art from the very outset as anthropomorphic,the later Lukacs tends simply to beg this question.&dquo; Artbecomes a document of man’s objective self-constitutionin history, and thereby also a means to self-awareness(a function signalled with the Hegelian term

&dquo;Fursichsein&dquo;). ‘= On the face of it, this documentary/cogni-tive approach resembles Hegel’s. Yet there are crucial dif-ferences, and I shall conclude the present section by in-

dicating the two main ones.

In the first place, for Hegel such a universal humanism isonly one side of art, if a progressively more importantside.&dquo; Hegel presents romantic art as a dilution of

thematics from the eternal &dquo;pathe&dquo; of Greek art to therealm of the human in general as well as to nature as such(landscape painting, for example). Thus Lukacs defendswhat for Hegel is an important aspect of romantic art

while lending it the prestige Hegel (and the early Lukacs)saw in epic individuality alone. We can illustrate this

strategy via what Lukács calls &dquo;the central category ofaesthetics,&dquo; the category of &dquo;Besonderheit&dquo; (which meansboth the particular and the typical). ‘~ For Hegel, the epichero essentially is the universal of his clan, his guidingpathos, the god-given law. Lukacs clings to this unifica-tion of single subject and universal substance, only nowuniversality is attributed to any social grouping what-soever. Hegel’s individual has been displaced into the

typically human, except that now the displacement is notfelt as such, as a transformation or declension; quite tothe contrary, the one simply borrows the aesthetic

prestige of the other.

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26

relation between form and content. Despite some remarkson the formal function of art, the main thrust of Lukacs’

exposition in Die Eigenart des i4sthetischen is that art

documents human activity and existence; hence the em-phasis on mimesis and realism.&dquo; The possibility of cri-

tique-the gap between ideal and reality, rebel and

bourgeois, romantic and philistine-substitutes for the

tension earlier generated by the separation of form fromlife accompanying the process of disenchantment anddisplacement. LukAcs’ anthropology simply offers a

secularized version of Hegel while ignoring the historicalprocess of secularization itself; an omission all the more

astonishing when one thinks of The Theory of the Novel.Although it is true that by &dquo;mirroring&dquo; (Widerspiegelung)Lukacs means more than sheer copying, the relation ofform and content is both less antagonistic and less fertilethan in the earlier work.

For Hegel art was always more than documentation of theIdeal: it amounted to a form of worship. Moreover, thoughwe can hardly enter into this, Hegel posited a complexdialectic between form and content based on their both

comprising a show, a semblance.&dquo; Through the workingout of this dialectic art becomes the showing up of thisshow and hence essentially something past. As a resultits religious function is lost: we no longer bend the knee,etc. The humanist strand surfacing in romantic art is onesymptom of this secularization of art. In its final phase artcomes to display solely the virtuosity of its maker or elsedegenerates into the cult of genius which worships theicon of Humanus in a parody of the original art-religion.&dquo;Art strictly speaking, (which for Hegel is classical art

alone) combines what Walter Benjamin termed &dquo;Kultwert&dquo;and &dquo;Austellungswert.&dquo;’&dquo; Luk~cs’ exclusively humanistand documentary approach denies the former altogether.So much is this the case that in an article on Hegel’s con-tribution to the sociology of art, T. V1r’. Metscher, a discipleof LukAcs, commits the solecism of writing Benjamin’s&dquo;Kultwert&dquo; as &dquo;Kulturwert&dquo; (i.e., aesthetic reception). B’1Nothing could better demonstrate the foreshortening ofhistorical perspective encouraged by Lukacs’ mature

aesthetics.

From Adorno’s viewpoint - and, I shall argue, from Hegel’stoo- Lukacs’ position is &dquo;human, all too human.&dquo; Let us

now turn to Adorno’s critique of &dquo;individual self-

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27

iii

As a young man Adorno was greatly influenced by TheTheory of the Novel, especially its utopian strain and thetheme of &dquo;reification&dquo; further developed in History andClass-Consciousness. He was less impressed by LukAcs’subsequent shift to humanism and realism. It is easy tosee why. Adorno declares himself on the side of naturerather than spirit. Art is for him imitation of nature andnatural beauty; if at the same time it seems to be about a

humanly constituted reality and to presuppose the sub-jugation of nature to man, that is just a bourgeois illusion.This general verdict applies equally to the mature Lukacs’view that art and its content are specifically human. Weobserved how Lukacs came to interpret the epic world insocial rather than natural terms and to extend this inter-

pretation to all art and all aesthetic content. Since the

Hegelian Ideal can be similarly interpreted, it is no sur-

prise that Hegel’s aesthetics also comes under attack. ForAdorno, the epic hero’s subjugation of nature is as objec-tionable as the corresponding aesthetic claim that the art-ist sublates nature into spirit.

In Adorno’s view, Idealism had uncritically assumed asgiven the absolute identity of reason and reality. Such asupposed identity is mere semblance, however, serving toconceal (a) the non-identical (nature) resistant to all

philosophical mediation and (b) the process by whichnature has been suppressed by and in favour of an om-

nipotent subjectivity.&dquo;’ The deceit is double; not only is

identity imposed but it is also said to be there absolutely,immediately, as it were &dquo;by nature.&dquo;

Adorno’s attack on Hegel’s aesthetics is less involved

than this general critique of Idealism, perhaps because, indeducing art from the inadequacy of nature, Hegel doesnot hide his view that art is an imposition upon nature. (Infact Hegel’s aesthetic theory is not as simple as Adornolikes to think, since it contains its own indictment of an-

thropomorphism, its own negative dialectics. This is a

point I shall return to; for the moment I shall continue withAdorno’s charge against Hegel.)

The argument of Hegel’s Aesthetics appears simply todenigrate nature in order to elevate art to absolute status.This strategy Adorno tries to unmask. For example,Hegel’s argument that natural beauty is somethingnecessarily prosaic, abstract and formal fails (Adornoalleges) to see that prose is but a reflexion of the disen-



28

chantment of the world wrought by an aggressive ra-

tionalism, i.e., spirit. His elevating of art above nature failsto see that this is a habit typical of bourgeois in-

dividualism. He fails to see, because he is afraid to see,that what nature really calls for is the reawakening of an&dquo;archaic&dquo; condition lost to us precisely through the sup-pression of nature. Thus viewed, nature in fact holds outthe hope of reconciliation, and thereby becomes the

bearer of utopian promise in much the same way as in TheTheory of the Novel. Adorno’s treatment of Hegel accord-ingly has two aspects: he wishes to unmask both natureand its ideologically motivated denial in the Aesthetics.

The one harbours a future for man, the other embodies an

Enlightenment or rationalist prejudice the exposure ofwhich will, in Nietzschean fashion, help to liberate manfrom humanism. Adorno reverses Hegel’s claim that artreflects a manmade reality: &dquo;Art [is] instead imitation ofnature, imitation of natural beauty.&dquo;&dquo;

Now, we have observed that Hegel gives ample warrantfor such an anthropocentric reading. After all, he definesart as the manipulation of nature and the fashioning ofsigns. Even more clearly, the &dquo;individual self-sufficiency&dquo;that forms the centre-piece of the Ideal results from

spirit’s bending of nature to its will; this moment reap-pears in Lukacs’ own aesthetics. Of course, Hegel alsoholds that such &dquo;individuality&dquo; is worlds apart from

modern individualism with its stress on the particular per-son. But the cunning of Adorno’s strategy is that he

assimilates one to the other without more ado. In some

ways it is the reverse of Lukacs’ extension of epic self-

sufficiency to the whole world of art; Adorno pushescapitalism back to include the epic world of ancient

Greece. He locates the roots of bourgeois individualismas far back as the Greeks’ ideological assumption thatman has subjugated nature. Hence the patentanachronism (in Dialectic of Enlightenment) that portraysOdysseus as a proto-capitalist who by his cunning waysturns nature to his own ends while pretending they arenature’s.11 In humanizing nature, Adorno and Horkheimerargue, the hero (alias for the poet) at the same time forgeshis own self-hood. Here we have the characteristic ruse of

enlightenment, which

...has always taken the basic principle of myth to be an-thropomorphlsm, the projection onto nature of the subjec-tlve.... Oedipus’ answer to the Sphinx’s riddle: &dquo;It is man!&dquo;

Is the Enlightenment stereotype repeatedly offered as in-formation,...&dquo; 1



29

Enlightenment here performs a dual role. On the one

hand, religion and art often reduce divinity to human

dimensions; on the other, a rationalist interpretation willexpose this practice as simply a projection of human

qualities onto the gods. Thus, after the poet has in effectlegitimated a human (rather than divine) regime, the im-plications of this anthropomorphism are brought out by asuccession of philosopher critics (Xenophanes, Bacon,Feuerbach, for example). Adorno and Horkheimer nameHegel along with Nietzsche as the two sharpest critics ofthis second-order Enlightenment strategy: Hegel,because in the brilliant Chapter Vi of his Phenomenologyhe exposes the dialectic by which the rationalist attackupon faith merely substitutes one illusion for another. 14Yet it is not the least of the authors’ ironies that Hegel isaccused in turn of falling victim to the same rationalisttemptation. His philosophy is &dquo;enlightened&dquo; precisely in-asmuch as it supposes, implicitly or explicitly, an ultimateidentity founded on the speculative subject. Just as

Odysseus journeyed through the Mediterranean, humaniz-ing natural potencies and myths in order to promote hisown myth of self-hood, so Hegel gathers the whole worldinto a system, systematically putting down nature in orderto assert a conceptual totality. This is the real, the

bourgeois, &dquo;List der Vernunft.&dquo;

I noted above how Adorno reverses LukAcs’ reduction ofnovel to epic: he makes Odysseus into a picaresquecharacter. 41 Such a strategy of course puts the HegelianIdeal in an ironical light. Hegel’s description of heroic self-sufficiency, by which even Odysseus fashions his own im-plements, becomes no more than a bourgeois construc-tion idealizing a bourgeois norm.’,, Odysseus is yet morecunning than Hegel allows: his is the cunning not merelyof reason but also of Enlightenment rationalism. Fromthis perspective the vaunted organicity of the heroic Idealis no less a perversion and reification of nature than is the&dquo;second nature&dquo; of modern social institutions. Both ex-hibit a double movement, first reducing nature to humanproportions, and then in turn petrifying human history intoreified, seemingly &dquo;natural&dquo; shapes. By a kind of

chiasmus, nature becomes historical, while history is

rendered (pseudo) natural.

We may observe this reversal, thematic for Adorno’s entirecritical position, in its clearest form in a 1932 lecture

delivered at Frankfurt and entitled &dquo;Die Idee der

Naturgeschichte.&dquo;~7 The lecture shows equally clearly theI influence of Benjamin; the notion of &dquo;natural history,&dquo; for



30

instance, comes directly from Benjamin’s study of Ger-man Trauerspiel .41 Benjamin had read baroque allegoryand emblematics as a convoluted meditation on human

history considered as the history of a natural fall. What

Adorno does in his lecture is to combine this with Lukacs’

stress on reification and the perverted &dquo;second nature&dquo; of

the modern world (citing the passage on the charnel

house of long-dead interiorities I have already quoted).Thus he proposes using Benjamin to decipher the

petrified shapes of history: these hide a primordial mean-ing, namely, the fall into nature. 4 Cultural critique of thekind Adorno went on to practise embodies this doublemovement of historicizing what seems given and fixed,then attempting to evoke once again the natural, the ar-chaic, or what Benjamin had termed the ’aura’ of the art-work.

Such criticism can be negative or positive. The Odyssey,for instance, is read negatively as proposing a

demythification of natural potencies, as a tour de force ofMediterranean myths, so to speak. Art of this sort is but asymptom of a general bourgeois disease. At the sametime there are works that allow a more positive reading,for they partially see through the reifications of cultureand anticipate a state which does not yet exist but whichjust for that reason resists assimilation into a complacentidentity. Mimesis of nature is for Adorno at once a

deciphering of some primal meaning and a utopian prom-ise.‘&dquo; _

-

Where does that leave Hegel? In some ways Adorno readsHegel positively, in other ways negatively. The manner inwhich he turns Hegel against himself is evident from thevery title of his main work, Negative Dialectics. His rela-tion to Hegel’s philosophy of art is equally ambiguous. Heboth borrows Hegel’s vocabulary and rejects his fun-

damental principles. But the rejection too is dialectical: adeterminate negation which has positive consequences.Hegel is the untrue, and hence an indirect mode of grasp-ing the true. His suppression of nature and natural beautyin favour of spirit and art is thus not simply false but also adistortion which once unmasked will show us the truth.

Art is mimesis of nature. Hegel’s Aesthetics masks thattruth and yet, through its very denial, reveals it.

Subtle as this interpretation of Hegel is, does it do justiceto the latter’s dialectical conception of art and the Ideal?Does Adorno not oversimplify Hegel’s own presentation?In the concluding section I shall attempt a brief answer tothese questions.

I



31

iv

We have shown that Adorno views as a double subterfugethe suppression of nature and its legitimation as nature.Heroic enterprise and Hegel’s philosophical reprise of itwithin the Ideal of art each stand convicted of this deceit.

Yet, I shall now argue, Hegel shares Adorno’s critical view:his philosophy of art contains its own &dquo;negative dialec-tics.&dquo; Hegel defines art as the presentation of the sen-suous showing of the Idea (sc., the classical Ideal); furtherexamination reveals how art also shows through that

show.

Adorno’s general critique of Hegelian systematicsseriously underestimates the extent to which Hegelhimself grapples with negativity and non-identity.Although the final system does posit the identity of identi-ty and non-identity, in no way does it presuppose the sup-pression of the latter. Philosophy’s task remains prob-lematic. The tension between being (or nature) and

thought (or spirit) conditions Hegel’s entire speculativeenterprise.

Let us formulate the logical issue thus: How can reflec-tion and being be identified without reducing one to theother? This generates its aesthetic equivalent, both in

content and in form, viz.: How is it conceivable that the

Ideal is something natural, given, and at the same timeposited, willed? How is art at once mirror of the Ideal andcreative self-expression?

. In the remainder of this essay I shall focus on two related

solutions to these aesthetically posed problems. Eachconcerns Greek Kunstreligion, and presents a dialectic ofgiven vs. posited, physis vs. thesis, on the dual planes ofform (art) and content (Sittlichkeit).

Let me look first at an early trial solution, the Natural Lawessay of 1802.,~ As I have said, modern natural law theorysupposes a total break between law and nature, where the

Aristotelian tradition had thought the two homogeneous.Hegel inherits the Hobbesian revolution, but at the sametime displays an ironic attitude towards its achievement.For in his view the underlying formalism of modern naturallaw theory lays it open to the very natural contingency it

was concerned to banish from jurisprudence. Negativefreedom (as Hegel dubs it) is no guarantee of freedom infact; it is, rather, the opposite. Proceeding from this

polemical standpoint, Hegel gains an insight into the

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32

the nascent science of political economy. He consigns tothe discrete realm of bourgeois society (burgerlicheGesellschaft), a term which thereby acquires a meaningquite different from that of &dquo;civil society.&dquo; Natural law isinverted into the law of nature, to which man is subject asto a natural necessity. Hobbes’ status civilis is revealed tobe a status naturalis.11

But Hegel conjures up a further paradox. He is concernedto ask how ancient Sittlichkeit could (per impossibile) ac-commodate bourgeois society. Since the latter is now

seen to be man’s merely natural side, Hegel poses theethical issue as follows: how can rights and recognitionbe accorded to nature as well as to consciousness and ra-

tionality ? Hegel’s solution is brilliant, if sophistical. Heargues that the opposing sides of nature and spirit arejoined by a relatively passive medium, Anschauung, intui-tion, looking on. And since intuition is by definition sen-suous, he illustrates this by an aesthetic model: TheEumenides of Aeschylus interpreted as a kind of parableon the founding of the polis. The message of the play, ac-cording to Hegel, is that the Areopagus must accord thechthonic deities a legal status equal to that of the Apollo-nians ; only thus can the polis survive. Here there is indeeda continuing city, but only by perpetual revolution, as it

were, a tragedy enacted repeatedly in effect so as to

generate world-history. History, Hegel claims, is &dquo;nothingelse but the performance, on the ethical plane, of the

tragedy (Trauerspiel) which the Absolute eternally enactswith itself....&dquo;&dquo; The political community must continuallymake sacrifices to its economic basis, i.e., to nature.

For us the interest of Hegel’s model lies in its similarity toBenjamin’s (and then Adorno’s) notion of &dquo;Natur-

geschichte,&dquo; i.e., the tragic fall into nature, eternallyreenacted. The parallel has already attracted note; Bern-hard Lypp has made much of it, further arguing that theyoung Hegel subscribes to the same &dquo;logic of disintegra-tion,&dquo; the same aesthetic model of philosophy, the samestress on tnimesis of nature and on the dialectics of&dquo;Schein&dquo; (semblance) as does Adorno.&dquo; Lypp holds thatHegel soon abandoned this position. And it is truE that

Hegel ceases to rely on a dramaturgical &dquo;looking on&dquo; to ef-

fect the absolute balance of spirit and nature; that in thePhenomenology, for example, the model is replaced by aconceptual &dquo;Erinnerung&dquo; (or internalizing memory) whichoperates both teleologically and retrospectively. On theface of it Hegel there adopts the precise standpoint thatAdorno objects to. One might be tempted to give a reading



33

parallel to Adorno’s critique of Homer, and so make thePhenomenology a Bildungsroman of spirit whose hero is ayet-to-be constituted self. But that would do less than

justice to the &dquo;pathway of despair&dquo;&dquo;&dquo; outlined there, thenegativity that continually erupts into the narrative.

Moreover, the philosophy of art found in the Berlin lec-

tures retains, I would argue, this negative moment, andthe tragic in the last analysis takes precedence over theepic or sculptural. The story that philosophy tells, in thisonly echoing the story of art itself, concerns the naturalfall of art and its aesthetic Ideal, which in turn is the ac-

companiment to the fall of Greek civilization.

The most cogent evidence for the truth of my claim lies inthe categories Hegel uses to analyze the Ideal, especiallythe central category of &dquo;action&dquo; (Handlung), which, as wassaid above, embraces the opposed moments of plasticethos and dramatic agon, i.e., epic and tragedy. Or again,if we look on art historically, we may see it as charting thetragic fate of ancient Greece, the fate of the essentiallyclassical Ideal and hence of art itself (art as Kunstreligion,a form of absolute spirit). Instead of referring to the

Aesthetics, however, I shall appeal briefly to Chapters VIand VII of the Phenomenology, in which Hegel’s negativedialectics of art may be traced more readily.

Hegel treats of epic Sittlichkeit at the beginning of

Chapter VI (Spirit).&dquo;’ But it has already appeared in

Chapter V (Reason), where Hegel discusses various

romantic attempts at constituting objective spirit (amongthem the third world-condition mentioned above). In-

dividual and community seem united at last through theagency of what Adam Smith called the invisible hand of

nature but which Hegel calls instead &dquo;the animal realm ofspirit&dquo; (das geistige Tierreich)’-, a phrase Marx was to usein his excited reaction to Darwin’s Origin of Species:

It is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes and reminds

one of Hegel in the Phenomenology, where bourgeoissociety figures as &dquo;the animal kingdom of spirit,&dquo; while inDarwin the animal kingdom figures as bourgeois society.&dquo;&dquo;

The reference to Hobbes hits the mark exactly: civil socie-

ty turns into the state of nature it is supposed to haveescaped. Hegel goes on to demonstrate that the unity ofprivate and communal interest is merely apparent, a

deceit (Betrug). Unity can be achieved only in objectivespirit, in Sittlichkeit, which truly is the work of each and

all.

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34

exclusively modern notion, the notion of labour as self-realization, into an ancient political model. For the

Greeks, making (techne) was inferior to action (praxis): theone is directed to ulterior ends, the other proposes its

own.&dquo;9 We ought not to miss the irony in Hegel’s procedurehere. He reinterprets ancient Greece from a modern stand-point which culminates in political and economic in-

dividualism. Sittlichkeit becomes a product, a work.

Nevertheless, it remains an irony, something true only &dquo;forus&dquo; and not for the Greeks themselves. They looked uponthe law as physis, not thesis; it simply is, no man knowingwhence it came, to quote as Antigone’s famous tine.’’&dquo;

They could collapse consciousness into being just solong as the law remained patriarchal and their actions in-stinctual and unquestioning. But as soon as they movedfrom an epic world-condition towards a political constitu-tion with its basis in positive rather than natural law, theappearance of giveness began to dissolve. What followsupon this shift forms the dialectic of Chapter VI. The am-biguity of natural vs. posited becomes focused in the com-peting authority of divine and human norms (doubly am-biguous, for each is a posited norm which yet claimsdivine sanction). It is a dialectic parallel to what we

observed in the Natural Law essay, only this time the ex-emplum, never mentioned by name, is Sophocles insteadof Aeschylus, and Antigone in particular. And wherebefore tragedy attended the constitution of the city, now itcharacterizes its fall. Mere recognition (Anschauung) ofwhat is due to nature is no longer sufficient; con-

sciousness of the individualist basis of what Hegel in theAesthetics calls &dquo;individual self-sufficiency&dquo; is fatal to itspretended legitimacy. For Hegel it is woman, in the figureof Antigone, who personifies this insidious irony, for evenas she stands for the principle of divine givenness shereveals the particular self at the heart of the polis. She isthe one who uncovers the polis’ actual dependence on

particular agents and their subjectively willed deeds.

Here Hegel perceives a further irony. Where the first ironylay in the fact that what had seemed natural substance

was really a product of subjective activity, the second con-sists of the natural fate that now befalls that product.Hegel’s dialectic exhibits a chiasmus much like Adorno’s:the anthropomorphizing of nature, followed by its irra-

tional fall back into nature. Overemphasis on the humancalls down the blood revenge of chthonic forces upontheir Apollonian suppressors. Within the play, implicitframe of the entire section, the political condemnation of



35

Antigone leads inexorably to the fall of Creon. But Hegelalso reads Antigone as diagnosing the flaw in the polisgenerally and as prefiguring its destiny. The polis is laidopen to a fate that is natural, immediate and inscrutable;ancient Greece succumbs to internecine war, to the Alex-andrian Empire, and ultimately to a reality founded uponthe principle of force and contingency, namely, Rome. Thenecessary unity of an actualized reason, the polis, invertsinto the external necessity of nature.&dquo;’ I

A similar fate overtakes the artist. Although he may seemto imitate a content already and absolutely given, (hismuse, his theme) in fact he is the one who gives the deitya shape or supplies the form for an action. The work of artreally comprises his work, his own self-expression. In thePhenomenology we observe this tendency taken to an ex-treme in the cult of genius, the so-called &dquo;beautiful soul&dquo;

(die sch6ne Seele).,,’ Chapter VI is framed by two

tragedies: that of the epic hero of ethical substance, andthat of the pure subjectivity of conscience (Gewissen).The reduction of being (substance) to positing reflexion(the self) has tragic consequences, when the beautifulsoul finds its form-giving activity dissolved into actual

formlessness and a sheer yearning for substantial ex-

istence. As with the ethical hero, denial of nature leads toa natural fall.

In Chapter VI, Hegel never uses the word &dquo;tragedy;&dquo; whatwe may call content and form appear serially as im-

mediate shapes of spirit. The following chapter (Religion)returns to the theme at a higher level in putting represen-tation or consciousness in apposition to divine content.Art thus becomes a form of worship, its object a politicaldivinity (which Hegel will later call the Ideal). In Kunst-

religion proper, form and content seem as one, a givenidentity. But again Hegel’s negative dialectic demon-

strates that this identity comes from the denial of

otherness and is not so much given as forged. In the epicgenre, for instance, we see the bard effacing himself

before his tale, a representation in turn of heroic self-

effacement before the ethical law. We also see that such

identification of self with substance is merely pretence:the poet no less than his hero acts on his own account;substance is founded upon the subject. Again, the trage-dian represents a seeming reconciliation of norms andthrough the formal structure of tragedy achieves a

precarious unity of spectator and polis. But that is

hypocrisy (in the original sense of play-acting),’,’ for in facthe performs a role no less than do his actors, and social



36

roles are seen to be distinct from the ethical norms theyalso stand for. Everything falls apart.

In the genre of Greek tragedy we thus see portrayed theform of art itself, as a kind of make-believe. Tragedy tellsnot merely of the death of the classical Ideal and of theaesthetic legitimation of norms, but also of the death ofart, its inevitable &dquo;going-to-ground.&dquo; The philosopher-observer merely recapitulates the original &dquo;Natur-

geschichte&dquo; of art. Nevertheless, in doing so he brings tolight the negative dialectic at work in any aesthetic

presentation of totality; he demonstrates that art is the

(mere) semblance of a semblance, that it shows throughitself.

Of course, my outline is no more than that, and does scant

justice to Hegel’s fully developed philosophy of art. But atleast it should serve to put Hegel’s praise of the epic heroand of his individuality in an unfamiliar light. For Hegel asfor Adorno, Odysseus and Homer are equally guilty ofturning a blind eye to their own assertiveness while at thesame time claiming for it a divine sanction. For both, thetruth behind such hypocritical anthropomorphism is a

logic of disintegration, a &dquo;natural history.&dquo; Both found artand beauty upon the play of Schein, semblance.

Yet, despite these parallels, I am not putting Hegel up forposthumous membership of the Frankfurt school. Hegel’scritique of Kunstreligion is by no means Adorno’s critiqueof the culture industry. More to the point, Hegel doesclaim an ultimate reconciliation between subjectivity andotherness, an ultimate identity of thought with nature. Theactualized &dquo;utopia&dquo; to which art looks forward (if I maypress the parallel with Adorno) is a philosophically sanc-tioned system - though not, I should add, the rationalityof the Prussian state, let alone the &dquo;Utopia Limited&dquo; of

bourgeois society! As Hegel tells the story, negativedialectic must turn into speculative reason.&dquo; Hence fate

implies something different for him from what it impliesfor Adorno and Benjamin: he interprets it as the

hypostasis of subjectivity and spirit’s &dquo;falling-to-ground&dquo;as a coming to itself.’&dquo; Art has a natural history only withinthis larger speculative frame. That frame was, as we know,removed soon after Hegel’s death and the perceivedfailure of his effort at systematic reconciliation. Yet its

disappearance serves only to underline how much Hegelprefigures Adorno’s critical approach.

The conclusion of my essay amounts to the conclusion ofan itinerary that has traversed many points. We have



37

moved from the epic totality of the Greek Ideal to its

displacement as the prosaic world of the novel, movedagain to the supposed anthropomorphism of art, or~ly tosee that this leads to a tragic reversal, a fall into nature. Insuch a &dquo;natural history&dquo; Hegel finds the negative truth ofart, as well as a disillusionment with which, it might beargued, we have no choice but to remain.

NOTES

1. G W F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1970), 13, 130, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T M.

Knox (Oxford. Clarendon P., 1975), p. 94. Subsequent references are tothe pagination of these editions, translations are my own

2. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grun-drisse, vols. 8-10 of Werke (from 3rd ed , 1830); Encyclopaedia of thePhilosophical Sciences in Outline, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans.Wallace and Miller (Oxford. Clarendon P., 1971). References are to thenumbered sections, with notes and additions (Anmerkungen and

Zusätze).

3. T W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 118.Cf. Hegel, Ästhetik, 13, 202, 152.

4. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, V. i, 218. The aptness of Orsino’s remarkis not spoiled by the fact that he means by "perspective" an optical in-strument enlarging or distorting the image. For Hegel art is just such aninstrument, yet also a natural phenomenon.

5. See e g Griesheim’s student notes on the 1824/5 lectures,

Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie 1818-1831, ed. K. H. Ilting (Stutt-gart frommann-holzboog, 1974), IV, 76:

the expression ’nature’ has a double-meaning, an important double-

meaning which leads to absolute error On the one hand ’nature’ means

natural being, the way we find ourselves In various aspects as im-

mediately created, the immediate aspect of our being. Over against thisdetermination and distinct from it, ’nature’ means also the concept

(Begriff) The nature of a thing means the concept of the thing, what it isfrom the rational standpoint, and this thing can be something quite otherthan merely natural. Natural law means, then, on the one hand the law ofnature, and on the other what is right in and for itself.

Hegel several times elsewhere draws the same distinction.

6. See Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:Clarendon P , 1952), §151. "in the simple identity of individuals with ac-

tuality we find the ethical, as the universal mode of action, as custom

(Sitte), the accustomedness of which is posited as a second nature in at UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA on August 31, 2015psc.sagepub.comDownloaded from


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place of a first, merely natural willing, and is the thorough-penetratingsoul, the meaning and actuality of its being,...a world of living and pre-sent spirit,..." (translation amended).

7. Ibid., §4.

8. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke,12, 275ff., where Hegel counterposes to the human significance (Sinn)the Greeks attributed to nature their actual reliance on external inspira-

tion, divination, mimesis, oracles, mysteries, etc.

9. Hegel (Ästhetik, e g , 13, 203; 153), puts the human figure at the centreof the Ideal. On art as communication, see e.g. 13, 102;71.

Strictly speaking, art and its Ideal comprise spirit, not merely a human

reality, and the human figure exemplifies a spiritual totality Never-

theless, art originates in human phantasy, speaks to a human communi-

ty, and depicts a human life-world.

For Hegel’s denigration of nature, see Chapter 2 of the first part of theAesthetics.

10. For an expansion of this argument, see my Ph.D. dissertation, "An In-

terpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Art" (University of Toronto, 1979),esp. Chapter III, also section IV, below

11. See the analysis offered by Thomas W H Metscher, "Hegel und die

philosophische Grundlegung der Kunstsoziologie," Literatur-

wissenschaft und Sozialwissenschaften (Grundlagen und

Modellanalysen) (1971), pp 13-83, at pp 27ff Metscher indeed sees

"world-condition" as a social rather than aesthetic category (p 83 n )

12. Philosophy of Right, §4 Cf Encyclopaedia, §§440-80, esp §§469ffand §482, where Hegel describes how the will becomes objective spirit,i.e., the universal world-condition.

13. On this strategic inversion of natural law I follow the interpretationof Manfred Riedel. see his Studien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), and "Freiheitsgesetz und Herrschaft derNatur: Dichotomie der Rechtsphilosophie" in his System und

Geschichte: Studien zum historischen Standort von Hegels Philosophie(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp 96-120, esp. pp. 99ff

14. See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel. A historico-

philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature, trans AnnaBostock (Cambridge: MIT, 1971), p 52

15. Thus when Hegel wishes to describe "the epic world-condition" he

expressly identifies it with the heroic age (15, 341; 105 3).

16. Lukács, op. cit., pp. 46, 49-50.

17. See 13, 337-9, 260-2 and 15, 343, 1054 for the epic element; and 13,336-7, 260 for criticism of the alienation wrought by culture Marxist com-

mentary may be found in Metscher, loc. cit., pp. 31-3; Fredric Jameson,Marxism and Form. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature(Princeton. Princeton U P , 1971), pp. 165-6, 352-4, Hubert Ohl, Bild undWirklichkeit. Studien zur Romankunst Raabes und Fontanes

(Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1968), pp. 24-6; and Frank Dietrich Wagner,"Asthetiche Autonomie und industrielle Arbeitswelt. Zu einem aktuellen

Eiderspruch in Hegels Kunstphilosophie," Hegel-Jahrbuch (1978), 303-9

18. Adorno, op. cit., p. 124; cf Ästhetik, 13, 51, 3119. See Werner Hahl, Reflexion und Erzählung. Ein Problem der Roman-theorie von der Spätaufklärung bis zum programmatischen Realismus



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(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971), esp. pp. 85ff., 101ff. The first to compareepic and novel was apparently Hugo Blanckenburg in 1774.

20. See H Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays (PrincetonPrinceton U P , 1957). I am linking Frye’s theory of myth (pp. 136ff.) withhis theory of historical modes (pp. 33ff.), as Frye himself does at least im-plicitly I might note that the rather similar displacement mechanism forwhich Frye borrows the Schillerian name "naive/sentimental" (p. 35)operates a-historically, as indeed it does in Schiller’s essay. Sentimental

romance, e.g., is found in classical authors and Romantic Märchen alike.

21. See Frye, the Secular Scripture. A Study of the Structure of Romance(Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1976), pp 36f.; and Lukács, op. cit., pp 74ff ,

noting a precedent in the irony examined by German Romantic criticism.

22. See Hegel’s chapter on "romantic" (i.e , post-Hellenic) art, which pro-poses a historical progression much like Frye’s from myth, through high-mimetic and low-mimetic (or realist) modes to irony.

23. A more neutral account of literature and the novel is offered at 15,392-3, 1092-3 and 281-2, 1005-6 There Hegel allows that the pseudo-epicconflict between the ’poetry of the heart’ and the prose of circumstancecan have various results, whether tragic, comic, or as an eventual resolu-tion. This last can occur either through the ’hero’s’ acknowledgement ofthe rational kernel in society or else through his stripping away all its

prosaic features. In other words, there is reason amid the finitude of life,and art is able to detect it. See also the note following

For debate on Hegel’s theory of the novel see further Werner Hahl op.cit., p 92f , Hubert Ohl, op. cit., pp. 21-9; Franz Rhóse, Konflikt und

Versohnung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), pp. 15-20; Peter Szondi, Poetik undGeschichtsphilosophie I (Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1974), pp 459-60, and

Christoph Helferich, Kunst und Subjektivitát in Hegels Ästhetik

(Kronberg Scriptor, 1976), pp. 89-93.

24. In the state proper if not in bourgeois society itself At 13, 341; 263

Hegel claims that the individual can in principle reach the same livingharmony with modern society as exists in the epic world, for society toois a spiritual totality essentially the individual’s own

Interestingly enough, Lukács has commented on the sardonic passage Ihave quoted; see his The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1958),trans John and Necke Mander (London Merlin, 1963), p 112 But he en-

tirely fails to catch Hegel’s savage humour, trying instead to applystraight-faced his general model of reconciliation-cum-resignation Cf

Adorno’s reaction in his polemic, "Reconciliation under duress" (fromNoten zur Literatur II, 1961), trans. Rodney Livingstone in Aesthetics andPolitics (London. New Left Books, 1977), pp. 151-76, at pp. 175-6.

25. Lukács’ 1962 preface tries to put his youthful effort in an objective,indeed historical, perspective He declares that the book is Hegelian in

spirit, for it borrows Hegel’s discussion of totality in epic, drama and

lyric, his historicizing of aesthetic categories, as well as his dialecticalmethod (15). "The book’s aesthetic problematic of the present is also partof the Hegelian legacy.... In Hegel himself, however, only art is rendered

problematic as a result of this...art becomes problematic preciselybecause reality has become non-problematic" (17), since the actual pre-sent is also rational Lukács on the contrary sees the problem of art as

deriving from the problems in reality; for him aesthetic discord impliessocial critique.



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26. See Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S Harris

(Albany: SUNY, 1976), p. 190: "Formerly, the infinite grief existed

historically in the formative process of culture. It existed as the feelingthat ’God Himself is dead’, upon which the religion of more recent times

rests; the same feeling that Pascal expresses in so to speak empiricalform: "la nature est telle qu’elle marque partout un Dieu perdu et dansl’homme et lors de l’homme..."

" The Phenomenology mention is to be

found in Werke, 3, 547, and in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller(Oxford: Clarendon P., 1977), p. 455. (Subsequent references are to theseeditions; I supply my own translations, however.)

In addition see Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God. A Study of Tragic Vi-sion in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (1954), transPhilip Thody (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), esp. Part I, passim.

27. Lukács is like Hegel in praising Dante’s Divine Comedy, andmoreover in terms reminiscent of Hegel’s opposition of "objectivehumour" to the "subjective humour" of a Sterne or a Jean Paul (53-4).

Hegel discusses "the law of the heart" in Phän, 275ff.; 221ff., alluding toSchiller’s Karl Moor. The Aesthetics places the third world-condition inthe transition from a chivalric world, still a quasi-totality, to the atomized

society of today. Besides the Sturm und Drang dramas of Goethe andSchiller, which Frye revealingly calls "heroic romance," Hegel cites Götz

and Cervantes as documenting this transition (Don Quixote is Lukács’

exemplar).

Hegel relegates symbolism, both as cultural practice and as trope, to therealm of nature; it is the imposition of meaning upon an alien, natural

phenomenon. In The Theory of the Novel, "symbol" bears a bewilderingrange of nuance, from the transparency of lyric to the opacity of

dramatic symbolism. For example, in the lyric "alien, unknowable natureis driven from within, to agglomerate into a symbol that is illuminated

throughout.... Otherwise, nature is transformed—because of its lack of

meaning — into a kind of picturesque lumber-room of sensuous symbols"(63). Dramatic symbolism is of the latter type, proceeding as it does fromthe need to represent ideas and ends in sensuous (i.e., heterogeneous)form. In general Lukács follows Hegel, therefore, in associating sym-bolism with nature, whether senseless or meaningful or finally as con-ventional bearer of abstract meaning.

28. Jameson, op. cit., pp. 180-1, 190.

29. History and Class Consciousness, Studies in Marxist Dialectics

trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1971) from the 1968 re-

edition ; see "Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat," pp.83-222. The term used there is "Verdinglichung," as in Marx, not Hegel’s"Entfremdung," though Lukács assimilates the two meanings (cf. thenew preface, p. xxxvi). He likewise assimilates Hegelian "Bildung"(cultivation) to the Marxist notion of social alienation

On "reification" see the clear-headed account in Gillian Rose, The Melan-

choly Science. An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno

(London: Macmillan, 1978), esp. pp. 35ff.

30. Ästhetik, 13, 255-7; 195-6.31. See Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, 2 vols. (Neuwied/Berlin:Luchterhand, 1963), Chapter 2 (i. 139ff.). Art is anthropomorphic, wherescience performs a ’disanthropomorphizing’ function.

32. See the discussion in Chapter 13 of Die Eigenart, esp. ii, 294ff.



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33. Cf. Hegel’s rejection of the Terentian formula nihil humani a me

alienum puto at 13, 70; 46. It occurs in the context of asking what mightbe the proper aim (Zweck) of art. Hegel objects to the aim of depictingthe human-in-general, on the grounds that that would render art too for-mal an affair, a mere means. For romantic art’s diluting of the properthematics of art, see e g. 14, 239; 608. For romantic art and nature, 14,223f.; 595f.; and cf. landscape in painting, 15, 60f.; 831f.

34. "Das Besondere als zentrale Kategorie der Asthetik," DeutscheZeitschrift für Philosophie, IV (1956), much of which reappears in Die

Eigenart as Chapter 12 (ii, 193f.). See also G H. R. Parkinson, "Lukács onthe Central Category of Aesthetics," in Georg Lukács. The man, his workand his ideas, ed. Parkinson (New York: Random House-Vintage, 1970),pp. 109-46, esp. pp. 114-5

35. Die Eigenart, Chapters 5-10, passim.36. See my "An Interpretation...," Chapters I and II.

37. 14, 237-8; 607: "art...makes Humanus its new saint — the depths andheights of human feeling as such, the universally human in its joys andsorrows, its strivings, deeds and fates

"

"Humanus" is an allusion to

Goethe’s early fragment, Die Geheimnisse. There follows an allusion toTerence. The truth of this quasi-religion is accordingly thoroughlyhumanist

38. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical

Reproduction," in his Illuminations (1955), trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Schocken, 1969), pp 217-51, at pp 244-5 "This polarity cannot come intoits own in the aesthetics of Idealism.... Yet in Hegel [it] announces itselfas clearly as was conceivable within the limitations of Idealism" (transla-tion amended). I would argue that Hegel was quite clear on the polarity,and that he built his dialectics of art around it

39. Metscher, loc. cit., pp. 47-50. He is discussing art as social institu-tion and in particular as communication between author and public,hardly the same thing as ’cult-value’ The substitution of "culture-value"is found at p 75n. Although in reprinting the essay in his Kunst und

sozialer Prozess. Studien zu einer Theorie der ästhetischen F.rkenntnis

(Koln: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1977), Metscher corrects this slip, the

misconception remains.

Note that Lukács does allow that mimesis had "magic" roots (DieEigenart, i, 377-408) and that religion reflects upon the human just as artdoes (i, 132, 382f.). Nevertheless, following Feuerbach, he sees magicand religion as seeking to transcend the world, e.g , through allegory,where art keeps its feet on the ground (i, 137, 383) See also Parkinson,loc. cit., pp 121-2

40. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 115-9 Adorno is alert to the

subtleties of Hegel’s dialectical language; see for instance his essay"Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei," in his Drei Studien zu Hegel(Frankfurt. Suhrkamp, 1963), pp. 105-65. Nevertheless he accuses Hegel’s procedure of being ultimately subservient to an identity thesis. The

reconciliation posited as result by Hegel’s system is a "Schein," whichAdorno compares with that found in the unified classical style of

Beethoven’s musical structures; the two shared a privileged moment in

history. But illusion is less harmless for philosophy than for art, Adornoadds.

41. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 111. at UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA on August 31, 2015psc.sagepub.comDownloaded from


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42. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans.

John Cumming (New York. Seabury, 1972).

43. Horkheimer and Adorno, op. cit., pp. 6-7.

44. Ibid., p. 6; cf. Phän. pp. 400ff.; 328ff.

45. Horkheimer and Adorno, op. cit., p 47.

46. If Adorno himself does not make the connection with Hegelian epicindividuality, some others have. Hans-Heino Ewers, Die schöne In-

dividualität. Zur Genesis des bürgerlichen Kunstideals (Stuttgart:Metzler, 1978), provides a reading of Hegel on the "heroic age" much likeAdorno’s of Homer; see esp. pp. 163-4, 170-8. Thus: the world of epic in-

dependence reduces to a bourgeois fiction, a projection of bourgeoisnorms into the past. Christoph Helferich (op. cit., pp 7-8, 48-52) takes asimilar tack. I shall argue in section IV that Hegel too sees ’beautiful in-

dividuality’ in just this light.

47. The lecture has been reprinted in Adorno’s PhilosophischeFrühschriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 345-65.

48. Benjamin, the Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne(London: New Left Books, 1977), from Ursprung des deutschen

Trauerspiels (1963; first published 1928); see e.g. pp. 89ff., 129ff.

49. Adorno refers to Lukacs’ use of "second nature" in "Die Idee..." at pp

355-7, and to Benjamin at pp. 357-60. The yoking of Benjamin with Hegelremains Adorno’s rather than Benjamin’s own. Of his friend Adorno

remarks: "The French word for still-life, nature morte, could be written

above the portals of his philosophical dungeons. The Hegelian conceptof ’second nature’, at the same time reification of self-estranged, human

relations, and also the Marxian category of ’commodity fetishism’, oc-

cupy key positions in Benjamin’s work" ("A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,"in Prisms (1955), trans Samuel and Sherry Weber (London Spearman,1967), pp. 227-41, at p. 233). But this is very much a reading-in of

something absent from and even alien to Benjamin

50. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, e.g., pp 141 and 198.

51. Hegel, Natural Law. The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law,trans. T. M. Knox (University Park: University of Pennsylvania P , 1975)Cf. the "economic" interpretation suggested by Lukács in his The YoungHegel. Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics

(1948), trans Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1975), pp. 398-419

52. Cf Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §289 Anm.. "civil (burgerliche) societyis the battlefield of individual private interest, all against all."

53. Hegel, Natural Law, p. 104.

54. Bernhard Lypp, Ästhetischer Absolutismus und politischer Vernunft.Zum Widerstreit von Reflexion und Sittlichkeit im deutschen Idealismus

(Frankfurt. Suhrkamp, 1972), esp. pp. 214-8 (on Benjamin) and pp 235-41

(on Adorno).

55. Phän. 72; 49.

56. The Phenomenology thus differs from the Natural Law essay in

separating content (spirit) from form (e.g., epic, tragedy), consideringthese in Chapters VI and VII respectively. Furthermore, history is now no

longer cyclical but developmental, a "Bildung" of spirit from ancientGreece to German Romanticism; and no longer is it presented as a

tragedy, even though it has tragic aspects

57. Phän. 294f., 237f.: "Das geistige Tierreich und der Betrug oder die at UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA on August 31, 2015psc.sagepub.comDownloaded from


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Sache selbst." The reference of this section is typically ambiguous. Theorthodox reading (by Hyppolite, Loewenberg, Royce, e.g.) takes it to be

specialization, especially intellectual; see Gary Shapiro, "Notes on theAnimal Kingdom of the Spirit," Clio, 8 (1979), 323-38. Those favouring aneconomic reading include, besides Marx himself, Lukács, The YoungHegel, pp. 482-4; Manfred Riedel Theorie und Praxis im Denken Hegels(1965; repr. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1976), pp. 189ff.; and Winifred Kaminski,Zur Dialektik von Substanz und Subjekt bei Hegel und Marx (Frankfurt:Haag und Herchen, 1976), esp Chapter 8

58. Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, ed D B Ryazanov (Berlin: Marx-

Engels Verlag, 1929- ), III/3, 78: letter to Engels, 18/6/62.

59. Manfred Riedel has demonstrated Hegel’s revisionism in several

essays included in the studies already mentioned.

60. Phän. 322, 261, quoting II.456-7:

They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, Though where theycame from, none can tell.

61. Greek religion is "the religion of beauty or necessity;" the unity of

body and soul is necessary as well as beautiful But it is another,

negative sort of necessity that overtakes the polis

In logical terms: reducing immediacy (nature, being) to the status ofsomething posted by the ego results in turn in the appearance of an

unmediated otherness set over against positing reflection, which then"falls to ground." See Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (1812/13; repr.

Hamburg: Meiner, 1934), Book II passim, for this as it were natural cycle.

62. Phän. 464ff., 383ff.

63. The unity of hero and chorus in the face of an inscrutable fate "is ex-

ternal, a hypocrisy (Hypokrisie), the hero, as he appears before the spec-tator, splits apart into his mask and the player, into the person (die Per-

son) and the actual self" (Phän. 541, 450) The Greek hypokrisis, originallythe playing of a theatrical role, was later used to translate the New

Testament description of the Pharisees. Hegel plays upon both mean-

ings

64. Encyclopaedia, §79 "The logical has, in its form. three sides, α) theabstract or intellectual (verständige), β) the dialectical or negatively-rational, α) the speculative or positively-rational."65. See Hegel’s logical redescriptions of fate in Wissenschaft der Logik,(a) i, 339 (and Encyclopaedia, §107 Zusatz), on Nemesis as measure, (b) ii,

183, on absolute necessity and its blindness, (c) ii, 371, on "mechanist"

necessity, the hidden telos of which is subjectivity, the Concept.



The cunning of odysseus: a theme in hegel, lukacs, and adorno

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