Beauty and Truth
Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism
University of Chicago Press, 176pp, £21.00, ISBN 9780226079493
reviewed by Tom Hastings
If Art really can embody intelligible relations (love, friendship, citizenry) between subjects (you, me, them) and objects (you, me, this) in a way that Philosophy desires to but can’t, how can this mode of comportment be represented? And if we follow the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in recognising art and philosophy as communicating one recognisably ‘same content’ to a greater or lesser extent, what criteria are available to the enquirer to test this out? Hegel’s precursor, Immanuel Kant, resolved this quandary by placing the burden of judgment on the exemplary subject, who was accorded the power to judge through the ‘free play’ of his perceptual and cognitive faculties. This reflective judgment gained legitimacy through the naming of the beautiful, whereby to say, ‘that is beautiful’ (or even, ‘that is so #*$@ cute!’), was to present an aesthetic phenomenon (the work of art) as if it possessed a ‘conceptually organized unity’. But Hegel’s same content put an end to the beautiful’s ‘as if’…
After the beautiful, Art is enrolled in the service of the subject’s attempt to realise a more far-reaching freedom—one that would eclipse the need for art, religion (and eventually) philosophy altogether. But what does this philosophical problem have to do with ‘Pictorial Modernism’? From Kant’s guys like us pitch, to Hegel’s famously triumphalist claim that Art has been surpassed in Spirit’s bid for Freedom, the tradition of German Idealist philosophy and the rise of pictorial Modernism in the mid-19th century are at obvious loggerheads. A compelling new release from the American Hegelian scholar and philosopher Robert B. Pippin sets out to refute this.
After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism begins with the claim that for Hegel, ‘there is a deep connection between understanding meaningful conduct, actions and expressions of persons and understanding expressive meaning in artworks.’ Pippin acknowledges some kind of public, shareable meaning, marshalled by norms that are necessarily social, and historically filtered: I raise my arm, so you raise your arm. Pictorial Modernism (and here we are dealing with a capacious version that starts with Manet’s Olympia and works its way up to Jackson Pollock) marks the point at which the socially objective moment of self-recognition, as well as the recognition of others as being legible through this self-recognition, begins to break down: I raise my arm, you turn away.
Pippin’s book argues that by understanding the work of art in ethical terms as a ‘test case’ (as opposed to a work of art) the subject is then in a position to recognise the moment of misrecognition as grounds for the possibility of renewed social forms of recognition. A definition and admission precede this claim, which, though enticing on the surface is, as I see it, basically suspect.
Firstly, the work of art is defined as an ‘affective-sensible modality of self-knowledge’. Secondly, Pippin admits that ‘I am neither an art historian, nor an art critic, but I am interested in a kind of philosophical attention to artworks.’ These two designations open up a space which, whether historically minded or not, allows the philosopher to proceed on the basis that knowledge is itself constitutive—that it can make things and produce subjects. This claim is then rolled out across three elegant chapters that move centrifugally from the art object (Édouard Manet), to the art object’s relation to art criticism (Michael Fried and TJ Clark), to art criticism’s relation to philosophy (Martin Heidegger).
In the first chapter, selected paintings by Édouard Manet - the ‘grandfather’ of Modernism - are proffered as embodied proof of two imaginative figures from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1835). The first figure describes man’s ‘amphibious’ problem: ‘How can a subject of thought and deeds that always experiences itself as beyond or more than its material states come to any resolution about who or what it actually is?’ Two pages later, the artwork is imagined to house a ‘thousand-eyed Argus’:
The idea that visual art can transform the surface of every object … into a thousand-eyed creature is also a claim that the reception and appreciation of the work should be understood not as an inspiring intimation of the ideal [i.e. the beautiful].
Here embodiment both delegitimises the appearance of the ideal in sensible form and describes the ‘contradiction’ that lies at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic and pictorial Modernism. It is knowledge’s claim to some kind of materiality (real or imaginary) that allows the subject to effectively use works of art to constitute herself as a subject in the public sphere.
But doesn’t this mean that we are being asked to read the historically conditioned breakdown of knowledge (knowledge as ‘mutuality of recognition’) through the work of art we are simultaneously being called upon to interpret? And if so, is the work of art then only meaningful insofar as it performs the declarative moment of (mis)recognition — a kind of determinate negation? Pippin avoids this charge by leaning upon pictorial Modernism’s putative ‘demand that we understand each other, and thereby understand and appreciate art, in a new way.’ (Interestingly, Modernism’s ‘demand’ starts to sound like the Kantian subject’s ‘demand’ that his judgments be ratified by an imagined community of sense.) Pippin could here be seen to strategically invoke Manet’s paintings at key points in order to substantiate philosophical claims about the unbroken ‘vitality’ of reason moving into an age of pluralisms of the social order.
Chapter two goes a long way to alleviate this concern by connecting the two figures from Hegel – ‘man’s amphibious problem’ and the ‘thousand-eyed Argus’ - to the ‘problem of the beholder’ in the writings of two eminently authoritative art critics, TJ Clark and Michael Fried. Pippin counters Hegel’s depiction of a brute natural dominator with Marx’s account of historical materialism, before engaging TJ Clark’s Debordian theory of society’s ‘circuit’ of representations. This move comes at the right moment. Clark’s claim is that ‘one can put an emphasis on representations as constitutive of a social order and still remain true to the insights of historical materialism, as long as one is clear on the nature of that link between representations and the “totality” he (and Marx) calls “social practice”.’ A painting like Manet’s Olympia (1863) thus ‘constitutes a test of representational adequacy’, in which case, ‘what is “shocking” is the suggestion that prostitution is not just consistent with capitalist exchange value but paradigmatically representative of it.’ Clark’s social frame provides the correct test for Pippin’s philosophical interrogation of Hegel’s writings on art, not least because of the way it subtly undermines Clement Greenberg’s reduction of the painting’s representation to Painting’s ‘medium-specificity’. Beyond this, Pippin offers a nuanced critique of Clark’s sometime tendency to totalise Modernity. This lays the ground for a more confraternal discussion of Michael Fried’s famous distinction between ‘theatricality’ and ‘absorption’.
Michael Fried - Pippin’s silent interlocutor, to whom the book is dedicated - characterises ‘the modern struggle for mutuality of recognition’ in terms of the ‘“increasing difficulty” in finding credible antitheatrical strategies.’ Simply put, the more theatrical a picture, the more it knows it is being beheld. An ‘antitheatrical strategy’ attempts to negate this conventionality through a high level of “absorption” which, in Hegelian terms, means ‘“not being merely for others”’. What Pippin gathers from this is that, not only is ‘the defeat of theatricality an essential condition of the work’s being an artwork’, but that a ‘successful expression of a relation between artwork and beholder is also an expression of the problem of shareable intelligibility in general, a subject-subject relation, not some sort of subject-object relation.’ Pippin effectively ends the chapter where he begun it, with the Idealist claim that knowledge is itself constitutive. At this point the reader might suspect the philosopher’s desire to revive a public sphere that may never have existed: one that the art critic Thomas Crow properly vetted when he wrote in 1987 that ‘the perceived unity of modernist practice was, even in its decayed, terminal forms, a survival of the original equation between artistic seriousness and public purpose that took definitive shape during the 18th century.’
The final chapter checks Hegel’s philosophy of art with a close reading of the 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s landmark contribution, The Origin of the Work of Art (1935-6). As Pippin augurs, ‘in what way a content can near truth will be an issue’ [my italics]. A first answer comes in the form of a summary presentation of Heidegger’s ontological redressing of the artwork as an ‘event’ that does not represent the world of its subject so much as the ‘worlding of the world’ at work in the concealing and revealing of a truth that is never correctness but only ever disclosive. These categories add succour to Pippin’s Hegel play, dynamising a notion of Geist that still sits uneasily next to his account of ‘pictorial Modernism’.
Robert B. Pippin’s admission that ‘unfortunately Heidegger does not draw our attention to the many unusual sensible aspects of the actual painting’ could serve as an indictment of the book itself. Indeed, the late introduction of Clement Greenberg’s textured art writing and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty - with its immersive, situated register - appears to plug the material gaps in a discussion about art otherwise rooted in ontology—with this confluence ringing out in pronouncements such as ‘Cézanne has a Heideggerian tonality…’ This kind of philosophical permeation could be dangerous, one might argue, if it were tasked after Heidegger with ‘revealing any one aspect of the “world” or “destiny” of some “historical people”’ [my italics].
Robert B. Pippin’s ‘Concluding Remarks’ returns the reader to the claim that art can be viewed as ‘a component of a collective attempt at social intelligibility’. The legitimising lens tracks drastically here, from the significance of reading ‘details’ pace Clark and Fried, to the suggestion that ‘it is possible for societies, as if they were themselves subjects, to be mired in some way in practical self-contradiction’ [my italics]. This new ‘as if’ reads as programmatic in the context of the closing pages. Its function is to reduce society to the order of the psychological and to raise the subject to the sensus communis of Kant’s originary ‘aesthetic sensibility’… making way for what I wonder?
By the end, we have all but lost sight of Manet and Cézanne, the ‘father and grandfather’ of pictorial Modernism. Instead, we are left with a lengthy vindication of Hegel as a rational philosopher, committed to addressing (but not to ‘solving’) the ethical issue of ‘mutual social intelligibility’. ‘Art’ it seems, has been marshalled in as an appropriate (but fully exchangeable) topos for a larger philosophical project we are not made privy to, apart from at discrete points in the book’s many footnotes. After the Beautiful shines through its scholarly and comparative close reading of text, to leave the reader with a glimmer of a promise for the renewal of a society that, when she looks up, is nowhere to be seen. Pippin’s attempt to graft the values of an ideal bourgeois public sphere onto the crisis of Modernity through Hegel’s philosophy of art is, to say the least, anachronistic. I find it especially troublesome in light of the book’s title, that Pippin ends by drawing attention to Hegel’s ‘ringing reassertion of the link, not only the link between “beauty and truth”… but the link between them, the social bond, which has also been preserved.’ Still, it is good to know what you stand against.
After the beautiful, Art is enrolled in the service of the subject’s attempt to realise a more far-reaching freedom—one that would eclipse the need for art, religion (and eventually) philosophy altogether. But what does this philosophical problem have to do with ‘Pictorial Modernism’? From Kant’s guys like us pitch, to Hegel’s famously triumphalist claim that Art has been surpassed in Spirit’s bid for Freedom, the tradition of German Idealist philosophy and the rise of pictorial Modernism in the mid-19th century are at obvious loggerheads. A compelling new release from the American Hegelian scholar and philosopher Robert B. Pippin sets out to refute this.
After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism begins with the claim that for Hegel, ‘there is a deep connection between understanding meaningful conduct, actions and expressions of persons and understanding expressive meaning in artworks.’ Pippin acknowledges some kind of public, shareable meaning, marshalled by norms that are necessarily social, and historically filtered: I raise my arm, so you raise your arm. Pictorial Modernism (and here we are dealing with a capacious version that starts with Manet’s Olympia and works its way up to Jackson Pollock) marks the point at which the socially objective moment of self-recognition, as well as the recognition of others as being legible through this self-recognition, begins to break down: I raise my arm, you turn away.
Pippin’s book argues that by understanding the work of art in ethical terms as a ‘test case’ (as opposed to a work of art) the subject is then in a position to recognise the moment of misrecognition as grounds for the possibility of renewed social forms of recognition. A definition and admission precede this claim, which, though enticing on the surface is, as I see it, basically suspect.
Firstly, the work of art is defined as an ‘affective-sensible modality of self-knowledge’. Secondly, Pippin admits that ‘I am neither an art historian, nor an art critic, but I am interested in a kind of philosophical attention to artworks.’ These two designations open up a space which, whether historically minded or not, allows the philosopher to proceed on the basis that knowledge is itself constitutive—that it can make things and produce subjects. This claim is then rolled out across three elegant chapters that move centrifugally from the art object (Édouard Manet), to the art object’s relation to art criticism (Michael Fried and TJ Clark), to art criticism’s relation to philosophy (Martin Heidegger).
In the first chapter, selected paintings by Édouard Manet - the ‘grandfather’ of Modernism - are proffered as embodied proof of two imaginative figures from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1835). The first figure describes man’s ‘amphibious’ problem: ‘How can a subject of thought and deeds that always experiences itself as beyond or more than its material states come to any resolution about who or what it actually is?’ Two pages later, the artwork is imagined to house a ‘thousand-eyed Argus’:
The idea that visual art can transform the surface of every object … into a thousand-eyed creature is also a claim that the reception and appreciation of the work should be understood not as an inspiring intimation of the ideal [i.e. the beautiful].
Here embodiment both delegitimises the appearance of the ideal in sensible form and describes the ‘contradiction’ that lies at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic and pictorial Modernism. It is knowledge’s claim to some kind of materiality (real or imaginary) that allows the subject to effectively use works of art to constitute herself as a subject in the public sphere.
But doesn’t this mean that we are being asked to read the historically conditioned breakdown of knowledge (knowledge as ‘mutuality of recognition’) through the work of art we are simultaneously being called upon to interpret? And if so, is the work of art then only meaningful insofar as it performs the declarative moment of (mis)recognition — a kind of determinate negation? Pippin avoids this charge by leaning upon pictorial Modernism’s putative ‘demand that we understand each other, and thereby understand and appreciate art, in a new way.’ (Interestingly, Modernism’s ‘demand’ starts to sound like the Kantian subject’s ‘demand’ that his judgments be ratified by an imagined community of sense.) Pippin could here be seen to strategically invoke Manet’s paintings at key points in order to substantiate philosophical claims about the unbroken ‘vitality’ of reason moving into an age of pluralisms of the social order.
Chapter two goes a long way to alleviate this concern by connecting the two figures from Hegel – ‘man’s amphibious problem’ and the ‘thousand-eyed Argus’ - to the ‘problem of the beholder’ in the writings of two eminently authoritative art critics, TJ Clark and Michael Fried. Pippin counters Hegel’s depiction of a brute natural dominator with Marx’s account of historical materialism, before engaging TJ Clark’s Debordian theory of society’s ‘circuit’ of representations. This move comes at the right moment. Clark’s claim is that ‘one can put an emphasis on representations as constitutive of a social order and still remain true to the insights of historical materialism, as long as one is clear on the nature of that link between representations and the “totality” he (and Marx) calls “social practice”.’ A painting like Manet’s Olympia (1863) thus ‘constitutes a test of representational adequacy’, in which case, ‘what is “shocking” is the suggestion that prostitution is not just consistent with capitalist exchange value but paradigmatically representative of it.’ Clark’s social frame provides the correct test for Pippin’s philosophical interrogation of Hegel’s writings on art, not least because of the way it subtly undermines Clement Greenberg’s reduction of the painting’s representation to Painting’s ‘medium-specificity’. Beyond this, Pippin offers a nuanced critique of Clark’s sometime tendency to totalise Modernity. This lays the ground for a more confraternal discussion of Michael Fried’s famous distinction between ‘theatricality’ and ‘absorption’.
Michael Fried - Pippin’s silent interlocutor, to whom the book is dedicated - characterises ‘the modern struggle for mutuality of recognition’ in terms of the ‘“increasing difficulty” in finding credible antitheatrical strategies.’ Simply put, the more theatrical a picture, the more it knows it is being beheld. An ‘antitheatrical strategy’ attempts to negate this conventionality through a high level of “absorption” which, in Hegelian terms, means ‘“not being merely for others”’. What Pippin gathers from this is that, not only is ‘the defeat of theatricality an essential condition of the work’s being an artwork’, but that a ‘successful expression of a relation between artwork and beholder is also an expression of the problem of shareable intelligibility in general, a subject-subject relation, not some sort of subject-object relation.’ Pippin effectively ends the chapter where he begun it, with the Idealist claim that knowledge is itself constitutive. At this point the reader might suspect the philosopher’s desire to revive a public sphere that may never have existed: one that the art critic Thomas Crow properly vetted when he wrote in 1987 that ‘the perceived unity of modernist practice was, even in its decayed, terminal forms, a survival of the original equation between artistic seriousness and public purpose that took definitive shape during the 18th century.’
The final chapter checks Hegel’s philosophy of art with a close reading of the 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s landmark contribution, The Origin of the Work of Art (1935-6). As Pippin augurs, ‘in what way a content can near truth will be an issue’ [my italics]. A first answer comes in the form of a summary presentation of Heidegger’s ontological redressing of the artwork as an ‘event’ that does not represent the world of its subject so much as the ‘worlding of the world’ at work in the concealing and revealing of a truth that is never correctness but only ever disclosive. These categories add succour to Pippin’s Hegel play, dynamising a notion of Geist that still sits uneasily next to his account of ‘pictorial Modernism’.
Robert B. Pippin’s admission that ‘unfortunately Heidegger does not draw our attention to the many unusual sensible aspects of the actual painting’ could serve as an indictment of the book itself. Indeed, the late introduction of Clement Greenberg’s textured art writing and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty - with its immersive, situated register - appears to plug the material gaps in a discussion about art otherwise rooted in ontology—with this confluence ringing out in pronouncements such as ‘Cézanne has a Heideggerian tonality…’ This kind of philosophical permeation could be dangerous, one might argue, if it were tasked after Heidegger with ‘revealing any one aspect of the “world” or “destiny” of some “historical people”’ [my italics].
Robert B. Pippin’s ‘Concluding Remarks’ returns the reader to the claim that art can be viewed as ‘a component of a collective attempt at social intelligibility’. The legitimising lens tracks drastically here, from the significance of reading ‘details’ pace Clark and Fried, to the suggestion that ‘it is possible for societies, as if they were themselves subjects, to be mired in some way in practical self-contradiction’ [my italics]. This new ‘as if’ reads as programmatic in the context of the closing pages. Its function is to reduce society to the order of the psychological and to raise the subject to the sensus communis of Kant’s originary ‘aesthetic sensibility’… making way for what I wonder?
By the end, we have all but lost sight of Manet and Cézanne, the ‘father and grandfather’ of pictorial Modernism. Instead, we are left with a lengthy vindication of Hegel as a rational philosopher, committed to addressing (but not to ‘solving’) the ethical issue of ‘mutual social intelligibility’. ‘Art’ it seems, has been marshalled in as an appropriate (but fully exchangeable) topos for a larger philosophical project we are not made privy to, apart from at discrete points in the book’s many footnotes. After the Beautiful shines through its scholarly and comparative close reading of text, to leave the reader with a glimmer of a promise for the renewal of a society that, when she looks up, is nowhere to be seen. Pippin’s attempt to graft the values of an ideal bourgeois public sphere onto the crisis of Modernity through Hegel’s philosophy of art is, to say the least, anachronistic. I find it especially troublesome in light of the book’s title, that Pippin ends by drawing attention to Hegel’s ‘ringing reassertion of the link, not only the link between “beauty and truth”… but the link between them, the social bond, which has also been preserved.’ Still, it is good to know what you stand against.