Her Cock is Eatin’ Cheesecake
Dru Farro
Synopsis of Hegel’s Aesthetics
I don’t know, you’re probably like me and have been to many museums or galleries full of art. Or Art. Or Fine Art. Museums are very weird because they sort of codify, by means of totally mysterious criteria, the possible engagements with art and the range of experiences consequent thereof. But what does a piece of art, or Art, or Fine Art, do? The weirdest experience with a piece of art I’ve ever had was at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montréal (which I was in sort of accidentally) during an exhibition of Cuban art (which, probably like many of us, I knew nothing about). I was just like bopping around the museum, thinking about stuff, saying things to myself like ‘oh that one’s nice’ and ‘this one makes me feel weird’ and ‘this sure is annoying’ and ‘how long do you have to stand in front of a piece of art before you can, like, move on?’ and ‘would someone please tell me once and for all if communism is good or bad?’ and ‘isn’t it weird that sugar comes from these crazy-looking sticks?’ …my usual idiotic interior monologue. Then I saw a painting by some guy whose name I don’t remember anymore except that it was a pseudonym and that his fake last name was Ponce-de-Leon and that he was like a drunk and never famous in his life and Cuban. The painting was called, in English, ‘The Three Faces of Christ’, but its real name is whatever ‘The Three Faces of Christ’ is when translated into Spanish. Needless to say, I stood in front of it for maybe half an hour — until I felt like I couldn’t enjoy it anymore — feeling things that, of course, don’t translate into any language.
Not having read Hegel’s Aesthetics I figured I would start this post off with my example of what I guess I would have to describe as a singularly aesthetic experience — an encounter with art (or Art, or Fine Art). Will Hegel’s analysis help put into language, or make any more accessible, my memory of my encounter with Señor ‘Ponce-de-Leon’? Maybe not. But I’m already wondering, and perhaps this will become clear as I read the lecture, why would anyone bother trying?
Here’s something that Hegel says that doesn’t surprise me:
we may, however, begin at once by asserting that artistic beauty stands higher than nature. For the beauty of art is the beauty that is born — born again, that is — of the mind; and by as much as the mind and its products are higher than nature and its appearances, by so much the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature (4, I’m using the Penguin Classics edition, which is probably not the definitive and hallowed edition, assuming that Hegel’s Aesthetics has hallowed and unhallowed versions).
Hegel’s justification for this claim is that even the moronic fancies that flit capriciously through the mind of any person (like when I start impromptu inventing speculative Apps for theoretical electronic devices, as is my custom) are higher than the works of nature, at least formally, since my Apps are products of my ‘intelligence’ and my freedom. Hegel also implies that art stands apart from nature insofar as works of art are capable of being considered in themselves, whereas works of nature (if ‘works’ they may be so called), can be understood only in their connection to the rest of nature.
But what does ‘higher than’ mean here, anyway? Lucky for us, Hegel anticipates this question and answers it. Lo, it is written,
to say, as we have said, in general terms, that mind and its artistic beauty stand higher than natural beauty is no doubt to determine almost nothing. For ‘higher’ is an utterly indefinite expression… (ibid.)
Yep. But the distinction for Hegel remains, nevertheless, between art and nature and consists in this: works of art (which are products of the mind) are capable of truth, given that the mind, for Hegel, comprehends in itself all that is. Hegel values the mind and its products because it is the mind that makes possible any comprehension of natural, or any other variety, of beauty in the first place.
Hegel, true philosopher of my red heart that he is, moreover anticipates my above question (why bother trying?). He notes, with I think sincere gravity, the charges against any rigorous study of art: that art is a mere luxury, that it is only a tool for the real investigation of, for example, morality, or that art is above all deception and should be ignored. Moreover, art is about perception, and philosophy is about getting busy with wisdom, so why would philosophy even imagine itself capable of analyzing the aesthetic when its goal is the metaphysical or epistemological? Double moreover, isn’t art just about, like, your opinion, man? Science, per contra, is about THE TRUTH, so science would be about as interested in art as any university would be in hiring me to teach at it. Against all this, which Hegel readily allows, he nevertheless persists in imagining a kind of art that is absolutely free, that cannot be appropriated for practical purposes, ‘free in its ends and in its means’ (9). Because art, more than anything, is about freedom. Hegel writes,
science liberates itself from service to rise in free independence to the attainment of truth, in which medium, free from all interference, it fulfills itself in conformity with its proper aims. Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind (ibid).
Hear that Kanye? Hear that Jay? That’s Hegel calling you out! I don’t see no most comprehensive truths of the mind sittin’ on that throne!
Here are some examples of the Divine Nature brought to utterance:
‘Add this, we blazin’, Nikki, what you think? I got two White Russians but we also need some drinks.‘
‘Heard they do anything for a Klondike, well I’d do anything for a blonde dyke.‘
‘But really, really, I don’t give a eff-you-see-kay, forget Barbie, fuck Nicki she escaped, she on a diet but her cock is eatin’ cheesecake.‘ (for an explanation of my idiocy regarding this line, see the comments below)
‘Give me a Smith & Wesson I got niggas undressin’‘
Or, in Hegel’s words,
[Kanye, Nicki, Nas, Gza, Andre and Boi, Ice Cube, Biggie, Method Man, 2-Pac, etc] represent even the highest ideas in sensuous forms, thereby bringing them nearer to the character of natural phenomena, to the senses, and to feeling…. [the mind] generates out of itself the works of fine art as the first middle term of reconciliation between pure thought and what is external, sensuous, and transitory, between nature with its finite actuality and the infinite freedom of the reason that it comprehends (10).
Hegel justifies his interest in art (or Art, or Fine Art, or Spongebob Squarepants) because works of art are ‘genuinely real’ and are so because they exist in their own right, they are the product of an intelligent ordering of the chaos of material elements with which we share our experience of life. Art allows the higher reality in which the mind frolics happily to make itself felt in the material of the world. Hegel writes,
the work of art brings before us the eternal powers that hold dominion in history…the artistic semblance has the advantage that in itself it points beyond itself, and refers us away from itself to something spiritual (11).
Art is your first Radiohead album, art helps you see the panic and the vomit, compels you at least to wonder if there might be some place to sleep beyond the crackle of pigskin, the dust, and the screaming. It does not, according to Hegel, provide the tranquility we perhaps see through its prism — only suggests it as something to which our mind might aspire, even possibly achieve (though not through art itself). Besides, our present condition, which I think is still the case today, is dominated by maxims, by laws, by clichés and repetitions, by refrains, by the familiar and the unambiguous, by stories and experiences so insipid that they could not possibly trouble our all-too-easily-troubled horror at our own existence. This is why Hegel pronounces, famously I think, that ‘art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past’ (13). Art no longer produces any kind of communion with the Highest Divinity, but rather a sense of enjoyment and, at most, judgments of taste.
What we ultimately have here is a rehashing of the master and slave thing, where the slave sees in the object created his or her own self, not herself as complete, though, but as alienated. This alienation is precisely what the created object reflects. Let’s let Hegel bring us home here,
and in this preoccupation with the other of itself the thinking spirit is not to beheld untrue to itself as if forgetting or surrendering itself therein, nor it is so weak as to lack strength to comprehend what it different from itself, but it comprehends both itself and its opposite. For the notion is the universal, which preserves itself in its particularizations, dominates alike itself and its ‘other’, and so becomes the power and activity that consists in undoing the alienation which it had evolved. And thus the work of art in which thought alienates itself belongs, like thought itself, to the realm of comprehending thought, and the mind, in subjecting it to scientific consideration, is thereby but satisfying the want of its own inmost nature (15).
So what was happening to me that day in Montréal? Being alive, I guess, all rapturous and transmuted. A lot like being dead, really.
Art is ‘higher’ than nature for Hegel because his project is to see the ‘I’ negate the environment it occurs within. As Butler writes:
“Regarding itself as a nothing, as a doing of nothing, as an excremental function, and hence regarding itself as excrement, this consciousness effectively reduces itself to the changeable features of its bodily functions and features. Yet, since it is an experience of wretchedness, there is some consciousness which takes stock of these functions and which is not fully identified with them. Significantly, it is here, in the effort to differentiate itself from its excretory functions, indeed, from its excretory identity that consciousness relies on a mediator that Hegel calls a ‘priest.’ This mediating agency relieves the abject consciousness of responsibility for its own actions.” (Butler, quoted in Kroker’s Body Drift, 35)
Your telling me ‘[your] first three-headed Christ, your first radio-head album’ wasn’t an infinite Wyoming sky? Fuck Hegel. My first powerful aesthetic experiences weren’t confined to the ratiocinations of the world spirit of reason, they were beachcombing with my dog along the coastlines of the Juan de Fuca Strait. = )
Hegel is calling Jay-Z and Kanye out. Indeed!
“I don’t see no most comprehensive truths of the mind sittin’ on that throne!”
“Truly!” proto-Deleuzians Kanye and Jay answer, “you do not! And that, dear Hegel, is exactly what makes it a throne. You see, there is no church in the wild.’
“Human beings in a mob
What’s a mob to a king?
What’s a king to a god?
What’s a god to a non-believer?
Who don’t believe in anything?
Is Pious pious cause God loves pious?
Socrates asks, “Whose bias do y’all seek?”
All for Plato, screech
I live by you, desire
I stand by you, walk through the fire
Your love is my scripture
Let me into your encryption
Two tattoos, one read “No Apologies”
The other said “Love is cursed by monogamy”
That’s somethin’ that the pastor don’t preach
That’s somethin’ that a teacher can’t teach
No church in the wild.”
Love this. You’re the best.
THIS! For as far as I could see and as long as I can remember: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/153/336502111_e30afc846b_z.jpg?zz=1
Someone doesn’t know how to listen to rap lyrics very well. It’s “sh-sh-she’s fake” not “she escaped” and “her pockets eatin’ cheesecake” (getting money in addition to referencing her enormous, beautiful ass) not “her cock is eating cheesecake.” And you titled the essay that? SMH. If only there were a massive electronic resource filled with information of this sort.
Cool! Thanks for reading and thanks for the comment!
You may have run aground because you began poorly. Hegel did not write his Lectures on Aesthetics to make you a more articulate art critic/connoisseur. Perhaps reading him with this intention led you to your opening question, “why would anyone bother trying?”
Since I do not wish merely to censure, I will try to suggest a legitimate reason why we might read Hegel’s Aesthetics today. E. H. Gombrich described Hegel as “the father of the history of art”. Hegel, as we know, did more than any other thinker to entrench the idea of an historical progress that is cumulative and rational. Gombrich’s “tribute” refers to the overwhelming significance that came to be attributed to the evolution of artistic styles, as opposed to their taxonomy. History dominates the study of art in a way unparalleled in other contemporary disciplines, such that “art history” is sometimes considered synonymous with knowledge of art. And great artists since Hegel began to see their work “historically”, in the sense that what they aspired to was to enter into the annals of “art history”. This is in contradistinction to the Classical aspiration of great artists: to become immortal through their work. But the parallel between these two aspirations is obvious. Art history became, and to some extent still is today, the measure of one’s status as an artist–that is, whether one is considered indispensable to the grand narrative of the art historians. Modernist art can hardly be understood without the rationale for artistic “movements”, particularly the avant-garde, which sought to “advance” art or to demonstrate the historical necessity of their stylistic innovations (as opposed to merely titillating a bored public with the latest fashions). However, “becoming historical” is an ambiguous, even nihilistic aspiration, particularly as the memory of Hegel and Marx’s moral compasses are fading. Reading Hegel’s aesthetics today might remind us of the presuppositions that lead artists to aspire to become historical figures (in contradistinction to immortals), as well as providing us an opportunity to reconsider these ideas in the wake of the catastrophes of the 20th Century and the so-called “crisis of culture”. This, in brief, is a reason why I might take up Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics today, and, in my humble opinion, it is a more compelling reason than the desire to find the right words to describe a moment of rapture. To that end we might take up any number of poems.
Finally, a word of caution: you might try to strike a more respectful tone. The disparity between Hegel’s grandeur and your gosh-gee-williker sensibility is a-music and only lowers your own writing while Hegel escapes unscathed. I hope the harshness of these remarks is tempered by the fact that I would not have expended the energy on someone undeserving.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the thoughtful comment!
Ugh, ‘respectful tone.’ What an f’ing bore. Try as Zizek might – and heavy lifting it is indeed – Hegel will never be anything other than a reactionary conservative hack (who actively resisted, denigrated and impeded the Burschenschaften, i.e. democratic and revolutionary student movements, of his day).
Dru wouldn’t say it but I will: respect cannot be commanded but must be earned.
Hegel isn’t deserving of a the first iota of respect. In the most appropriate of ironies, history will bury him, and those who demand ‘respect’ for his corpse too.
When I first read this post I remember being somewhat taken aback by it in perhaps a similar way that acitizen was (or perhaps a different way, I don’t know), and I find his or her comment very relevant.
I chalked up my own uneasiness with the original post to my personal sympathies with various critiques of commercial culture and the culture industries (that is not at all to say that I deny any value to this culture or the songs/artists [though indeed I am very reluctant to use that word to describe them!!!] in this post) and because in my own curiosity concerning communal ideals, their value and place in society (a curiosity the museum-going Dru also shares in this post), there is no room whatsoever–as a fundamental principle I suppose (I mean only for myself!!!)–for the valorization of anyone so visibly (especially to youth), boisterously and even violently laudatory of social prestige and material luxury and wealth as, for example, Jay-Z and Kanye West are (or at least that is how they appear to me, though I do not claim to have more than a cursory familiarity with their work!!! and what the hell do I know!).
If this makes me a bore so be it.
On another note, here is a poem that some people might find interesting that I think touches on some of the points Dru makes in his original post (which, even if I didn’t agree with it at points, I found to be anything but boring):
I just take issue with the patronizing tone acitizen struck, the idea that we ought to be filled with some base level reverence for Hegel, that we ought to be ‘respectful’ to the hallowed master – a position with which I quite strongly disagree.
Your point on Kanye and Jay is well taken, though I disagree.