Spiritualization (‘Vergeistigung’) or ‘From Stone to Word’. On Poetry in Hegel’s Philosophy of Art

Abstract

In Hegel’s “Lectures on Aesthetics”, poetry bears special relevance to the thesis of the spiritualization of art, the way of the medium from stone to word. The theoretical basis for this thesis rests on Hegel’s epistemic concept of intuition (Anschauung), representation (Vorstellung), and concept (Begriff ), as well as the components developed in this context for a modern semiology – a philosophical theory of signs and language. Poetry is considered as the most general, most comprehensive, and most spiritual art. A new kind of self-relation is constituted: imagination is related to imagination, representation to representation. Hegel unfolds a gradation from intuitive and imagining self-understanding – from art and religion – towards self-relational thought, a conceptual cognition of philosophy with its basis in the self-thinking thought (das Denken des Denkens). An intermingling of the forms of poetic and philosophical expression is to be avoided; crucial is a clean distinction between the forms of presentation proper to literature and to philosophy respectively, between the “army of metaphors” and the “phalanx of concepts” (Begriffe).