The Aporia of Configured Meaning: teaching Hegel's aesthetics

Abstract

This paper will look at an aspect of Hegel's aesthetics within the context of art education. The choice of Hegel is not innocent but is intended as a challenge to the current anti-Hegelian orthodoxy which, in concentrating on the perceived systemic closure and formal totality of his philosophy, seriously underestimates the pedagogical potency of his philosophy of art. The claim will be that instead of offering a closed theory of art, Hegel's Aesthetics, like all of his works, is driven by the negativity of his dialectic through a multitude of (for him) limited and contradictory positions all of which, if stripped of their art historical and philosophical garb, should be familiar to anyone sensitive to the predicament of the art student. Hegel demands the sublation of such positions for the sake of an absolute inaccessible to art, but if, as will be encouraged, he is read against the grain, and the logic of sublation is resisted, a critical text emerges that offers a multitude of insights which can form the basis for an effective pedagogical practice. In that sense, it is the teaching of aesthetics that is the concern here and not the introduction or defence of a philosophical position, and in particular the teaching of aesthetics within the context of an identified predicament which may not be so effectively addressed through modes of theorisation too closely tied to reception and methods of ‘reading’.