An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

training in artistic making that can never be reduced to recipe or rote. Instead,

models must be put before the novice, practice works in response to them must

be criticized and revised, and then one must wait–for active, imaginative

creativity in the novice either to come to the fore or not. For generations,

teachers of poetry, painting, music, acting, and dance have worked in this

way, hoping for that magical moment when precursor work is all at once fully

internalized, taken up, and actively transformed by the student as nascent

successor.

Hegel’s criticisms of subjectivism

While he broadly accepts Kant’s conception of art as in the service of free-

dom, Hegel also criticizes Kant’s picture of creativity as too individualist and

subjectivist.“This apparently perfect reconciliation [of freedom and sensuous

embodiment in the gesture of genius] is still supposed by Kant at the last to

be only subjective in respect of the...production [of art], and not itself to be

absolutely true and actual.”^24 According to Hegel, Kant“makes [the] dissol-

ution [of the opposition between freedom and sensuousness] and [their]

reconciliation into a purelysubjectiveone...not one absolutely true and

actual.”^25 In order tobethe genuinely true and actual sensuous embodiment

of freedom, the work of art must, according to Hegel, proceed not from

individual genius alone and its subjective psychological needs and powers,

but further from the engagement of creative genius with a widely shared and

lived conception of freedom. Shared and lived conceptions of freedom them-

selves have a definite, progressive logic of development, Hegel claims. Instead

of emphasizing the capacities and action of the individual maker, we should,

Hegel argues, note how“the sequence of definite conceptions of the world, as

the definite but comprehensive consciousness of nature, man, and God,gives

itself artistic shape.”^26 Notoriously, Hegel supposes that this explains why

certain nonwestern cultures did not manage to create great art, for they

lacked a properconceptionof the freedom that art is to embody.

So, for example, the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, in their artistic shapes,

images of gods, and idols, never get beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue

definiteness of form. They could not master true beauty because their

(^24) Hegel,Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 60. (^25) Ibid., p. 57. (^26) Ibid., p. 72; emphasis added.
120 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art