backgrounds and changing commitments. Even if it is true that works of
art–the highest and best works of art that fulfill art’s“supreme function”–
express in sensuous form a conception of what is highest and embody an
anticipation of human freedom in its service, it is not clear that all such
expressions will be quite commensurable with and transparent to one
another. Exactlyhowfreedom is anticipated and how a sense of what is
highest is embodied in sensuous form may differ significantly among a
university scientist, a migrant farm worker, a middle-class suburban teacher,
and an urban club owner, to say nothing of the differences associated with
ethnicity, race, or gender. As Stanley Cavell once observed,“the Spirit of the
Age is not easy to place, ontologically or empirically.”^31 While there can be
commanding works that bring together many audiences–Louis Armstrong’s
West End Blues, say, or Victor Fleming’sThe Wizard of Oz–oppositions none-
theless remain. Perhaps we need a somewhat more individualist and plural-
ized theory of expression.
To some extent, however, and contrary to his official systematic theory
of the achievement of free and meaningful life under modern social
institutions–a theory presented most explicitly in hisPhilosophy of Right
(1821)–Hegel registers this point in writing about the details of modern or
Romantic art in hisAesthetics(1835).^32 Somewhat surprisingly against the
grain of his systematic social philosophy, Hegel there observes that modern
life is“burdened with abstraction,”^33 as though inwardness or subjectivity
were continually failing to find a home in its world. The distinctive task of
modern art is then the presentation of freedom“notfrombutinfeeling,”^34
thus at least partly alleviating the sense of feeling as a passively borne burden
with respect to the experience of a particular person, object, or incident. By
way of the imaginative attentiveness of art, feeling about a particular comes(^31) Stanley Cavell,“Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,”in S. Cavell,Must We Mean
What We Say?(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), p. 73.
(^32) Hegel’sAestheticswas published posthumously in 1835, based on H. G. Hotho’s editing of
Hegel’s notes for his lectures on aesthetics presented in Berlin in 1820/1, 1823, 1826, and
1828/9. There is some controversy about the extent to which Hotho may have over-
emphasized Hegel’s systematicity and preference for Greek art at the expense of his
more complex rich engagements with the art of his own era. See Annemarie Gethmann-
Siefert,Einführung in Hegel’s Asthetik(Stuttgart: Uni-Taschenbuch, 2005). It is, however,
also possible nonetheless to follow these engagements in the text Hotho published.
(^33) Hegel,Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 1128.
(^34) Ibid., p. 1112.
86 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art