The Infinite Purposiveness of Fine Art

PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY

Introduction

In the introduction to his Lectures on Fine Art (1818), Georg W. F. Hegel (1770 – 1831) defines aesthetics as the ‘philosophy of fine art’[1]. I feel this is an apt designation, since, on the one hand – as Hegel himself states – it is more focused than the rather broad literal translation from the original Greek, ‘science of sensation’[2], and on the other, it is at once narrower and more comprehensive than the unhelpful ‘science of beauty’ whose object of study extends beyond the bounds of art tout court into the realm of nature, and at the same time subsumes itself under art whose breadth of inquiry necessarily also includes concepts that do not overlap perfectly with it. When considered as a mode of philosophical inquiry directed at understanding fine art, then, Aesthetics makes sense dually: as the science of understanding that human mode of creative production that is aimed both at evoking sensation and also at conveying beauty, without compromising its scope by limiting itself to either one, or unduly extending it outside its specific domain. And yet, by asserting itself as a middle ground between these two alternatives, Aesthetics, thus understood, risks positing itself as a mere definition-by-negation, and on close inspection, we must concede that our conception is one that begs further investigation. In other words: though we may have defined Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and attributed to it a satisfactory object – fine art – we must now go on to define the object itself, and endow it with a self-standing meaning that overcomes this apparent negative quality.

 Here, it is helpful to begin with Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). For Kant, fine art is set apart from other forms of cultural production by a peculiar attribute. Unlike other ‘cultural works’ that bear the mark of human ingenuity, fine art possesses a purposiveness that is entirely self-referential. While a tool or a utensil – a typewriter, for instance, or a shovel – is always created to serve a function outside of it – the typewriter to type and the shovel to dig – the work of fine art is a “way of presenting that is purposive on its own”[3]; it serves no other purpose, that is, than that which is inherent in it as a work of fine art. Hegel, who notes this definition without, it seems, being completely satisfied with it, adds an important modification. While retaining Kant’s self-sufficient ‘purposiveness’ and fully acknowledging its centrality, Hegel revendicates, for art, the external purpose Kant disavows. He calls this ‘finite purposiveness’, or that purposiveness in which “end and means remain external to one another, since the end stands in no inner essential relation to the material of its realization.”[4] To this he contrasts another form of purposiveness, which he never explicitly calls infinite, but may, for purposes of clarity, be named so. Infinite purposiveness is that purposiveness which is “perceived in the object without any presentation of purpose”[5]; it is that part of the artwork which serves as an end to itself. Where finite purposiveness is no different from the purposiveness of a tool, external, outer, and essentially distinct from its object, infinite purposiveness is indistinguishable from it. Though Hegel speaks of this infinite purposiveness with respect to beauty in particular, it can be extended to fine art on the whole. Fine art thus possesses both a finite and infinite purposiveness. Here, as we’ve stated, Hegel disagrees with Kant. But it is in its infinite purposiveness that art finds the true depth of its soul. This is where he and Kant would concur. An application of the idea of infinite purposiveness to our definition of aesthetics, then, may resemble the following: if aesthetics is the philosophy of fine art, and the essential feature of fine art is its infinite purposiveness, then it can be stated with little exaggeration that aesthetics is, first and foremost, the philosophy of that mode of human creativity set apart from all others by its infinite purposiveness. Given its critical role in defining the discipline to which it refers, the importance of the infinite purposiveness of fine art cannot be over-emphasized, and I have for this reason chosen it as the topic of my paper. Drawing mostly upon observations from the introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, I intend to explore fine art’s infinite purposiveness in depth, firstly by contrasting it to form, then to its finite counterpart, and finally by integrating it with Hegel’s notion of ‘Spirit’ (Geist).

 Infinite purposiveness

Throughout the introduction to the Lectures, Hegel refers to the infinite purposiveness of fine art in a variety of contexts and with a number of different locutions. In The Aim of Art, he speaks of the ‘essence’ of art, which is distinct from its vocation: “Art does not carry its vocation, end, and aim in itself, but…its essence lies in something else…” This is none other than a re-proposal of the distinction between finite and infinite purposiveness. Fine art’s vocation lies outside of it, and relates to it as something unessential, or external to it. Art may be designed, at least in part, to entertain, please and delight, but this aim is secondary and unconstitutive to art’s inner nature, like the digging of a shovel or the typing of a typewriter. This is its finite purposiveness. To this, Hegel contrasts art’s essence, which he describes as “something else to which [its vocation] serves as a means”[6]. It may, at first, be tempting to reduce this duality to a simple relation between form and content. Both pairings, after all, relate their constituent elements to each other as means and ends; just as the form of an artwork serves as a vehicle for the expression of its ‘content’, so too does its vocation serve as an outward manifestation of its inner essence. To my mind, however, the distinction in question here is rather more subtle. To equate an artwork’s essence to its form alone would be to ignore that content is equally constitutive to fine art’s essence. For – to modify a Kantian phrase – content without form is impotent, and form without content is empty. The second scenario would resemble a tragedy à la John Cage, one perfectly structured – with three acts and a complete dramatis personae – in which the characters say or do nothing at all. And the first scenario would be, to all practical purposes, inconceivable. It would have speech and action, but its language and plot would be jumbled up and take place outside of the confines of time and space. In the solid core of fine art, both form and content must align to create an inner completion. What we are discussing here, therefore, is not form and content in the immediate sense, but rather purposiveness, which itself involves a nuanced and complex interplay of this duality, but cannot be precisely equated with it.

 If it cannot be reduced to form, then, of what stuff is the essence of fine art made? What are the constitutive elements of its infinite aspect? We have seen that fine art’s infinite purposiveness is, in Hegel’s words, “perceived in the object without any presentation of purpose”[7]. And yet this delineation itself begs completion. What is the nature of that inner purpose in the object of fine art such that it is perceivable without presentation? What qualifies fine art as purposefully organised in such a way that its purposiveness is “directly there for us” and “we have no idea of its purpose explicitly separate and distinct from its present reality”?[8] To begin with, it may be useful to delineate this unpresented-yet-perceived purpose of fine art by contrasting it to its ‘presented’ counterpart, which is notably more straightforward. The purpose of fine art that is perceived through its outward presentation is, of course, its finite purposiveness, which relates to the artwork as an instrumental function relates to a tool. Hegel proposes a number of modes in which an artwork can be finitely, or outwardly purposive: it can edify morally, imitate nature and entertain[9]. The last of these is deemed by Hegel “inessential to art”[10] and can therefore be discarded. Additionally, for Schiller the foremost aim of art is to reconcile reason with the senses[11], to provide harmony, in other words, to our dirempt inner worlds. The common ground shared here by these external functions is their instrumentality. They outwardly re-propose an inwardly-sitting reality so that the underlying truth in question is particularised and rendered directly purposeful for fine art’s participant. When an artwork edifies morally, it pushes outward an ethical substrate whose original location is internal, giving it localised form so that its content is immediately graspable. When art imitates nature – or at least when it imitates it well – it likewise goes “beyond the mere technical imitation of what is there”[12], and gives concrete shape to the essential forms, the inner reality of the object buried under appearances. And when art seeks to comment on the interplay of reason and feeling, it does so by drawing on the deeper reality of that dualism, and underscoring it in particularised instances. In all these examples, the mechanism at work is instrumental; the purposiveness in question marks “the boundary at which art is supposed to cease to be an end in itself”[13]. It stands apart from the inner depth of art, and relates to it as something outside of it.

 We will now find it easier, having come this far, to intuit the true nature of infinite purposiveness. If fine art’s finite purposiveness is an external, concrete moment pointing toward a corresponding, deeper reality located in its inner core, then its infinite purposiveness can be no other than the deeper reality itself, the inner, essential truth to which the finite aspect instrumentally relates. So when an artwork presents, outwardly, an instantiation of a moral truth, a rendering of an essential natural form, or a distillation of the inner reality of reason or feeling, then its infinite aspect is the very thing it is an outward manifestation of: the moral truth itself, essential nature itself, the inner reality of reason itself. It is the essence to which it serves as a vocation. And here we have it: fine art’s inner purposiveness is the direct embodiment, in the specific domain of aesthetic production, of the principal truths that animate the soul of the artist, and therefore the mind and culture of a particular time and place. Fine art’s deep structure reflects this inner relation – that between, on the one hand, metaphysical truth and, on the other, form and content – so intimately as to be incomprehensible without it. It is a purposiveness more encompassing than its finite counterpart, which may express the immediate metaphysical character of this or that artwork without comprehending the broader truth that every great work of fine art possesses, that which connects it to a broader network and allows it to transcend itself and tap into the overarching spirit it embodies. To find this infinite aspect of fine art, one must dig deep, penetrate to the marrow, rather than float on its surface where its finite counterpart dwells.

 Fine art’s finite aspect offers its purpose as something external to itself, though containing it within its content. Its expression presents its meaning as something, not inherent in it but related to it genealogically, generatively, as son to father. Its infinite aspect, on the other hand, embodies fine art’s inner content completely, is at one with it. It offers itself because it is at one with itself. Its inner content cannot be distinguished from its inner form. It presents its purpose intersubjectively, in a way that eliminates, or at least blurs the boundaries between subject and object, between meaning and its expression. So when we say that a Gregorian chant was intended to glorify god by its liturgical usage and its textual solemnity, we are speaking of a finite purposiveness. When we penetrate, though, when we dive beneath this outward presentation, and go to the marrow, we find the glory of god itself; we find that the chant doesn’t glorify god at all, it embodies, through its deeper structures – through its intervals, its monophony, its serpentine melodies, the theism inherent in the above – the spirit, the paradigm in which and through which this god-glorification is legitimated. This is its infinite purposiveness, the molten core of the artwork where form and content most perfectly align. Hegel himself comes very close to capturing the moment of such an alignment. His conception of fine art involves a unification of form and content, which he posits was first achieved with classical art[14]. For Hegel, this alignment involves an ‘independent meaning’ at its core, a meaning, not of this or that, but of meaning itself[15]. I would agree with this observation with a small caveat: at the core of a work of fine art lies the embodiment of a particular metaphysic. Its meaning, therefore, necessarily refers to something outside of itself. And yet, at this same time, its content corresponds to itself entirely, since the expressive mode through which it conveys itself is co-extensive with its meaning. To this extent fine art expresses, through its infinite purposiveness, not so much meaning itself, which is so broad as to exclude a particularised representation of itself by means of its finite rendering, but that meaning which can be derived from the deeper metaphysical structure animating the spirit of its time, which, though broad in its own right, is still particular enough to have its meaning outwardly manifested.

 Fine art’s infinite aspect is thus narrower than a concept like meaning, but at the same time broader than it. Any single ideal, like beauty or truth or meaning, is subsumed in the inner essence of an artwork, whose infinite aspect will assimilate all the single elements falling within its purview into a purposeful whole. Rather than one specific component, fine art will embody, in its innermost core, a narrative that connects all its components, allotting to each an interrelated meaning. A work of fine art that aspires to be relevant will capture the overarching spirit of the time. Rather than representing beauty, or truth, or meaning, it will, at once, embody a culturally-determined attitude reflecting a specific idea of beauty, truth and meaning. For Hegel, the unification of content and form, which I believe occurs when an artwork’s infinite aspect coalesces, coincides entirely with the concept of beauty[16], but by reducing this alignment to the beautiful, he is, I believe, excluding from art’s infinite aspect the possibility of its renunciation, which it also contains in itself, as well as the recognition of other conceptual and metaphysical entities that might inhabit it. When form and content coincide, they yield, not beauty, but something broader, which for ease of communication I shall now call by the Hegelian term, ‘spirit’. And spirit’s generality allows multiple narratives of beauty, truth and meaning, including their distortions and negations. Much modernist and postmodernist art exemplifies this. When spirit denies beauty, its denial must also be given the right to reside in art; it must be embodiable in an artwork’s infinite aspect in order that it may be sensitive to its place and time.

 The relationship of fine art’s infinite aspect to spirit, in fact, is what I intend to discuss next, but before I do, I feel it opportune to elucidate, one last time, the primary differences between fine art’s finite and infinite purposiveness, so there can be no confusion on the matter. Fine art’s finite and infinite aspects differ in their manner of manifestation, and they differ, in this regard, along the following parameters: scope, medium, location and consciousness. Firstly, where the scope of the finite aspect is narrow, that of the infinite aspect is broad. The first presents content that is related to the specific work, the second embodies the broader content of an entire spirit, one animating, not this work or that, but the metaphysic implicated in the full breadth of the aesthetic. Secondly, where the finite aspect manifests itself through the medium of superficial, immediately identifiable stylistic devices, the infinite, on the other hand, relies, for its embodiment, on the inner structures of the work, and these require deeper probing to be uncovered and understood. Thirdly, where the finite aspect is outwardly located, and therefore immediately perceptible, the infinite is inward. Its content, though more complete, is considerably more subtle and therefore less articulable by the participant who would require a special intuition to be aware of it. Fourthly, where the finite aspect manifests itself as a result of conscious processes, the second does so unconsciously. And here we enter into the specifics of the artist’s creative process, into the distinction between intent and inspiration. The artist sets about achieving her finite purpose intentfully. That is, she is moved to work on this theme or that by a conscious interest in it. The infinite aspect, on the other hand, is born of a notably more subtle and unconscious desire, that of connecting with and channeling the spirit of the age, which manifests itself through the agency of inspiration. This is how an artwork’s finite and infinite aspects differ. How they relate has, I believe, adequately addressed in previous paragraphs.

 Infinite purposiveness and spirit

Hegel’s concept of spirit is a rather imprecise one, but in his Jena Lectures he comes close to giving it a graspable definition. Here, he states that spirit is a form of subsistence that is truly universal, which all the same contains the particular in itself.[17] This, I feel, is an excellent point of departure for our discussion of spirit and its connection with fine art’s infinite purposiveness. For when spirit manifests itself in fine art’s infinite aspect, it first and foremost posits itself as a conceptual unity, which, however already contains in itself the germs of its particularities. And when these germs then find their expression in fine art’s finite aspect, when they sprout stems and grow, they themselves retain the ghostly ur-mantle of their universal forms in their concrete manifestations. This is how spirit in fine art relates its universal aspect to its particular, and we have seen already what these universal and particular aspects are: the embodiments, in art’s infinite aspect, in its innermost core, of the metaphysic of an age, and the particularized outward renderings of these in its finite purposiveness. It may be opportune now to make an unfortunate but necessary concession: not all art conveys spirit, but all relevant art must; all art, in other words, that sets out to accurately represent the spirit of its age. And any artwork that achieves this true inner purposiveness we may call ‘art of spirit’. In ancient sculpture, Hegel says, spirit enters art and becomes its content[18]. What Hegel says of Greek sculpture alone I would apply to all art that achieves this aim, irrespective of its form or its epoch. All art that sets out to be art of spirit must aspire to this deep synchrony, must penetrate to the marrow. Its content must be ‘alive’ in this precise way, and in the equal and opposite sense, art that is asynchronous with its spirit is ‘dead’, ‘lifeless’.

 For Hegel, fine art is the means itself through which an individual becomes spirit:

The universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side) springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e. that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is. Things in nature are only immediate and single, while man as spirit duplicates himself, in that (i) he is as things in nature are, but (ii) he is just as much for himself; he sees himself, represents himself to himself, thinks, and only on the strength of this active placing himself before himself is he spirit.[19]

 In other words, it is in our nature as thinking consciousnesses to ‘duplicate ourselves’ in the art we create. We generate replications of ourselves by means of fine art so that we are able to recognise ourselves in it and thereby attain self-consciousness as spirit. When Hegel says that man is more than a mere thing in nature, it would appear Hegel is alluding to Kant’s thing-in-itself. Man is not merely dead matter. He is a consciousness that strives to attain self-consciousness. And it is in this latter iteration that he becomes spirit. By seeing himself through art, by representing himself as content through art’s inner form, he achieves self-consciousness. Through art, he sets himself apart from mere dead matter and acquires his vitality. He is no longer a lifeless object, but a self-conscious subject, validated as something real in the world. Here spirit, it would now seem, is implicated in fine art by a double function, a double function that unfolds bi-directionally. It is initially injected into the core of an artwork by man, who is not yet fully conscious of himself as spirit and yet manages to conjure it up from his own depths. But then in a successive moment, spirit turns on itself and redirects itself back toward man as he looks on, as he gazes into this mirror of his own making, and reflects back to him the energy he has emitted, and bestows the self-consciousness he yearns for. Art, then, can be said to serve the purpose both of capturing reality and also of reflecting it back to us, of – in Schopenhauer’s words – “plucking the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holding it isolated before it.”[20]

 Spirit moves through time in fine art’s infinite aspect as it might through any other channel: following the dialectical ebbs and flows of the shifting metaphysic. Since it is directed into an artwork by wholly intuitive means, by the intercession of an artist who is not consciously aware of the spirit she is channelling, the infinite purposiveness of art can be said to be fully available only to those participants who are metaphysically synchronous to her; those, in other words, who are equally able to passively apprehend spirit she injects it actively. To the extent that art is representative of its direct metaphysical environment, of the spirit it channels, it cannot be detached from it and understood apart from it. Historical perspective, in this sense, does not allow posterity to endow ancient Art with a meaning that may not have been readily available to its first interpreters, and doing so may lead to anachronously bestowed meanings that are inaccurate, where accuracy, here, can specifically be taken to mean degree of correspondence to original content of spirit. 

 It may now be worthwhile to cursorily trace the journey of Spirit through the history of fine art. In ancient Greece, man saw himself as one of the gods, and the gods were tellingly human-like. Man was flawed yet divine. Spirit thus expressed itself in fine art as a manly godliness or a godly humanity. The sculptures of ancient Greece, in their anatomical self-assuredness, are reflective of this, as are the Athenian tragedies like Oedipus, with their elevation of man’s troubles to cosmic-level significance. In the middle ages, this dynamic was overturned. Man was no longer godly, but flawed and cosmically insignificant. His faculties of reason were weak and misleading, and subservient to scriptural wisdom and the divine logos. Spirit, here, resembled the god-glorifying, human-diminishing Christian metaphysic, and can be noted in Cimabue’s two-dimensionality and Pérotin’s amorphous chant melodies. The humanistic revolution in the Renaissance, which was consolidated in the Enlightenment, brought about a notable shift. Spirit freed itself from its theistic manacles and acquired some of its ancient godliness, which was now said to be located in man’s reason. Through science, man could now understand the cosmos and saw himself as central in it. Spirit, here, embodied the supremacy of reason and man’s newfound self-confidence, and is reflected in the anatomical complexity of Michelangelo’s frescos, the contrapuntal richness of Bach’s cantatas and the political themes of the novels of Richardson and Swift. In the nineteenth century, the Romantic Spirit revendicated subjectivism for itself while omnifying its humanism, and elevated art to “an expression of the Absolute”[21]. In recognising herself in nature and the world around her, the artist raised herself to the status of god[22] without yet supplanting him. Spirit, for the Romantic, was the expression, through art, of the absoluteness of man’s subjectivity, and can be noted in the toils of Goethe’s Werner, the grandiloquence of Mahler’s symphonies and moody landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. With Modernism, god died and man took the final plunge, crowning himself master of the universe in his stead. In the Spirit of modernist art, the man-god is ubiquitous: in the atonality of Schönberg, the reality-distorting paintings of Picasso and the formal subversions of James Joyce. Finally with Postmodernism, Spirit moves beyond this collective egocentrism and, realizing its absurdity, laughs at itself, creating ironic and self-referential artworks like the Fluxus gags, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia and John Barth’s novels, works whose idea of truth and beauty is to poke fun of both.

 An artwork arises precisely because it is understood by its creator. Or more precisely, the underlying metaphysical mechanism spawning it – its spirit – is internalised by the artist so deeply that it is channeled unconsciously by the artist into her work. Spirit, thus intended, constitutes the fibre of her psychic essence. A medieval who pours his theological beliefs – his notion of the logos, his belief in the supremacy of divine command – into a chant or a painted panel, does so because these beliefs are entrenched within him. The Art he generates is at one with this metaphysical impulse, to such an extent that its meaning is incomprehensible without it. The contemporary seeking to intervene, here, and ‘understand’ the Artwork on the same level would have to absorb the underlying metaphysic in much the same way as a student seeking to learn a foreign language would need first need to decode its grammatical structures. Artistic meaning, in this deep sense, is the sense of infinite purposiveness, is synchronic rather than diachronic, requiring, for its fullest comprehension, a complete understanding of the spirit of a given place and time. To this extent, full understanding of any artwork other than that which rises in one’s own time, is difficult. Those anachronous meanings that we impose on it are, at best approximations and, at worst, distortions.

 Concluding remarks

To summarise, the infinite purposiveness of fine art is that kernel of purposeful activity that is so coincidental with fine art’s inner nature as to be, to all practical purposes, inseparable from it. It may be roughly defined as the potentiality for direct embodiment, in fine art, of the spirit of a time and place, where ‘spirit’, here designated, refers to the body of metaphysical attitudes – those regarding god, truth, the nature and substance of the universe, and man’s place in it – characterising a given society. This infinite aspect is distinguishable from its finite equivalent by its un-instrumentality, among other things. Where fine art’s finite aspect serves to provide an external, temporalised and spatialised instantiation of a particular human meaning – the function of reason in human affairs, for instance, or the tragedy of romantic love – the infinite aspect is that meaning, that experience itself, embodied in aesthetic form. Outer, or finite purposiveness is that kind of common modality found also in other modes of human production – what Kant would call ‘cultural works’. To the extent that infinite purposiveness is present in fine art to a larger degree than in any other mode of production, and perhaps even specific to it, we can define fine art in terms of it, as ‘that mode of human production set apart from all others by its infinite purposiveness’. And if we take this our starting point, we can easily amplify Hegel’s definition of aesthetics as ‘the philosophy of fine art’ to ‘the philosophy of that mode of human production set apart from all others by its infinite purposiveness’.

[1] Prefatory remarks

[2] Ibid.

[3] Critique of Judgment, § 43 (3): “Art is further distinguished from handicraft. The first is called free, the other may be called renumerative [sic] art. We look on the former as something which could only prove purposive (be a success) as play, i.e. an occupation which is agreeable on its own account…”

[4] Lectures on Fine Art, Introduction: Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art; (i) The Kantian Philosophy

[5] Lectures on Fine Art, Introduction: Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art; (i) The Kantian Philosophy

[6] Ibid.

[8] Introduction: Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art; (i) The Kantian Philosophy

[9] Introduction: Common Ideas of Art; (iii) The Aim of Art

[10] Ibid.

[11] On The Aesthetic Education of Man: Introduction, p. 10: “Beauty is thus given as the simultaneous development of the rational and of the sensuous, fused together, and interpenetrated one by the other, an union that constitutes in fact true reality.”

[12] Introduction: Common Ideas of Art; (iii) The Aim of Art

[13] Introduction: Common Ideas of Art; (iii) The Aim of Art

[14] P. 427

[15] Ibid, p. 428

[16] Lectures on Fine Art, p. 427

[17] Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 85

[18] Lectures on Fine Art, Section II: Sculpture, introduction, p. 701: “…the spiritual itself now enters so that the work of art acquires and displays spirituality as its content”

[19] Lectures on Fine Art, Introduction: Common Ideas of Art; (i) The Work of Art as a Product of Human Activity

[20] The World as Will and Representation, Book 30, Chapter 30

[21] Lectures on Fine Art, p. 522

[22] Ibid., p. 520

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 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1952

Hegel, Georg W. F. Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the

Philosophy of Spirit. Detroit. Wayne State University Press, 1983

Hegel, Georg W. F. Lectures on Fine Art: Vol. 1. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1975

Schiller, Friederich. On the Aesthetic Education Man. Digireads, 2020

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation: Vol. 1. Tr. By E. F. J. Payne.

New York. Dover Publications, Inc., 1969