Arte e modernidade no jovem Hegel

Abstract

It is a question of examining the position of art in the young Hegel, taking as its starting point the conception of modernity that runs through the texts of that period. In the Hegelian conception, the split of the world of culture into art, morality and science, under the rule of reason, also creates a rupture between the past and the future, as well as between the old and the modern. Based on Schiller’s “aesthetic utopia”, young Hegel sees in art the possible solution to the problems of this modernity whose aspects are split. In this sense, it is a working hypothesis the role attributed to art, not only as expressing modern separations in life relations, but also to indicate their reconciliation. For this, the investigation presents, initially, two visions on the concept of modernity in Hegel, that is, the one of Jürgen Habermas and the one of Charles Taylor. In Habermas’s perspective, Hegel was the first philosopher to treat modernity as a problem, since it has the singularity of seeking at all times to be self-certifying and, at the same time, to extract from itself the evaluation criteria and concepts without recourse to an exemplary past. Under this conception modernity expresses in its aspects the division of the world of life, for civil society, on the one hand, appears genuinely as “the creation of the modern world” and, on the other hand, as “ethics lost in its extremes”. In Taylor’s view, Hegel views modernity as the epoch of subjective revolution, which gave rise to the new political theory and the new conception of freedom. Taylor, on this point, links the new position of art to Herder and Schiller’s reflection, and not immediately to Hegel, but even here, it is still about the “aesthetic utopia” in the sense of the young Hegel. For this, it is the attribution of art to present the critique of modernity, referring to its divisions, expressed in the differentiations between freedom and necessity, spirit and nature, and at the same time, their reconciliation.