Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition

W. Deakin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349503032
  9781137482174
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137482181
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Re-examining English Romanticism through Hegel's philosophy, this book outlines and expands upon Hegel's theory of recognition. Deakin critiques four canonical writers of the English Romantic tradition, Coleridge, Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley and Mary Shelley, arguing that they, as Hegel, are engaged in a struggle towards philosophical recognition.

1

Hegelian Romanticism and the Symbiotic Alterity of Receptivity and Autonomy

1.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will develop the argument that German philosophical Romanticism and Hegelian speculative philosophy offer an interesting space in which to undertake re-readings of English Romanticism. Starting from a Hegelian stance, I argue that Romanticism can be re-read in terms of a vacillation between two positions: one of imaginative autonomy and one of necessary receptivity. I argue that what I term symbiotic alterity of autonomy and receptivity reaches a pivotal historical stage in romantic metaphysics and is something that at the same time remains implicit in Hegel’s dialectic – thus making Hegel a major romantic thinker. I would like to situate my argument in a teleological context, integrating Hegel’s social philosophy with his philosophy of art. Furthermore, I briefly outline some current readings of German romantic metaphysics, in order to help contextualise Hegelian aesthetics with regard to Romanticism as an overall movement. I conclude the chapter by examining a number of current readings of Hegelian aesthetics and assessing how these readings can be appropriated in part for my own project of a rereading of English romantic poetry.

The chapter consists of four sections: in the first section I offer some comments on Hegel’s social philosophy, in particular the concept of recognition. In so doing, I set the groundwork to expand the idea of recognition into the realm of aesthetics. Further, I set the teleological framework for what I propose is the ambivalent relationship of the romantic artist to the world – one which is characterised by a dialectical struggle between imaginative autonomy and receptivity and one which ultimately remains unresolved. This is a situation in which the artist attempts to recognise a transcendental truth within their work; or one might say, the artist through the vehicle of their art negotiates a better understanding of themselves and their relation to the external world. Following on from the social framework, I will discuss Hegel’s own treatment of romantic art and then illustrate other recent discussions of romantic metaphysics. I will outline Hegel’s theory of art in the context of the philosophical Romanticism of his contemporaries in order to set the scene for my own reading of English Romanticism, utilising the tools available from a Hegelian perspective in engaging with philosophical Romanticism’s self-representations. I conclude by discussing the theory in terms of more recent critical reception.

1.2 Hegel’s concept of recognition in an aesthetic light

In this section I will discuss Hegel’s concept of recognition, with the aim of identifying its value for a deepened critical understanding of romantic aesthetics. Although I will commence with a discussion of recognition in the sense of Anerkennung, I will additionally place my discussion of romantic aesthetics in the context of recognition as a form of cognition that entails a sense of acknowledgement of something outside of an individual consciousness, a re-cognition that adds to one’s overall conceptual apparatus. This second sense of recognition is also akin to an extension of the notion of acknowledgement as posited by Stanley Cavell.¹ This broader understanding of recognition is particularly well-suited to conceptualise romantic ideas, especially the way that the relation of acknowledgement or of avoidance of nature displaces the recognitive function of a human other into the natural world. This is the case despite the fact that the romantics also at times seek recognition through another human agent to a fortiori guarantee the validity of their visions, as I will also show throughout the book. I draw upon the symbiotic relationship between receptivity to the external world and imaginative autonomy, which I believe is central in Hegel’s teleology of recognition and also to high romantic aesthetics in its own search for aesthetic autonomy – a form of aesthetic autonomy that in Romanticism translates as a search for an aesthetic aesthesis. Paradoxically, this alleged autonomy is available only through acknowledgement of nature and more specifically through the subject’s organic connection to the natural world. Moreover, the status of imaginative autonomy and receptivity in Hegel’s schema of recognition is something that is ultimately reflected in the art of a number of the romantics, and for this reason Hegel can be considered a romantic, or he is at least prey to the same vacillations that constitute romantic art in some aspects of its own formations.

After the first three chapters of the Phenomenology, the consciousness under observation of the phenomenological observer reaches a point of self-consciousness, but it still has to secure the authenticity of this self-consciousness. It seeks therefore another self-consciousness for recognition (Anerkennung), or as Hegel has it:

Spirit is – this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I”. It is in self-consciousness, in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning point, where it leaves behind it the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present.²

In the process of attaining self-consciousness or “mutual recognition” the consciousness enters the dialectical struggle of interaction with an alien consciousness that leads through the life and death struggle to the lordship and bondsman stage and finally, after the experience of unhappy consciousness, to mutual recognition. H.G. Gadamer³ states the wider aim and achievement of recognition in Hegel in terms of an inner difference that unfolds with the dialectic and gives establishment to the parts of the concrete universal.⁴ Hegel appropriates Aristotle’s concept of formal-final⁵ cause by taking this universal both to precede and to be the telos of its parts. Hegel, in his absolute idealism, will therefore transcend oppositions such as the phenomenal/noumenal, subject/object or the “I/Not I.”

One of the key elements in Hegel’s theory of recognition is the social nature of recognition; one can have self-consciousness before recognition (as opposed to Fichte),⁶ but one cannot be fully self-conscious or partake in the universality of consciousness without the recognition of another self-consciousness that will allow identity-in-difference. This is the movement of consciousness that allows for the realm of Spirit (Geist) itself; this social and practical aspect of recognition has been stressed more recently by thinkers such as Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard.⁷ This explicitly social side of Hegel stresses the rationality of freedom and recognition, and it proposes a relational sense of freedom and recognition. It implies a mediated status of autonomy: true autonomy is gained through another and therefore requires receptivity. Robert Williams also writes of the novel nature of autonomy that is apparently inaugurated with the theory of mutual recognition, in both Hegel and Fichte.⁸ Williams argues that Hegel’s transition to self-consciousness through mutual recognition (Anerkennung) requires mediation in a relationship with another subject; consequently, a subject’s autonomy rests upon receptivity towards other subjects.

A case can be made for applying Hegel’s concept of recognition into other areas of his philosophy.⁹ One advantage of such an extension is that recognition can be seen as the mechanism behind the dialectical teleology that permeates Hegel’s systematic thought and the relational state of autonomy that is preserved among these different domains. A second sense of cognitive recognition is central for the traversal of each dialectical Gestalt. Only once cognitive acknowledgement has taken place does the mind move into the next shape of consciousness. I will illustrate the claim here and show its plausibility, with examples from Hegel’s treatment of religion and art.

With regard to religion for example, Williams has pointed out the development in terms similar to that of Hegel’s subjective struggle for recognition. Williams argues that Hegel holds Judaism as a stage in which the mighty transcendent Jaweh is in a relation of master to slave with humanity in which people fear a transcendent, omnipotent god. In this stage of development, in the philosophy of art Hegel also claims that the God of Judaism stands above the corporeal world of humankind and nature; humankind stands in an essentially negative relationship to the great Jewish God. In the Aesthetics this is also one of the forms in the early symbolic stage of art for Hegel. However, by the time of Christianity humankind and God are reconciled through mutual recognition – this is exemplified in the crucifixion.¹⁰ On this reading, we discern an instance of recognition through Hegel’s treatment of the religious sphere, and once again a step away from complete autonomy to an onto-theology that presupposes receptivity in the development of religious consciousness. In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel himself further expands recognition into the formal structures and dynamics of the modern state (1821),¹¹ and this culminates in the requirement of recognitive acknowledgement at the level of the nation state:

The nation state [das Volk als Staat] is the spirit in its substantial rationality and immediate acuality, and is therefore the absolute power on earth; each state is consequently a sovereign and independent entity in relation to others. The state has a primary and absolute entitlement to be a sovereign and independent power in the eyes of others, i.e. to be represented by them. At the same time, however, this entitlement is purely formal and the requirement that the state should be recognised simply because it is a state is abstract. Whether the state does in fact have being in and for itself depends on its content – on its constitution and [present] condition; and recognition, which implies that the two [i.e. form and content] are identical, also depends on the perception and will of the other state.¹²

The central question for this book, however, is how recognition and the symbiotic alterity of receptivity and autonomy are relevant to aesthetics.

Frederick Beiser, writing of the status of art in relation to religion and philosophy and following the trajectory of Hegel’s Aesthetics, explains the ostensible reason for art’s lower status in terms of Spirit.¹³ Hegel claims that art belongs to only the first stage of Spirit, where Spirit goes outside of itself and finds itself in another. However, we have seen the return to self in religion (the incarnation) and the self-in-other and return to the self in the Phenomenology. In contrast, with works of art the self never returns into itself but just has itself instantiated in the external work of art. Beiser’s reading of Hegel in terms of the dialectical nature of Spirit is correct, but there is more to be said on this point: in order to open up the argument, one needs once again to broaden the use of recognition in Hegel and to include the concept of “cognition” or “re-cognition” (Erkenntnis). This cognitive sense of recognition is implicit in the movement of consciousness as it cognises the external world and acknowledges it as part of the overall Concept (Begriff) or Notion. With this broader conceptualisation of recognition there is equally a teleological development and a necessary receptivity presupposed in order for the subject to cognise self-knowledge – however, there’s no requirement of an alien consciousness or mutual recognition. Paul de Man writes of recognition in this second sense and claims that there is an externalisation of the mind as it projects itself before returning into itself in Hegel, which gives once again a sense of a struggle for recognition that entails a certain kind of receptivity:

Thought is proleptic: it projects the hypothesis of its possibility into a future, in the hyperbolic expectation that the process that made thought possible will eventually catch up with this projection. The hyperbolic I projects itself as thought in the hope of re-cognizing itself when it will have run its course. This is why thought (denken) is ultimately called by Hegel Erkenntnis (which implies recognition) and is considered to be superior to knowledge (wissen). At the end of the gradual progression of its own functioning, as it moves from perception to representation and finally to thought, the intellect will refind and recognise itself.¹⁴

Here thought “projects” itself into the externality of the future before synchronically returning into itself, and thus “re-cognizing itself when it has run its course.” In this broader sense of recognition, one can also see a struggle for the cognition for thought of itself, and there is a similar projection of thought in the realm of aesthetics.

The object of art opens up the subject (artist) to itself, and the subject also returns into itself (or re-cognises itself) through the formation or cognisance of the aesthetic object. If art simply entailed disinterested contemplation, then the whole edifice of Hegelian aesthetic theory would collapse – as it presupposes the lifting of inner Spirit by the subject through art into the corporeal world of representation. The work of art requires explication and identification within the subject, whether the putative subject is the recipient or the artist. Moreover, Beiser reads Hegel as claiming that the “self and its other, subject and object, have the same status.” Again, this is clearly true for recognition (Anerkennung), as outlined in chapter four of the Phenomenology, but it is not as clear for religion and aesthetics. However, if one emphasises Hegel’s belief that Spirit pervades all reality, a commonality emerges between Hegelian thought and the ontological foundation of romantic aesthetics. Schlegel and Novalis both saw the external world as a “thou” which was as such imbued with a consciousness of its own.¹⁵ This self-conscious mediation is something that also binds the Jena romantics to a necessarily receptive relationship with the external world, the “I-thou.” Furthermore, the attempt by the romantics to synthesise Spinoza’s monism with Fichtean subjectivity¹⁶ was something that culminated in their organic philosophy (and something that I shall argue in Chapter Three also transpires in the work of Wordsworth). Hegel’s theory simi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Hegelian Romanticism and the Symbiotic Alterity of Autonomy and Receptivity
• 2  Philosophy, Theology and Intellectual Intuition in Coleridges Poetics
• 3  Wordsworths Metaphysical Equipoise
• 4  Dialectical Collapse and Post-Romantic Recognition in Shelley
• 5  The Contingent Limits of Romantic Myth-Making
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index