Art, Myth and Society in Hegel's Aesthetics by James David;

Author:James, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

2. The Opera as a Modern Art Form

In his interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Either/Or, Kierkegaard, or, to be more precise, the pseudonym he refers to as A, distinguishes between the form and the content (i.e. subject matter) of the work of art. A also considers an absolute harmony of form and content to be the mark of the classic work of art. Kierkegaard’s use of a form-content distinction, and his understanding of what constitutes a classic work of art, might be seen as evidence of Hegel’s influence on his thought,14 because, as we saw in Chapter 2, Hegel holds the view that an absolute unity of form and content is the mark of the classic work of art, or the ideal, as he otherwise calls it. Moreover, although Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel’s aesthetics would have been based on what must now be regarded as an unreliable source, we shall see that Kierkegaard uses the form-content distinction in a way that closely corresponds to Hegel’s use of it. In this respect, Kierkegaard’s account of Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a classic work of art, the most classic of all works of art in fact, appears to be compatible with Hegel’s own account of the classic work of art, in so far as the relation of form to content is concerned. Yet Mozart’s opera would for Hegel belong to the sphere of romantic art, which he considers to be essentially different from the classical art of ancient Greece, in which art fulfils its highest vocation.

As previously mentioned, according to Hegel an absolute unity of content and form is possible only when that which is to be portrayed (i.e. the conceptual content) is by its very nature susceptible to the form of art. The content of the work of art must, in short, be of such a kind that it lends itself to being portrayed in sensory form, with such a perfect match of content and form being found in classical Greek art, in which the divine is presented in human form. I have suggested, however, that this conception of the classic work of art fails to do full justice to the role that Hegel considers a work of art such as the original epic to have played in the ethical life of ancient Greece. In the original epic, the unity of content and form is linked to the aesthetic presentation of ethical as well as religious ideas, and the aesthetic presentation of these ideas is held to be the most adequate and primary means of bringing them to consciousness in the historical community in question. It is important to bear this in mind because it becomes relatively easy to conceive of works of romantic art which meet the requirement of an absolute unity of form and content in the sense indicated above, so that these works would ipso facto have to be considered beautiful works of art; and Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Don Giovanni will be shown to be a case in point.

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