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Hegel's Art History and the Critique of Modernity & Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. . - book review
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2002 by Jonathan Gilmore
Like Wyss, Jean-Marie Schaeffer aims to dissolve the Hegelian impulse in art history, but for him, Hegel is only one example of a long and varied history of philosophical treatments of art--including that of the Jena Romantics, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, all of whom Schaeffer indicts with the charge of exemplifying what he calls the "speculative philosophy of art" (p.
67). Such philosophy, Schaeffer charges, asks one fundamental question about art--"What is art?"--and answers it by construing art as in its essence a cognitive vehicle through which certain fundamental truths, primarily philosophical and spiritual, about the nature of reality are disclosed. In this theoretical stance, discourses about art, particularly those of a philosophical nature, adopt the mandate of offering legitimacy to art by showing how it serves as such a means of revelation. The counterpart to this theory, in which, in a sense, all art's deepest content is the same--an order of ultimate truths--is a theory of reality in which mundane, ordinary existence probed by science and instrumental rationality is held to be secondary or only epiphenomenal to a more fundamental reality, which art in its highest moments discloses. Although this formulation of the speculative theory of art would serve comfortably as an account of Romanticism, Schaeffer aims his charge much more broadly. Indeed, he treats roughly the whole of modernist philosophy of art as a series of versions of Romanticist aesthetics and diagnoses modernism itself as suffering from a motivating Romantic conception of art at its core.
