UC Riverside

Hegel is often interpreted as undertaking two independent projects. Hegel is praised for his insight into the connection between the theory, artwork, religion, and concrete way of life of various cultures. However, Hegel is condemned for constructing an “Absolute” system of knowing that selectively focuses on his own culture’s theory, ethical attitudes, and way of life. Hegel is often interpreted as understanding his Absolute as the pinnacle of human knowledge that reconciles all normative and theoretical conflicts within past cultural worldviews and ways of life. This bi-furcation is especially pronounced in scholarship on Hegel’s Lecture on Aesthetics. Many scholars suggest we ignore Hegel’s discussions of the Absolute and attend only to his discussion of particular artistic works and movements. In this dissertation, I first provide an alternative reading of Hegel’s Absolute. For Hegel, any articulation of the Absolute is also an act of reconciliation (versöhnung). Reconciliation aspires to redeem theoretical and normative conflict by re-framing natural laws and ethical principles as synchronized with the concrete reality of particular peoples, social institutions, and empirical observations. In this way, reconciliation grounds individuals in universal principles that orient them towards harmony within themselves, with each other, and with nature. For Hegel, any conception of the Absolute is justified through its presentation of universal principles that can systematically unify a community’s observations of nature and history into a comprehensive theory, and properly normatively orient that community within that understanding of history and the cosmos. Using this hermeneutic, I will also illustrate how we can read Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics as a unified work. On the one hand, Hegel's local cultural insights arise from his understanding of art as a way of expressing the Absolute that produces a proper reconciliation for the historical moment in question. On the other hand, Hegel traces the causes of his own culture’s forms of conflict and alienation as gradually developing throughout the history of art. Thus, Hegel’s theory of the Absolute is integral to his local cultural insights, and the history of those cultures is essential to understanding the purpose of his presentation of the Absolute.