MA Defence: Farshad Jarrahi, Philosophy

Hegel and the Modern Debate of Historicism in Art: A Contemporary Reading of Hegel’s Ideal of Art through the Musical Form

Farshad Jarrahi

Supervisor: Emilia Angelova

ABSTRACT: The aim of this inquiry is to contribute an interpretation of Hegel’s Ideal of art, suggesting that historical context is one of the factors that determines the form of an artwork, if it is an actualization of the Ideal of art.  I motivate my approach through locating Hegel's view in an unresolved contemporary debate, between two views in the domain of the ontology of music.  The first view, representing the pure structuralist or formalist argument, taking more or less a Platonic line, maintains that a great deal of Western notated art music, consists of “abstract” entities, i.e., types, existing as pure and eternal sound structures. The opposing view, known as contextualist, holds that the musico-historical context of the composer of a musical work is, among other factors, determinative of the artistic and aesthetic properties of the work. I aim to argue that Hegel’s account of the Ideal of art can be interpreted in favor of the contextualist view, in so far as it holds that the ideal form of art is not, and cannot be, examined in abstraction from the broader context of its external world. I focus this study for a contextualist interpretation of Hegel through examining what Hegel means by the external determinacy of the Ideal in the Lectures on Aesthetics.  

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