Summary of Søren Kierkegaard and the Codes of Perception. The Golden Age painting and Danish aesthetic Hegelianism.
This work seeks to characterise and assess the significance of Danish aesthetic Hegelianism in relation to both the formation of aesthetic theory and pictorial practice. The purpose includes examining whether and, in the affirmative, how aesthetic theory and artistic practice interact. The key theme considered in the thesis is the significance gained by Hegelianism within the traditional territories of the philosophy and history of art. This question is given an added twist, however, as the thesis distinguishes between a Hegelian and a Hegelianist aesthetic, while in terms of methodology a distinction is drawn between two levels of understanding: 1) the historical link between Hegel, Danish Hegelianism and the late Golden Age painting; and 2) Hegelian and Hegelianist aesthetic thinking applied as a contemporary pictorial analytical instrument.
The thesis is divided into five main sections and 17 chapters. It is based in particular on late Golden Age paintings and pictorial world in general, and progresses with a reading of the period's aesthetic and, especially, Hegelianist and Hegelian texts, where the texts are viewed in relation to the paintings/pictures, and the paintings/pictures are related to the texts. The thesis concludes with reflection on the nature and being of the picture, which focuses on 'the beautiful image' and the limits of perception, and increasingly becomes image-less. In terms of the pictorial material considered, the progression is from the 'beautiful' picture to the various popular pictorial cultures and book illustrations of the time. The five main elements are: A. Aesthetics and pictorial art; B. Kierkegaard and the codes of the gaze; C. The body and soul in the Modern; D. Reconciliation figures? and E. Concept of the work, image theory and ontology of the image in Søren Kierkegaard.
The theoretical and methodical aspects of the thesis are considered on an ongoing basis within each of the five main elements. In the introduction, I describe how I relate to the research traditions that are my starting point, supplemented with particularly important research contributions and an account of why this work is not a Neohegelian project.
The thesis shows that the Kierkegaardian dialectic of perception is a particularly potent pictorial analytical instrument that allows the paintings' ambiguous statements, inner fractures and dichotomous figures to emerge. At the same time, the dialectic of perception also makes it possible to establish some, as yet hidden, relations between the pantomime of the gaze in the Golden Age painting and the struggle for recognition in society. I unroll these analyses of a phenomenology of perception under the headings of the aesthetics of distance, concealment and the procedural, whereby both ethical and existential aspects become apparent in the pictures.
In the thesis, I can further show how there are formal similarities between certain Kierkegaardian linguistic images and some of the late Golden Age's landscape sketches and paintings. This is unfolded as a linking of Kierkegaardian figures of thought with pictorial statements. On the question of whether there is a connection between the Hegelianist aesthetic and pictorial practice, I seek this in the work of the landscape painter J.L. Lundbye. Lundbye was keenly interested in Kierkegaard, which can be traced in the formal qualities of some of his paintings.
The thesis also shows that Søren Kierkegaard has an independent and systematic pictorial theory that is based on such aspects as close familiarity with Hegel's aesthetic, but which short-circuits this aesthetic in many ways. The most important constituent of the pictorial theory is the picture's relation to time and space and to what Kierkegaard perceives as the limits of perception. For Kierkegaard, this pictorial theory is inscribed in the description of the Aesthete's 'image of being'. Kierkegaard takes his antetypes to the academic 'beautiful painting' from the popular pictorial world, including the 'nürnbergers', 'Neuruppiner Bilderbogen' and book illustrations. Without displaying them, he inscribes these antetypes in his texts, tearing them out of the original context, emptying them of any, also transcendent, content, and filling them with new significance. Here the thesis shows how Kierkegaard applies an allegorical approach to his antetypes and concludes that these antetypes interact with the indirect notification form, and can be perceived as its pictorial mode. Finally, the thesis shows that in his re-writing of Hegel's thesis on the death of art, Kierkegaard inserts the popular image in place of the painting, and that he furthermore connects his antetypes with the qualities he finds in the controlled irony that is described in The Concept of Irony. I describe Kierkegaard's performative aesthetic approach in relation to the antetypes as an expression of his, in the context of his time, innovative situational aesthetics.
In terms of Danish aesthetic Hegelianism as such, where I work especially with J.L. Heiberg and K.F. Wiborg, the thesis concludes that the mediating, reconciling figure in Hegel is inflated, with special emphasis on the classicising features in Hegel, while the romantic, form reflexive aspects of his aesthetic are abjected. This entails, for example, that Hegel's descriptions of the dialectic of colour and of its kinship to music (and time as time) are screened off. Hegel's thesis of 'an art after art', i.e. the death of the idealistic, beautiful work and its resurrection in a prosaic pictorial expression in which the formal qualities are at the centre, is not incorporated in the Danish reception, so that Hegel's aesthetic loses a significant proportion of its resilience and explosiveness.
Finally, in view of the thesis' interest in the ambiguity of Heiberg's relation to the painting, I can show how there is a hitherto unobserved link between the Golden Age painting and the Italian (Venetian) baroque and proto-baroque.
Ragni Linnet, May 2014