HEGEL

The Paintings

Hegel, the paintings                               

Landscape with Hegel swimming (Renaissance painting)

Cityscape with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel completing Phänomenologie des Geistes during the Battle of Jena, 14 October 1806 (History painting)

Interior with Hegel waking on a winter morning (Genre painting)

Interior with Hegel flirting, 11 March 1829 (Biedermeier painting)

Landscape with Hegel waiting patiently at the end of every road (Expressionist painting)

Landscape with Hegel waiting patiently at the end of every road (Caspar David Friedrich)

Die Hegelfiguren

schwimmend sitzend

Landscape with Hegel swimming

(Renaissance painting)

No feeling is so homogeneous with the desire for the infinite, the longing to merge into the infinite, as the desire to immerse one’s self into the sea. To plunge into it is to be confronted by an alien element which at once flows round us on every side and which is felt at every point of the body. We are taken away from the world and the world from us. We are nothing but felt water which touches us where we are, and we are only where we feel it.

G.W.F. Hegel

Cityscape with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel completing Phänomenologie des Geistes during the Battle of Jena, 14 October 1806

(History painting) 

But the other side of its Becoming, History, is a conscious, self-mediating process—Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance.

G.W.F. Hegel

Interior with Hegel waking on a winter morning

(Genre painting)

It would indeed be both useless and pedantic to parade the whole machinery of the formal syllogism on every occasion. And yet the several forms of syllogism make themselves constantly felt in our cognition. If any one, when waking on a winter morning, hears the creaking of the carriages on the street, and is thus led to conclude that it has frozen hard in the night, he has gone through a syllogistic operation—an operation which is every day repeated under the greatest variety of conditions.

G.W.F. Hegel

Interior with Hegel flirting, 11 March 1829

(Biedermeier painting)

There is a famous story that, at the dinner after the performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, the wife of one of Mendelssohn's best friends sat between him and an old man who kept flirting with her. Tired of his boring chatter, she turned to Mendelssohn and asked “Who is this idiot beside me?” “That idiot,” he whispered back to her, “is the great philosopher Hegel.”

Landscape with Hegel waiting patiently at the end of every road

(Expressionist painting)

we are doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel

                                                                                    Michel Foucault

Landscape with Hegel waiting patiently at the end of every road

(Caspar David Friedrich)

we are doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel

                                                                                    Michel Foucault

An Amberley Document

is an imprint of

Sorrow-Acre Press