The politics of aesthetics in German Idealism

Sidorov Aleksei Mikhailovich PhD in Philosophy Docent, the department of Ontology and Epistemology, Saint Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Sankt-Peterburg, g. Saint Petersburg, ul. Universitetskaya Nab., 7/9 s.idem@mail.ru Other publications by this author

      At the beginning of the XIX century, philosophy was faced with the task of resolving the conflict between the desire of the European subject for freedom and the nostalgic need for expressive unity with the world. Asserting himself, the subject tragically denied the conditions of his own existence, the objective grounds of his superiority. Gaining power over the world, he lost its reality: what would the subject dominate if the world continuously turned into a continuation and reflection of the subject himself? In addition, he also lost his own reality, disembodied, became a look from nowhere, not correlated with anyone's specific existence. But that's not all. The modern subject is everywhere free and everywhere in chains. This position is not difficult to decipher from the point of view of social logic. In the bourgeois world, a person realizes his freedom by engaging in anonymous, non-subjective processes of causes and effects, which ultimately confront the subject with all the fatality of a "second nature". This is what Marx called alienation, but many people were worried about it at that time. It is enough to recall Hoffmann's themes – real phobias, compulsively repeated in many works of the German romantic double, doll, automaton, living individual life, replaced by a mechanism. Even earlier, Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, also likens modern society to "an artful clockwork mechanism in which mechanical life as a whole arises from the combination of infinitely many, but lifeless parts." And further: "Eternally chained to a separate small fragment of the whole, a person himself becomes a fragment" ^{[1, 265]}. Schiller was one of the first to describe the contradictions of modern society, pointing out that the division of labor and competition make society as a whole richer, and the individual poorer. Shortly after the Letters, an anonymous "First Program of the System of German Idealism" appears, written, as it turned out later, jointly by Schelling, young Hegel and Helderlin - a truly programmatic text of romantic aestheticism, in which the modern state with its constitution, government, laws and religion is sharply condemned as a mechanism that must give way to genuine organic unity. people. At the height of its historical success, the bourgeois class suddenly found itself helpless in the order it had created, at a loss between an unknowable subject and an unattainable object, in the frightening new reality of class division and market competition.  The post-religious and post-traditional values of the Enlightenment - secularization, humanism, the primacy of reason and science - were poorly combined with the maintenance of moral and social relations, with the course of everyday life, and led to their progressive degradation. Deprived of the standards of objectivity, the subject was forced to generate values independently, and in this process the dual nature of humanism and anthropocentrism was revealed. On the one hand, the proud consciousness of his power ("I create new meanings and values!"), on the other – the despair of emptiness and loneliness ("I'm so lonely in this world ...").  If the Enlightenment defined itself through a break with tradition, then the romantics tried to restore the ties destroyed by the Enlightenment, to return to man the lost reality. The romantic image of humanity came into conflict with educational humanism based on the ideas of autonomy, liberation from external authorities, critical use of reason, universal principles from the point of view of which religion, history, morals, politics are criticized in order to achieve a progressive movement towards a more civilized and rational society. The man of romanticism seeks to get rid of this emptiness of formal autonomy, which has already begun to cause anxiety, the experience of disembodication. Thus, in short, the synthesis of Enlightenment and Romanticism was on the agenda at the turn of the century. 

      Here the question arises – where to look for the origins in the conditions of a lost tradition. It is obvious that both Enlightenment and Romanticism are equally devoid of a pre-modern unity with tradition and both appear as products of history. The two concepts of origin and foundation are opposed to each other, and in Germany more acutely than anywhere else - because in the conditions of political fragmentation and historical lag, the Germans tried to offer an alternative version of modernity, saving from soulless mechanistic civilization and abstract universalism. And here the paradox of romantic historicism is rooted – like the Enlightenment, Romanticism is generated by a reflexive historical consciousness, for which the immediacy of traditional life is no longer possible, and reveals, on the one hand, the organic originality of particularism, the self–sufficiency of concrete historical units, and on the other, nostalgically seeks to restore the lost source of true life. Romantic historicism existed in this tension between presence and absence, which is expressed in its two varieties – organic and aesthetic. Organic historicism, of which Herder was the father, considers history as nature, as a process of natural development in which the living spirit of the people generates forms of historical life. This vitalist trend, using the concepts of living and dead spirit, leads to a fatal opposition of life and spirit in the philosophy of life and cultural pessimism. The Romantics, and later Nietzsche, contrast this line of thought with aesthetic historicism, which comprehends the categories of origin, foundation and creativity more deeply – in terms not of the naturalization of history, but rather of the spiritualization of nature, the highest manifestation of which is creative imagination. Myth, generated by the collective genius of the people, and art, the creation of an individual genius, express the essential relationship between nature and history, since they come from a common source – from the productivity of natura naturans. Aesthetic historicism represents, as it were, the highest point and dialectical transformation of organic historicism. The place of natural products of development (language, tradition, etc.) is occupied by the productivity of nature itself, which is embodied in the aesthetic act of creativity. This aesthetic program of renaturalization, of fitting a person into the reality from which he fell due to the one-sided development of rationality, ends with the expectation of a new mythology generated by the polytheism of imagination and promising a new unity of spirit and nature. The idea of a new mythology – a key one for German Romanticism – contrasts the revolutionary progressivism of modernity with a different understanding of the relationship between nature and history, the divine and the human. Romanticism seeks the reterritorialization of man in the natural-historical world, which is more fundamental than the New European illusions of self-based subjectivity, writes either history into nature or nature into history. The idea of natural history, linking the historical telos, the transcendence immanent in history with the natural source, is extremely important for the romantic imagination and goes back to Herder's organic historicism. Romantic nationalism, the religion of the people, the idea of divinity diffused in nature and expressed in the living spirit of national culture, in its language, customs and institutions, originates from it. But the organic circle of history also cannot avoid slipping away from the beginning. What Herder begins, Spengler ends – romantic nostalgia and the inability to regain the lost reality are manifested in the themes of the decline and degradation of culture. Aesthetic historicism, with its idea of a new mythology, is looking for a living spirit in life itself, from the quietist acceptance of the natural process with its alternation of ups and downs, moves on to the search for the most creative principle that could resist decline. But in this aesthetic voluntarism, the third position originates, combining organic and aesthetic historicism – it could be called meta-historicism, inspired by the Heraclitic image of the cosmic game played by the god of time. This onto-poetics of history comprehends it as a work of art that generates itself. She tries to grasp the primordial as such, hesitating between the quietism of organic historicism and the voluntarism of aesthetic creation. Nietzsche's amor fati and Heidegger's Ereignis share this insolubility between receptivity and activism. Metaphors of creative play play a leading role in German thought from Herder to Heidegger. Whether we are talking about expression (Herder), creativity (Schelling), production (Marx), revolution (Marx, Wagner) or life (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) – all these concepts establish a connection between nature and history, the unconscious and the conscious, the established and the established.

        The dilemma of the bourgeois subject was that the desire for freedom and autonomy – and this was the very essence of his being – leads him to enmity with Nature and, thereby, knocks the ground of reality out from under his feet. The more autonomous, the less real the subject and everything around him became. The price of freedom turned out to be radical homelessness, as evidenced by the romantic theory of irony: the frenzied dynamics of subjective desire destroyed any objective correlates in the world. For the unattainable dream of pure productivity without works, one had to pay with exhausting disappointment. The fundamental requirement of a viable ideology, which is that a person can reasonably feel at home in the world, tragically contradicted the libertarian worldview of the bourgeoisie.  It is also not surprising that the theme of the aesthetic then arises before all theorists who have tried to find a means of healing the wounds of the split modernity. If the harmony of social life in general can be restored in modern conditions, after the loss of heteronomous meanings and authorities, then the new social order must inevitably pass through the estesis of a person who, like a work of art, must discover the law in the depths of his own free identity, and not in external power. The liberated subject accepts the law as the principle of his own autonomy, breaking the stone tablets on which the law was originally carved in order to write it down again in his heart. The final binding force of the bourgeois social order, in contrast to the compulsion of absolutism, should be feelings, habits, beliefs, etc. Therefore, such an order can be called aestheticized. Post-metaphysical democratic power could be based on the particulars of subjective experience, and the enlightened conflict between abstract duty and the pursuit of pleasure could be resolved. After the destruction of the centralized coercive apparatus of absolutism, individuals felt the lack of institutions that would ensure the unity of social life. The question was where the experience of unity, strong enough for the reproduction of social life, should be localized. In economic life, individuals are structurally disconnected and antagonistic, at the political level there is nothing but abstract rights. That is why the aesthetic sphere of feelings, experiences, embodied habits, etc. remained the only candidate for the role of a source of revived unity. Relying on feelings as the basis of social unity was not as unreliable as it might seem. What could be stronger and more certain than "natural" inclination and "instinctive" loyalty. Such organic connections are much more effective than the suppressive structures of absolutism. But for the correct organization of the affective sphere, "education of feelings" is required. Rousseau, in Emile and The New Heloise, began this process of spreading pedagogy and sexual morality, aimed at creating new forms of subjectivity. The virtues of the ideal citizen in Rousseau are based on an empathic imagination that evokes in us compassion and sympathy for other beings, that is, on an aesthetic basis. Rousseau did not think that feelings could replace rational law. But he understood that reason is not enough to unite society, and he can become a regulating social force only by being animated by love and affection. Actually, it can be argued that the very emergence of aesthetics as a discipline in the XVIII century had a political meaning, was associated with the need to explore a vast territory of feelings, motives, affects, as a space for a new way of legitimizing power.

       Kant's philosophy and the history of its comprehension in German idealism is symptomatic in this respect - the entire philosophical thought of Germany in the 1790s was determined by the fragmentation of the Kantian system, which reflected the processes of division in modern society itself. This fragmentation was connected with the boundaries separating Kant's cognition and ethics, the First and Second criticism. This division runs through the very core of the Kantian subject, turning it, according to Hegel, into an amphibian floating in the ocean of causality, but at the same time breathing the air of freedom.  The fact that the Third Critique proposed an aesthetic mediation between these spheres also had a decisive impact on philosophy, but for now let's turn to one problem in which idealists saw the cause of this fragmentation – the problem of the thing in itself. Kant's epistemology mixes the active form and the passive content, but this union does not achieve genuine intimacy. The form is external to the content in the field of the understanding, remains without content in the field of practical reason and turns into an end in itself in the field of aesthetic judgment. Fichte, who saw in the Kantian thing in itself the denial of freedom, described the absolute Self as a pure subjective activity that needs to be posited by nature only as a sphere and an instrument of self-expression. Nature as a non-Self is simply a necessary moment of the Self, asserted only to be abolished. Fichte's violent activism is essentially one of the forms of aestheticism, although Fichte did not explicitly address aesthetics: like a work of art, the absolute Self extracts its law from itself, engaging in a self–sufficient manifestation of its power. Hegel will later want to curb the self-referentiality of the subject by returning us to the object, but at the same time he will only replace one form of aestheticization with another. In the majestic work of art of the Spirit, subject and object, form and content, part and whole, merge together. If the subject is to achieve unity with the object without compromising its autonomy, then subjectivity must be inherent in the object itself. Hegel resolves Kant's antinomy of subject and object, turning Kant's aesthetic fiction – the unity of subject and object in the act of judgment – into an ontological myth. If the world is completely subjectivized, then the dynamic activism of the Fichtean Self can be considered as the essence of reality itself. The negativity of reason not only does not distance from objects, but, on the contrary, reveals the rational totality of the world; and for this disclosure, human subjectivity is absolutely necessary. In nature and history we are at home, because they need our freedom for their full realization. It is difficult to imagine a more elegant solution to the conflict of autonomy and non-rootedness. Reason alienates us from nature, but reason brings us back, so the rational goals of Enlightenment are preserved, but its alienating effect is eliminated. Thus, the contradictions of bourgeois history are projected onto reality itself. If the essence of reality lies in contradiction, then to be self-divided means to be rooted in it. The absolute must be a subject, otherwise it would depend on determination from the outside and would therefore cease to be The absolute. Just as the objectivity of a work of art is a self-generating process of the manifestation of subjectivity in being, so also the self arises in the act of self-knowledge. Since infinite self-determination is the essence of subjective freedom, philosophy, reproducing this act of self-consciousness, acts as a practice of liberation. Transcendental discourse, therefore, is an ethical, even existential practice rather than a set of theoretical propositions. Philosophy is not a story about human freedom from the outside, but its very realization. "Who chooses which philosophy, therefore, depends on what kind of person who is, because the philosophical system is not a dead utensil that could be put aside or taken at will; it is animated by the soul of the person who possesses it. Flabby by nature or relaxed and twisted by spiritual slavery ... will never rise to idealism"^{[2, 460]}. It is as if the self-referentiality of Kant's ethical subject or work of art is transferred into the very structure of the cognitive argument. In general, the types of discourse carefully differentiated by Kant – about pure and practical reason, about the ability to judge – are united in German idealism in one fell swoop. For example, Schelling argued: "what is usually called theoretical reason is nothing but imagination in the service of freedom"^{[3, 425]}. By the way, in this rejection of the critical system of "checks and balances" and "separation of powers" and hasty synthesis, the American deconstructionist P. de Man saw the danger of "aesthetic ideology", the creation of deceptive aesthetic ontologies of "unity of diversity", which represent a seductive and politically dangerous image of organic life, like a work of art, in which differences are reconciled between the differences between subject and object, spirit and nature, necessity and freedom. 

       Further, it is important that Fichte's objective world, nature, not-Self is the product of the unconscious activity of productive imagination. The Absolute Self spontaneously limits its infinite activity and considers itself passively affected by external objects – and the force that implements this assumption is imagination. Fichte deduces Kantian categories from this primary act of imagination. By declaring productive imagination to be the basis of all theoretical abilities, Fichte essentially turns reality into an aesthetic illusion. "There is no being. I myself do not know and do not exist. There are images, they are the only thing that exists, and they know about themselves as images ..."^{[4, 148]}. But not only pure reason and empirical knowledge are derived from imagination – this also applies to practical reason. After all, nature, posited through imagination, is also necessary for continuous effort, which forms the basis of moral action. But the aspiration will not arise until there is an obstacle that needs to be overcome. The ego feels the inhibition of its impulses as caused by something external, and this feeling is the basis of our belief in reality. This is how Fichte aestheticizes the very possibility of theoretical knowledge. Our knowledge of the world is, as it were, a by-product of a more fundamental unconscious force. Behind the representations of the understanding lies a deeper will to represent. Moral life is also the highest development of these unconscious impulses – an idea that anticipates Freud. Thus, it is possible to deduce everything that exists – the external world, the categories of reason, morality – from the spontaneous, unconscious attraction of the absolute Self, and the basis of this attraction turns out to be imagination. The world, therefore, has an aesthetic source.  

            Schelling, who started out as a student of Fichte, quickly became increasingly dissatisfied with his teacher's one-sided subjectivism. After all, being a subject also means being a conditioned object. Therefore, a conscious subject cannot be absolute by definition. Schelling consistently moved on to the concept of absolute reason or identity, which overcomes the duality of subject and object and cannot itself be objectified. This absolute can be represented as an unconscious force acting in the subject. In addition, in Schelling's philosophy of nature, it also becomes the essence of objective being. And the sphere in which this identity can be embodied becomes art. For Schelling of the period of the "System of Transcendental Idealism", the only area in the world where one can find the objectification of the intellectual intuition through which the Ego posits itself is aesthetics. "If aesthetic contemplation is only the objectified transcendental, then it goes without saying that art is the only and eternal organon, as well as a document of philosophy, which continually confirms everything that philosophy cannot give in external expression… Art is the highest for a philosopher because it opens to his gaze the holy of holies, where, as it were, that which is divided in nature and in history, which in life and in activity, as well as in thinking, must avoid each other, is burning in eternal and primordial unity"^{[5, 484]}. The ordinary subject in the world is divided into conscious and unconscious. Only a limited part of the Self can be realized, and the limiting activity of the subject, since it is the cause of all limitations, is beyond the limit of representations as an inexpressible transcendental force. I am aware of my limitations, but not the act that it is supposed to be. Like bourgeois society itself, the subject is torn between its own non-stop unconscious productivity and its limited products, in which it simultaneously finds and loses itself. This aporia prevents complete identity with oneself. Philosophy must therefore strive to resolve this contradiction, and Schelling finds an image of unity in the world.: this is art. In art, the unconscious acts together with consciousness, and aesthetic intuition is, therefore, a unique material embodiment of intellectual intuition. At the peak of the development of its powers, philosophy resolves into aesthetics, returning to the poetry from which it once arose. Philosophy is a self–erasing path from one state of poetry to another. Philosophy can unite subject and object in its depths, but these depths must necessarily be given "in external expression". And this obligation has, among other things, ideological significance. An ordinary person from the street does not have the opportunity to deal with the subtleties of Schellingian philosophy in order to come to terms with reality. He needs a sensually embodied image of this reconciliation. As a material objective medium, art is a more universally accessible example of intellectual intuition than philosophy itself. Art, as Schelling states, belongs to the whole person, while philosophy is only a part of him. Aesthetics brings philosophy back home, into everyday experience, as an embodied ideology, where obscurantists draw their "spontaneous intuitions". This leads to the question of the status of the theory itself – does the mind sacrifice itself, dissolving into aesthetic intuitions, and does it not abandon rational knowledge of the world?

        Hegel, as already mentioned, in his youth, sharing with Schelling and Helderlin the romantic project of the aestheticization of reason, in mature works interprets Romanticism as theoretical suicide and creates a majestic concept of rational redemption of historical and social life. One way of reading Hegel in general may be to interpret his system as designed to prove the impossibility of Romanticism. This is aimed at, for example, the famous thesis that art is a thing of the past, that the absolute can no longer be represented in a sensual form, as in ancient Greece, that philosophy is the truth of art and that, therefore, art is only a moment in the history of truth. If Kant seems to have hidden the real world from knowledge, and Fichte and Schelling returned reality at the cost of compromise with the whims of intuition, then Hegel wanted to preserve both peace and reason. It was a heroic attempt to defend the dignity and viability of the bourgeois project. If the bourgeoisie wanted to become a truly universal class and assert its political, economic and cultural hegemony, then the absolutism of Fichte and Schelling, not to mention romantic concepts, were ideologically not quite suitable for it, since they conflicted with the program of bourgeois Enlightenment. Philosophy needs solid foundations, and the problem with intuition is that, on the one hand, it is more fundamental than anything else, but on the other hand, it is unacceptably baseless. Nothing can be more obvious than intuition, but also more unprovable. Its power and seduction and, at the same time, its emptiness and emptiness, lies in the fact that it simply exists. It is impossible to deny it, but only because there is nothing to deny, for lack of articulation. In a complex, contradictory modern society with a fierce struggle of values, apodictic knowledge was necessary, but to assert that the theoretical system was based on transcendental intuition meant, in fact, to admit that it was not based on anything. In addition, the claim to the intuition of the Absolute leads to a contradiction between the final Truth and the discursive work on its disclosure. In the double rhythm of disclosure-concealment, symbols seem not only to reveal the truth, but also distort the eternal immediacy of the Absolute by their mediation. Thus, the discourse that brings us closer to the Absolute, at the same time moves it away from us. It is as if philosophy were the result of some fundamental Mistake that repeats itself every time someone tries to correct it. If so, then why write and read instead of diving into the fullness of intuitive experience? If philosophy exists, it is necessary to assume the existence of contradiction or false consciousness as its precondition. But then no philosophy can be absolute, since its very existence is a symptom of an irremediable defect. And so, Hegelian philosophy brilliantly solves this dilemma. Yes, the fact that conflict and contradiction exist is confirmed by the very existence of philosophy, but Hegel shows that this contradiction is immanent to the very Truth that philosophy reveals, thus introducing the historical "final" conditions of philosophy into its spiritual substance. Our search for a way out of the labyrinths of false consciousness is not external to the truth, and this truth is created. As in psychoanalysis, errors, illusions and delusions constitute the trajectory of truth and must be worked out to the end in a kind of spiritual therapeutic process. "An idea in its process creates this illusion for itself, opposes something else to itself, and its activity consists in removing this illusion. It is only from this delusion that truth is born, and therein lies reconciliation with delusion and with finiteness. Otherness or delusion, as removed, is itself a necessary moment of truth, which exists only when it makes itself its own result"^{[6, 399]}. The truth, therefore, is not stated in theoretical statements, but is a rhetorical performance of the theory itself, with all the accidental distortions and "wrong turns". This is more a kind of practice than a "pure theory". If division and contradiction are essential moments in the development of an Idea, because Hegel introduced historical and social conflicts that condition theory and threaten to relativize it into its very dialectical form. With this understanding of the Absolute, truth is no longer in contradiction with the performative work of discourse. In Hegel's philosophy, there is no place for the romantic fear of losing the Absolute at the moment of its articulation, that is, separation, since the Absolute as a unity of identity and difference includes the trauma of discourse in its essence. Thus philosophy is also freed from suspicion of uselessness – after all, false consciousness, to which it owes its existence, itself turns out to be a necessary moment of the Absolute. Hegel shows the positivity of the negative. Inspired by idealistic courage, he penetrates into the very essence of the object and reveals its inner secret. He transfers the contradictions of thought into the thing itself, which is divided within itself through the work of negativity. But this is possible only because the being subjected to violence will eventually restore its integrity. Hegelian dialectics returns these bloodless forms to the corporeal content, "removing" morality in the concrete ethics ("morality") of the living body, immersing formal categories in the rich, saturated movement of self-restoration of the Spirit. Hegel transfers Kant's aesthetic fiction of the "world for us" into the very structure of reality, thus protecting the subject from both the Fichtean hubris of subjectivism and the suffering of alienation. The bourgeois dilemma – the objective escapes my power, and what I possess ceases to be objective – seems to have been solved. What is entirely mine, however, is absolutely real. Imagination rises from the aesthetic sphere to the theoretical one, providing a transition from feelings to cognition. Ideology, in the form of the doctrine of the identity of subject and object, is embedded in scientific knowledge, and Hegel could therefore afford to assign art a lower place in his system because he aestheticized reality as a whole. The self-reflexivity of such a construction unexpectedly reveals a formal similarity with the later modernist idea of text autonomy and, undoubtedly, there is a connection between them. For the modernist, the world itself is formless, there is no external determination of textual forms, so the autonomy, self-justification of the text is a consequence of the lack of sufficient grounds and "natural" starting points in reality. Of course, the idealist, unlike the modernist, believes that the structure of reality is reflected in his discursive gesture, but this belief gradually weakened, and the form remained – the "world" as an artifact created by discourse.

          The problem with Hegel's theory was that with the modern complexity and inconsistency of society, knowledge of the whole could no longer be spontaneous and immediate – as it was, according to Hegel, in ancient Greece - and the project of its rational deployment assumed such an intricate discourse that it jeopardized its ideological effectiveness. By making the world transparent to theory, Hegel risked making theory opaque to the world. The irony of the situation lies in the fact that in the aesthetic philosophy of Schelling or the Romantics, Hegel was repelled precisely by esotericism, the lack of universal significance of intuition, the appeal "not to everyone", which, we add, made them ideologically problematic, while his system, as he believed, is exoteric, comprehensible and makes it possible for anyone to enter the sphere of science. Hegel underestimated the ideological power of sensual presentation, which is evident from the position that art occupies in his system. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel speaks of the necessity of painfully interrupting the following of ideas at first by the intense work of concepts. In this strict Protestant iconoclasm, Hegel appears as the true heir of Kant, who, in the famous passage of the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, disparages the sensual representation of ideas. "Perhaps there is nothing more exalted in the Jewish book of laws than the commandment: Do not make yourself an idol and no image of what is in heaven, above, and what is on earth, below, and what is in the water, below the earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people in the epoch of the development of his moral culture was experienced by his religion when he compared himself with other peoples; these can also be explained by the pride inspired by Mohammedanism. The same applies to the idea of a moral law and the capacity in us for morality. It is quite in vain to fear that if we deprive it of all that is connected with feelings, it will contain only a cold, lifeless approval without any motive force or touching; on the contrary, where the senses no longer see anything in front of them, where only the indubitable unquenchable idea of morality remains, it will rather be necessary to moderate the impulse unlimited imagination, so as not to let it rise to enthusiasm, than, fearing the impotence of these ideas, to seek help in paintings and children's manuals"^{[7, pp. 145-146]}. So, in post–Kantian idealism, which offered the bourgeois redemption of social life, on the one hand, a project of rational legitimization emerged with a discourse too sophisticated to find a sensual representation, on the other - an ideologically seductive form of immediacy (aesthetic intuition), vulnerable, however, from the point of view of its general significance and meaningfulness. This dilemma was noted by Schiller in his work "On the necessary limits of the use of artistic forms". "Sensuously concrete exposition, on the one hand, is rich, because where only one definition is required, it gives a complete image... but on the other hand, it is limited and poor, because it attributes to one individual and one particular case what, after all, belongs to the whole sphere of phenomena. It thus restricts the mind just as much as it enriches the imagination with excess ..." ^{[8, 364]}. Kant left the latter reality unknowable, ethics with the emptiness of formal duty, and organic expediency as just a hypothesis of taste. Fichte and Schelling transformed Kant's ethics into a concrete principle of revolutionary freedom, and his aesthetics into a way of knowing reality, however, while lowering the value of cognitive rationality in favor of imagination, intuition and feelings. Hegel's task was, on the one hand, to overcome the weakness of the Kantian reason, which does not reach true reality, and, on the other, the irrationality of romantic intuition, reconciling thought and the world in a way of cognition that would combine Kantian analytical rigor with the romantic energy of imagination. This method of cognition is dialectical reason. Hegel tried to propose a more capacious concept of reason that would combine cognitive, practical and affective aspects. Hegel's mind is not a contemplative faculty, but the whole project of transforming the inner nature of the subject. Reason achieves its goals through the feelings and self-realization of human beings in the field of "morality" (concrete ethical life) and objective spirit. Rational moral behavior here is inseparable from human happiness and a sense of self-satisfaction. And thus Hegel "aestheticizes" the mind by rooting it in bodily desires and affects. Mind, of course, is not completely aestheticized, dissolving into hedonism, but it leaves the sublime Kantian sphere of Duty and becomes an active transforming force in material life. Through the dialectical medium of morality, through "education" in praxis, when the ethical becomes "second nature", such unity of the universal and the individual can be achieved. Within the limits of dialectics, Hegel masterfully combined the abstract and the concrete, the sensual and the spiritual, but this did not negate the question of the concrete representability of the system as a whole. And if aesthetics is an example of such representation, then it is obvious that Hegel, unlike his post-Kantian predecessors, rejects the aesthetic solution of the problem, placing art on the ontological ladder at a lower level compared to religion and philosophy. Of course, the Hegelian system does not completely discard anything, and the aura of art and, especially, religion provide what could be called the ideology of this theory, that is, its embodiment in everyday life. Religion is aimed at the universal, and at the same time rooted in feelings, but unlike art, it is more "spiritual", consciously aspires to the Absolute. Religion can perform two vital ideological functions that philosophy is incapable of. It provides a connection between a person and the Absolute at the level of feelings and experiences, and not just conceptual comprehension. And, moreover, as a cult, it belongs not only to subjectivity, but also to the "objective spirit" of institutionalized social practices. As an ideology, religion mediates the affective and practical, and although the political state, ultimately, should have a solid foundation of reason, and not religious faith, it nevertheless needs religion as a cult, affective, representational sphere, where universal rational imperatives are embodied in feelings and beliefs, correlate with the mores of a particular societies. In a sense, religion plays the role of Kant's aesthetic judgment in the Hegelian concept, a medium that correlates the universal and the concrete. Why does religion, and not art, as in the Romantics or Schelling, play such a role? Partly because Hegel, unlike his predecessors, interprets culture not narrowly aesthetically, but anthropologically and institutionally. Social connections cannot be maintained by disinterested aesthetic intersubjectivity, they must be rooted in practices and institutions. The problem, however, is not completely solved – after all, even in an ideal political state, the embodiment of the Absolute in history, individuals are deprived of direct spontaneous knowledge of a complex social whole. Each individual still acts in relation to the whole indirectly, from his particular position. In this case, such a state is a kind of fiction that exists only as a text, a book, only for a speculative theorist. The foundations of such a whole are outside of it, in the mind of Hegel, who supports its existence like God. There is an irremediable gap between theory and practice, life and knowledge. It is in this sense, as Kierkegaard said, that it is impossible to live in Hegel's system – it exists only as a concept for which there is no sensory analogue. Thus, faced with the problem of finding new foundations of social order in an unstable, conflicted modern society, theorists found themselves between two alternatives – reason and intuition, dialectics and aesthetics. It would be great if social unity were experienced directly as a work of art – this is how the German idealists imagined antiquity – but, in the too complex modern world, such aestheticized social knowledge, from Hegel's point of view, is impossible. Only dialectical reason, the intense work of the concept, can trace all the connections between the parts of the whole. But this whole remains ultimately at the level of a concept, not a lived experience, although, as has been shown, there are enough examples of what can be called aestheticization in Hegel's philosophy. Nevertheless, what is lived in society is never totality as such, and the latter excludes sensual embodiment and resides only in the Book. These difficulties, with the increasing need to redeem life after the loss of religious and metaphysical evidence, led the leading bourgeois intellectuals of the next generation – Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Marx - to sharply criticize the Hegelian system, abandon the rational apology of society and a new wave of explicit appeal to aesthetics.