Journal of Philosophy and Theology

Hegel and Gadamer on the Contemporary Understanding of Art: An Evaluation
Peter Alawa, Ph.D.

Abstract
Philosophers have different views on art, in the ancient period Plato believed that art is an imitation of the third order and the artists are to be expelled because they corrupt the society. In the medieval and modern era philosophers accepted that art is beauty. The problem is that people nowadays think that art is imitation and beauty and not. Knowing that art has moved to another level. This article is a reaction against this view that art is not imitation and beauty. Hegel approaches this problem when he says that art is not beauty but art has an essence which is the manifestations of the absolute mind, of which religion and philosophy are the other two. In Hegel‟s philosophy of art, art has a historical development which includes: Architecture, painting, music and poetry. Gadamer attempts to resolve this problem by dismantling the traditional understanding of art as beauty and imitation by introducing a phenomenological reconstruction of art as an experience. For Hegel, art is spiritual and also relate to the contemporary understanding of art because of architecture, music, painting and poetry. For Gadamer, art relate to contemporary understanding of art because any art work that is worthy to be called an artwork address us, it speaks to us. Today we have a better understanding of art which goes beyond that of Hegal and Gadamer. Art is now realistic because it has an artistic value from the inside, it is objectivistic because it is an object of reflection and it is relativistic because is an image of an age and concerns that particular culture. In this work, our method is textual analysis; it means a critical look at of the original works of our authors and commentaries written on them by other writers in order to evaluate our authors.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/ijpt.v5n2a7