Classical Interventions: Hegel, Klenze and the Aesthetics of Purity

ABSTRACT

In August of 1834, in a ceremony atop the Athenian Acropolis, the German architect Leo von Klenze ordered the dismantling and removal of all non-classical buildings from the hilltop. The results of the ensuing purification transformed the site from a multicultural complex of buildings that had accrued over centuries into what is essentially a minimalist museum, as we know it today. I argue that we can best understand Klenze’s classical intervention if we view it in the context of the discourse of a Romantic-era aesthetics of purity through which it appears self-evidently as the correct course of action. The most comprehensive articulation of this discourse appears in the lectures on aesthetics that Hegel gave in Berlin in the 1820s. Hegel argues that the perfection of Greek classical art emerges only as an overcoming of the misshapen and failed attempts at art that preceded it, which he calls “symbolic” or “oriental” (Egyptian, Persian, Indian). The human spirit, Geist, can materialize itself as a work of art only by Europeanizing itself, by shedding all oriental otherness. We can read Klenze’s intervention, which strips away all remnants of Ottoman Turkish architecture from the acropolis, as this aesthetics of purity written in stone.

Notes

1 All translations from the German are my own unless a specific English translation is noted. Because Hegel published no definitive system of his aesthetics, we must rely on student transcriptions of the four series of lectures he gave at the University of Berlin between 1820 and 1829. Heinrich Gustav Hotho, one of Hegel’s most devoted students and followers, relying on these manuscripts (some of which have since been lost) assembled his own version of Hegelian aesthetics (pub.1835, 1842. See volumes 13–15 of Werke in 20 Bänden, cited here as Werke). For a century and a half, the Hotho compilation was the only readily available version of Hegel’s Aesthetics (for the standard English translation, see Knox). Beginning in 1995, scholars began to edit and publish the existent transcriptions for all four of the lecture series. See editions by Schneider and Gethmann-Siefert. For an overview of the textual problems and editions in English see Moland (18–22). The comprehensive scholarly edition of Hegel’s works, Gesammelte Werke, includes editions of the transcriptions of all four of the lecture series (volumes 28.1–28.3).

2 On the question of the date of the ceremony, see Hamilakis’s Nation (61).

3 Hamilakis provides a detailed, compelling, and enlightening account of Klenze’s intervention in the context of national and ethnic identity (see Nation chapter 3).

4 For an insightful discussion of Hegel’s controversial “end of art” theory, see Gethmann-Siefert’s “Einleitung” (xvii-xxi) and Introduction (13–17). For engaging theoretical-philosophical reflections, see Žižek (253–64) and Pippin (279–306).