I wonder how Cannon-Brown will deal with Hegel in presenting his thesis on ancient Egyptian art. For Hegel, that Egyptian art is not really art proper because it was symbolic. By symbolic Hegel means that the form did not fully or perfectly embody the spiritual freedom of life but pointed to it in the same way, for example, a word points to a meaning but does not embody it, no matter how well it is crafted. Never mind that the Egyptians believed that the images and likenesses they made did serve as repositories for the KA, or soul. For Hegel, the aesthetic (that spiritual freedom that includes the irrational and the rational) must be perfectly embodied or realized in the human made art object. (Again, for Hegel, that perfect fusion only occurred once, with high classic Greek sculpture and thereafter slips back into symbolism, as with medieval and religious art, or fails to be the most significant content-expression of the Absolute, even into modernity (post 1800) because the developed human conceptual abilities outstrip the ancient Greeks and what can possibly be embodied in art proper - the man-made art object. I can't imagine a new serious book on aesthetics that does not deal with Hegel's art philosophy, at least in considering the sources of the Western tradition in aesthetic theory-philosophy of art. So, for me, the question Cannon-Brown must answer in this book is to explain his position on the symbolic nature of Egyptian art and how and whether that symbolic nature can be embraced by whatever theory of aesthetics he proposes. As I've always loved Egyptian 'art' I'll be sure to put this new book on my reading list. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, July 4, 2012 1:33:30 AM Subject: "The Aesthetic Ideal in Classical Egypt" (upcoming book) http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415650380/
