"Man is that night, that empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity: the wealth of an infinite number of representations, of images, not one of which comes precisely to mind, or which [moreover], are not [there] insofar as they are really present. It is the night, the interiority-or-the intimacy of Nature which exists here: [the] pure personal-Ego. In phantasmagorical representations it is night on all sides: here suddenly surges up a blood- spattered head; there, another, white, apparition; and they disappear just as abruptly. That is the night that one perceives if one looks a man in the eyes: then one is delving into a night which becomes terrible; it is the night of the world which then presents itself to us."
G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Philosophie des Geistes in Samtliche Werke, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1931), vol. 20 180-81. Cited by Kojeve in YFS 78, On Bataille, ed. Allan Stoekl, C) 1990 by Yale University.
The philosophy of Hegel is in reality a philosophy of death, what Hegel is working through in the writing of The Phenomenology of Spirit is in reality an anthropomorphic reflection on the birth, life and death cycle. The end of art is a substitute for the end of man/woman.
Art and man contain ‘everything in undivided simplicity, an infinite number of representations’, these representations at some point coming to an end as the eyes close in death. The night which cuts off all light, also eliminates reproductions. The copy ceases with death.
Man is for Hegel "death living a human life” a term that it could be argued arises because of his struggle with atheism. If Christ did not absolve us from sin, if there is no such thing as religious absolution, we are grounded in our past sins and the blood of our actions is never washed clean from our hands.
The legacy of Hegel’s thought lies in the Lutherian tradition, which itself can be traced back to William of Ockham. If something has an essence that is part of its very foundation, it is also something which it is not. (This is developed in detail in the master slave compact). The particular must exist within the universal and yet must also displace it. Death is a particular experience but is also universal and Hegel’s struggle that he sets out for our soul’s final holistic unification with that something that can only be defined as wholeness, is defeated in its very efforts because of the canker in the rose. A disease that corrupts the deepest ontological essence, being at this level becomes in Hegel’s mind identical with nothing. Therefore the great theme of history is mired in the necessity of illusion. The question, “can there be an original human being?” itself as a question defined an answer that predicated a metaphysical deity. Hegel doesn’t want to accept the full implication of the duality of the master/slave dialectic, his own growing atheism in effect creating a hollow space for protestant theology. Unlike Meister Eckhart who speaks of a fusion of being with nothingness, the Ockham tradition of stripping down to essences is pre-disposed towards an ontological finality. This is Hegel’s end of art, the ontic ground zero that for him, only a return to philosophy can negate.
The end of art can therefore be read as an embodied metaphor for the necessity of having to confront death with the knowledge that this confrontation is something that will in the end define our life.
