Research

Current research

My current work argues for the importance of Hegel’s aesthetics to his idea of freedom. I emphasize that Hegel views social life as essentially limited in its ability to realize freedom, because it depends on us developing a habitual, and hence unreflective, attitude towards social norms—they become “second nature”. Art suspends this habitual attitude by making us reflect on social norms as having a meaning that self-reflective (“spiritual”) beings such as ourselves can reconstruct and change. The project is an attempt to clarify the role of art in thinking about freedom. I argue that emancipatory thinking cannot focus solely on social and political questions. But instead of seeing art as either an escape from politics, or as itself essentially political, I argue that Hegel offers a plausible delimitation of the questions that should be solved by social and political institutions and those that art (and the rest of “absolute spirit”) can better address. Art is a form of what I call “normative lingering“: a contemplation of social norms which suspends their immediate practical bindingness and instead explores the underlying meaning, and potential contradictions, of the concept of freedom they aim to realize.