Terry Eagleton, in his new book, Culture and the Death of God, writes: ‘in [Hegel’s] view, art blends the will with spontaneity, the conscious mind with the unconscious. As such, it offers a precious insight into the very ground of our being, namely the unconscious process of self-productivity which is Nature as a whole. The human subject is a form of self-conscious production; but this self-fashioning is also its way of participating in the world’s perpetual conjuring of itself into existence . . . ‘
And a little later:
‘The objective world,’ Schelling writes, ‘is simply . . . The unconscious poetry of the spirit’.
Frank Auerbach knew this. I don’t whether he studied the German idealists, but when I saw, better to say, studied Auberbach’s work at Tate Britain a few days ago, and then in reading Eagleton’s use of these words of Hegel and Schelling, I seem to see in Auerbach’s work what they are talking about. Those thick layers of pigment, the inspired brushwork . . . The world is self-creating. And interestingly I discovered the Terry Eagleton book in the shop at Tate Britain after having worked through the exhibition and drank coffee and indulged in good conversation. Indulged? Indulged in a piece of work combined with the pleasure of sharply contoured conversation.
