Hegel’s Holiday

Hegel’s Holiday: the analysis

If you read the previous section of Hegel’s philosophy, thinking that this analysis will be indeed very deep, I’m afraid I will have to disappoint you.

This is because Magritte did not employ the sort of rigorous logic demonstrations that any philosopher would readily go through.

To see why, here’s a letter written by Magritte to the art critic Suzi Gablik explaining the origin of the painting:

My latest painting began with the question: how to show a glass of water in a painting in such a way that it would not be indifferent? Or whimsical, or arbitrary, or weak – but, allow us to use the word, with genius? (Without false modesty.) I began by drawing many glasses of water, always with a linear mark on the glass. This line, after the 100th or 150th drawing, widened out and finally took the form of an umbrella. The umbrella was then put into the glass, and to conclude, underneath the glass. Which is the exact solution to the initial question: how to paint a glass of water with genius. I then thought that Hegel (another genius) would have been very sensitive to this object which has two opposing functions: at the same time not to admit any water (repelling it) and to admit it (containing it). He would have been delighted, I think, or amused (as on vacation), and I call the painting Hegel’s Holiday.

René Magritte

According to Hegel, every object is contradictory in itself. Every idea presupposes a tripartite division which involves the formation of a thesis, its antithesis and the resulting synthesis.

A simplistic reading of this painting could be that the two objects are a kind of negation of a negation (check out the section Negation of a negation). The umbrella is negating water (by repelling it), whereas the glass is negating the function of the umbrella (which is negating water).

So, you could think of the function of the glass as a negation of the negation, which is often interpreted as the synthesis in the context of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad.

But should we really think of the glass as a synthesis? Synthesis of what? What is the original idea that forms the thesis? Naively, we could think of the umbrella as a thesis. But if so, what is the contradiction, or antithesis? And even if an antithesis were formulated, why would a glass be the synthesis of the original idea, which is the umbrella?

Remember, the synthesis should incorporate the original idea, and elevate it to a higher stage of development.

These type of questions are the reason that the title reads Hegel’s Holiday and not Hegel’s at Work. Hegel would have find the painting of objects having contrasting functions amusing, but surely not worthy of a serious philosophical analysis.

That’s the reason why most analysis of this work refer to the two objects as contrasts, rather than contradictions. The umbrella that repels water is contrasted with the glass that admits water.

Fair enough. But let’s dissect this painting a little further.

You see, my initial mistake when I first looked at this painting was assuming that I was looking at two different objects: 1) a glass of water and 2) an umbrella.

But in Magritte’s letter to critic Suzi Gablik he writes: “I then thought that Hegel (another genius) would have been very sensitive to this object which has two opposing functions: at the same time not to admit any water (repelling it) and to admit it (containing it).”

I emphasised Magritte’s usage of the word “this object”, so that you notice that he is not referring to the umbrella and glass as two separate objects. He’s referring to the contents of the painting as an “object which has two opposing functions”.

So, the painting depicts an object which looks like a glass on top of an umbrella, an umbrella-glass object, if you like.

We established above that there is no contradiction really. The glass is not contradicting the function of the umbrella.

In fact, the composite object, which consists of an object (glass) which function is to admit water, and an object (the umbrella) which function is to repel water, is not contradictory. It’s actually complementary, and could, thus, be viewed as a synthesised object.

So, let’s go down a different route, and think how Hegel’s idea of contradiction can be applied to this synthesised object.