This post is part of a larger deep dive
Curious about the role of Hegelian dialectic in Hegel’s Holiday? Check out Hegel’s Holiday Explained!
Or read the full Hegel’s Holiday article!
Artist: René Magritte
Year: 1958
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Private coleccion
Dimensions: 61 cm x 50 cm
Original_title: Les vacances de Hegel
Our rating
Your rating
I’ve been dreading the day I’d have to discuss Hegel’s philosophy.
Well, with Hegel’s Holiday, that day has come!
It should be obvious with this introduction that I’m no big fan of Hegel’s writings. But who is anyway???
Just to be clear, I’m not questioning Hegel’s genius in whatever he had to say. I don’t even doubt his exceptional skills as a writer, orator and educator.
But – and this is a big but – if you have something important to say that you wish commoners to understand and take seriously, isn’t it for your best interest to make it accessible?!?
Hegel apparently didn’t think so. His works are so, so obscure, so hard to decode, so boring, so … arghhhh… extremely frustrating to read!
You see, Hegel’s texts are so inaccessible that even nowadays experts do not seem to come to a consensus on the messages he was trying to get across.
And that was pretty clear when I set my mind on learning Hegel’s philosophy. I searched and looked everywhere: youtube videos, lectures, books, podcasts, you name it. But, at the end of the way, I realised that his texts have been interpreted differently by different scholars.
Granted, I’m no philosopher (and one could argue even not very intelligent), but come on…, why would someone write something supposedly important in such cryptic language for it to be likely misunderstood, is simply beyond me.
So, there you have it! I wanted to rant on a bit about Hegel (as if there wasn’t enough of that around) and get it all out of my system before embarking on the epic adventure (or is it more like a ride to hell?) that will be learning Hegel’s philosophy.
Hegel’s holiday is a painting by Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte. This relatively simple painting shows a glass filled with water standing on top of an open umbrella on a reddish background.
Frankly, I wouldn’t call Hegel’s holiday a superb work of art. Amusing, yes, but not so much a grandiose achievement. And I believe that wasn’t Magritte’s purpose with this painting anyway.
Technically, the painting is neither peculiar nor spectacular. It’s clean, nicely finished and accurate. The background has a dull, monotonous reddish colour, and the two objects represented are ordinary and uninteresting.
Even though the reflection of the glass, as well as the shadows on the umbrella panel, suggest the presence of some light source, there are no shadows being cast on the wall. So, overall, the painting looks quite static and has the feeling of being more like a postcard than an actual painting.
The title Hegel’s Holiday naturally hints at the work of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is notoriously famous for writing unduly complicated texts.
Magritte was a huge fan of Hegel, and grasping Hegel’s philosophy at a time when the Internet did not exist, is, by itself, a tremendous achievement for someone who hadn’t been formally educated in Philosophy.
Magritte probably spent days, weeks, months reading the original texts (yuck!) of Hegel’s most famous works.
Respect!
The title of the painting is subtle but clever. As a philosophy buff and a huge admirer of Hegel, Magritte most probably excelled in the readings of the German’s philosophy texts.
Being equipped with a deep understanding of Hegel, and with creativity on his side, Magritte was able to, once again (see our analysis of Not to Be Reproduced, also by Rene Magritte), encourage viewers to feel the mystery.
Our star rating is heavily weighted towards the fact that Magritte chose Hegel, out of all philosophers, as an inspiration for this work. This was a decidedly brave decision, considering how incredibly unfathomable Hegel’s philosophy is.
So, here, at Mindlybiz, Hegel’s Holiday gets a star rating of 2.5.
Well, it’s a picture of a glass on top of an open umbrella. An odd pairing of objects for sure, but not weird in the sense that you struggle to understand what you are viewing.
Magritte even discloses the idea behind the conception of this work, as the letter to his friend and critic Suzi Gablik makes clear (see below).
For those reasons, Hegel’s holiday gets a Bizarrometer score of 1.
The title should be a dead giveaway.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a philosopher of the XVIII century who earned the reputation for being one of the hardest philosophers to read. Hegel is infamous for writing overly complicated texts that probably no one but himself would be able to fully decode.
In a nutshell, Hegel noticed that the world was always in a constant flux and in a state of development and progress (e.g., 2.5 million years ago humans lived in caves, 10000 years ago we invented agriculture, and today we are able to build rockets to probe outer space).
Hegel believed that every idea had a logical contradiction of that idea. It was the tension between the original idea and its contradiction that promoted change, which could then elevate the original idea to a higher level.
Over the course of human history, humanity has been faced with ideas and their contradictions, and their sublation has, according to Hegel, brought us closer to the Absolute Truth (or Spirit, or Knowledge, or God – there are many names for it).
This is Hegelian dialectic in action – a system that opposes an idea with its contradiction, and which has the end objective to refine the original idea.
Science is a perfect example of this dialectic process in action. A researcher specifies an hypothesis about a particular phenomenon, runs an experiment, looks at the results, and sees if the results contradict the hypothesis. If they do, then the researcher updates his theory on the basis of previous findings. With each new iteration, the researcher gets a step closer to the truth about that phenomenon.
For Hegel, this dialectic process happens everywhere and all the time, ever since humanity exists. I gave the example with science above, but dialectics, according to Hegel, occurs in the realm of ideas, which brings me back to Magritte’s painting.
An umbrella is an object that repels water, whereas the glass is an object that admits water. The seemingly contradictory functions of the objects is supposed to be a tribute to Hegelian dialectics.
OK, great, but why is Hegel on holiday?
Well, if you think about it, an umbrella and a glass are not really contradictory, are they? When Hegel speaks of contradiction, he meant a literal contradiction. For example, a country might be ruled by a dictatorship, and the need for freedom might motivate the people to get rid of any form of government (i.e., anarchy). But by combining elements of both, we reach law and democracy (see the section below for additional examples of Hegelian dialectic in practice).
But the objects in Hegel’s Holiday, the umbrella and the glass, serve completely different functions. They are not contradictory. At most, we are seeing a contrast between objects, they might, in fact, be complementary.
And that is the reason why Hegel is on holiday. No need for a painstakingly analysis of logic, no need for proofs and demonstrations, no need for lengthy debates. The only purpose of this painting is for the amusement of the viewer.
Leave a comment
Add Your Recommendations
Popular Tags