Abstract

In the extensive secondary literature on Hegel, one finds a number of careful analyses on the aesthetics, the nature and status of language, and the Philosophy of Spirit, but no one study dealing specifically with the relation between meaning and expression in Hegel's philosophy. Given Hegel's assumption that absolute knowledge and complete transparency of expression are attainable at the end of the system, the relationship between meaning and expression seems hardly an issue marginal to his enterprise. ;The dissertation argues that the problem of expression lies at the very center of Hegel's philosophy of spirit. It seeks to show that the attempt to merge the finitude and historicity of spirit's self-expression in time with its infinite and absolute character goes together with a carefully crafted hierarchy of expressive media culminating with language. Though not extensive, Hegel's own thematic discussion of the topic in the Lectures on Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Spirit suggests a good deal of interest in and sensitivity to the issue on his part. ;The first part of the dissertation focuses on the hermeneutic difficulties raised by the definition of art as that which is semantically indeterminate, yet integrated into a historical movement marking the progressive articulation of the meaning of spirit. The second part examines the systematic organization of expressive media and art forms sketched in the Aesthetics--which ends with language and poetry--and their intersection with different epochs in the history of spirit. Finally, the last part addresses the fundamental issue of a possible hiatus between spirit's absolute self-knowledge on the one hand and its means of self-expression on the level of language on the other. First, the dissertation analyzes the relation between language and thought. Second, it tries to ascertain whether the type of conceptual systematization undertaken by philosophy entails either a sublation of or a reduction to the level of semantic signification identified by Hegel with representational thinking and everyday language. The dissertation concludes that, insofar as pure philosophical knowledge no longer needs to externalize itself, it is essentially a silent thinking