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From Tower To Cathedral
From Tower To Cathedral
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From Tower to Cathedral 33
4-. See Kant's Table of the Higher Powers of the Soul, at the end of the Ein-
leitung to the Kritik der Urteilskraft.
s. Ibid., 59.
From Tower to Cathedral 35
that come to displace art, sealing its consignment to the past while
themselves arising from its very dismemberment.
All three figures belong to the same sphere. But within the limits
of the Aesthetics, Hegel does not trace the turnings of these circles
so as to delimit the figures in a rigorous way, that is, so as to display
the magic by which spirit returns from death to life in ever higher
shapes. Within the limits of the Aesthetics, even the concept of art
is merely taken up lemmatically, not rigorously derived as such; it is
"a presupposition given by the system of philosophy" (A 1:35). And
so, at the outset Hegel delimits the sphere common to art, religion,
and philosophy in a way that forgoes reiterating the circlings of
spirit, that presupposes the rigorous deduction outlined in the En-
cyclopedia. The sphere common to the three figures he simply iden-
tifies as that in which are expressed the most comprehensive truths
of spirit.
How is it that there is need for such expression? What is the spiri-
tual need that art would formerly have satisfied but can no longer
satisfy? What is this need that now finds its satisfaction in religion
and philosophy, perhaps only in philosophy? It is a universal need,
indeed an absolute need, one that can find its highest satisfaction
only in absolute forms of spirit, only in the expression of the most
comprehensive truths of spirit. Here is Hegel's account of this need:
"The universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side)
springs has its origin in the fact that [findet seinen Ursprung darin,
dass] man is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that man draws out of
himself and puts before himself [fiir sich] what he is and whatever is
at all. Things in nature are only immediate and single, while man as
spirit doubles himself [verdoppelt sich], in that, first of all, he is as
things of nature are, but then he is just as much for himselj'[fiir
sich ]; he intuits himself, represents himself, thinks, and only
through this active placing of himself before himself [dies tittige
Fursichsein] is he spirit" (A 1:41). One could read this passage as
Hegel's account of the origin of the work of art. That origin lies
in the determination of man as doubling himself: as spiritual, man
is essentially self-doubling (so that he not only is, like things of na-
ture, but also is for himself), and art-like religion and philosophy-
is a way in which he actually comes to double himself, to be present
From Tower to Cathedral 37
7. "Yet whoever claims that nothing exists that carries in itself a contradic-
tion in the form of an identity of opposites is at the same time requiring that
nothing living exist. For the force of life, and still more the power of the spirit,
consists precisely in positing contradiction in itself, enduring it, and overcoming
it" (A r:us).
Stone
roads, ships, sky and sea, valleys and chasms") and, on the other
hand, an external harmony that we find pleasing or impressive (A
r:r36f.). And yet, the very reserve of such an account cannot but
make one wonder whether Hegel is really granting that a landscape
can be genuinely beautiful or whether he is only pointing to the
quite deficient beauty, an improper-almost sham-beauty, that un-
derlies our loose talk about beautiful landscapes. One might also
wonder about such beauty of landscapes in view of Hegel's discus-
sion in what, though marked as a separate section, may well be taken
to continue what Hegel has just said of landscapes: this subsequent
discussion focuses on the capacity of the beauty of nature to arouse
moods ( Stimmungen des Gemuts) and to exhibit a harmony with our
moods. His examples: "the stillness of a moonlit night, the peace
of a valley through which winds a brook, the sublimity of the
immeasurable, churning sea, the restful immensity of the starry
heaven." Hegel concludes: "Here the significance [Bedeutung] no
longer belongs to the objects as such but is to be sought in the mood
they arouse" (A r:r36 )-as if their beauty could accomplish no more
than to evoke moods, as if it were a beauty that presented nothing
of the truth of the objects, which would be to say virtually not
beauty at all. The legitimacy of such beauty becomes even more
questionable if one takes into account Hegel's insistence on the in-
adequacy of plants to reflect even what animate life can present (the
plant's "activity is always drawn out into externality") (A r:r4o ); to
say nothing of the utter defectiveness that Hegel ascribes to what
he calls "dead, inorganic nature" (A r:r24 ).
For example, stone-of which Hegel says almost nothing in his
discussion of natural beauty, mentioning it only in a passage where
he contrasts the particular parts of a house ("the individual stones,
windows, etc.") with the members of an organism whose unity
gives them a reality not possessed "by the stones of a building" (A
1:126). At most, Hegel could have allowed stone in nature the kind
of defective beauty that he accords to any sensible material that is
pure in shape, color, or whatever other qualities might be relevant
in view of its reception of possible forms (A r:144f.). Stone would
merely belong to "dead, inorganic nature" -even though, in the
most rigorous determination of the w_ord, stone is not dead, not
From Tower to Cathedral 39
dead as are those whose graves it can mark. What cannot have lived
cannot have died, cannot be dead -assuming that anything can be
dead, that death is not the utter exclusion of being, from being.
Only if life, ultimately as life of spirit, life as the spiritual endurance
of contradiction-only if life is made the measure, will one then
say, without further ado, that stone belongs to dead nature. But
then, stone in nature will have been, in advance, appropriated to
what can still be called, even if in an extended sense, experience. 8
For example, the stone of a glacier-covered mountain peak.
In July 1796, while employed as a private tutor in Bern, Hegel set
out with three other tutors on a walking tour in the Alps. During
the tour he kept a very detailed diary. 9 From this diary one ~earns a
great deal about his response to the mountainous landscape, in par-
ticular, that for the most part he was not so moved by it as-having
once read Meiner's Journeys in Switzerland-he had expected to be.
For example, he tells of how the snow-covered peaks in the region
of the Jungfrau failed to make the impression that had been ex-
pected, how "they did not excite the feeling of immensity and sub-
limity" (B 384-). He tells also of an occasion when he and his com-
panions came within a half-hour's walk of a glacier, only to find that
the sight offered "nothing interesting": "One can only call it a new
kind of sight) which however gives to the spirit no further occupation
whatsoever except to be struck at finding itself so close to masses of
ice during the extreme heat of the summer" (B 385). He says of
some other mountains seen during the tour (drawing his words
from the Critique ofJudgment, almost as if to disconfirm what Kant
says, especially about the sublimity of "shapeless masses of moun-
tains piled in wild disorder upon one another with their pyramids
of ice"): "Neither the eye nor the imag~nation finds in these form-
less masses any point on which the former could rest with satisfac-
tion or where the latter could find occupation or play.... In the
thought of the permanence of these mountains or in the kind of
sublimity that one ascribes to them, reason finds nothing that im-
presses it, that elicits from it astonishment and wonder. The look of
these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the monotonous
and, in the end, boring representation: it is so [es ist so]" ( B 391f. )-
little more, then, than simplybeing, pure being, with little further
determination, hardly more or less than nothing.
The one major exception seems to have been the sight of a wa-
terfall: "Through a narrow rock-cleft, the water presses forth from
above, then it falls straight downward in spreading waves, waves that
draw the gaze of the spectator' ever downward but which he still
cannot fix or follow, for their figure [Bild], their shape dissolves at
every moment, is forced into a new one at every moment, and in
this fall one sees always the same figure and sees at the same time that
it is never the same" (B 388). Hegel's celebration of this sight results
from its being a natural image of life: "the eternal life, the powerful
mobility in it" (B 388). Here one recognizes of course the same
schema operating as in the Aesthetics. And yet, in precisely this con-
text in the diary, Hegel insists on the inadequacy of any painting to
represent what, at least in the case of the waterfall, one finds pre-
sented in nature: "The sensible presence of the painting does not allow
the imagination to expand the represented object.... When we
hold the painting in our hands or find it hanging on a wall, then
the senses cannot do otherwise than measure it by our size, by the
size of the surrounding objects and find it small.... Furthermore,
even the best paintings necessarily lack what is most alluring, what
is most essential in such a spectacle [Schauspiel]: the eternal life, the
powerful mobility of it" (B 388). At least with respect to this spec-
tacle, it seems that nature surpasses art in its presentative power,
that nature presents something essential and does not merely fore-
shadow a presentation that only art will properly accomplish; it is as
though there were a kind of natural reserve, an excess, that art
would be unable to tap. But in the account of natural beauty given
in the Aesthetics, it is difficult to discern even the slightest trace of
any such reserve.
But now, for now, following Hegel, let me put aside nature and
its mere foreshadowing of that beauty that comes properly into play
in art, which-along with religion and philosophy-can express the
From Tower to Cathedral 4-I
in full generality the vocation of art and the essence of art as de-
termined by that vocation (die Bestimmung der Kunst-in the dou-
ble sense), he invariably refers to the presentational character of art,
to its character as Darstellung. In one formulation, it is the vocation
of art to present "the truth in the form of sensible artistic configu-
ration [der sinnlichen Kunstgestaltung]" (A r:64). Or, again: "Art
has no other vocation but to bring before sensible intuition
[sinnliche Anschauung] the truth as it is in spirit" (A 2:16). Both
formulations mark clearly the double bond of art: on the one hand,
its bond to the truth of spirit, which it is bound to present; on the
other hand, its bond to the sensible, in an artistic configuration of
which it is bound to shape its presentation. One of the most remark-
able accomplishments of the Aesthetics is the way in which it goes
about systematically determining the specific character of the sensi-
bleness ( Sinnlichkeit) to which art is bound. Even at the most gen-
eral level, where the differentiation between the various forms of
art and. that between the individual arts has. not yet come into play,
Hegel rigorously distinguishes the artistic bond to the sensible from
other types of relatedness that spirit can assume to the sensible.
Among those other, nonartistic types of relatedness he includes:
first, sensible apprehension, which merely looks on; second, desire,
which uses and consumes things, gaining self-realization in them;
and, third, theoretical intelligence, which goes straight for the uni-
versal, detaching it so thoroughly that the sensible loses all further
relevance. By contrast, the artistic configuration, the artwork, is
cherished, yet without becoming an object of desire. It counts nei-
ther in its immediate material existence nor in its pure universality,
but rather as shining (Schein).
With this word Hegel overturns a decisive character of art, over-
turns into a positive determination a character of art that has almost
always been taken to discredit it and to demonstrate its unworthi-
ness in rehition to philosophy. In part, the overturning is just a mat-
ter of restoring to Schein its range of senses and connections, so
that, instead of hearing in it only the sense conveyed by illusion or
deception; one hears in it an affiliation with das Schone and extends
its senses to include: shine, look, appearance, semblance, .as well as
illusion and deception-at least these, in a reconfiguration that can
From Tower to Cathedral 4-3
Io. Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Band: Die Objektive Logik, ed. Friedrich
Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke, vol. II of Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1978), 244ff.
44 Stone
bearing within itself its meaning, the spiritual content that is pre-
sented in conjunction with it. Hegel says that the vocation of archi-
tecture is to fashion a beautiful enclosure ( Umschliessung) for the
spirit as already present, namely, in the guise of man or the divine
image he will set up in the enclosure. But, then, the architectural
product does not bear its meaning or purpose in itself but has it
only in the men or images it will enclose. Precisely when the archi-
tectural work accords fully with its concept (that of enclosing spirit),
it has its meaning outside itself. Incapable of endowing the spiritual
with an appropriate existence, "it can only reshape the external and
spiritless into a reflection [Widerschein] of the spiritual" (A 2:51).
The architectural product cannot itself present spirit, cannot present
spirit in and through its own shining; it can only enclose the spiri-
tual, providing a shell (Hulle) for the statue of the god, for another
artwork that another art, one outside architecture and unbound by
its limitations, will have shaped into an appropriate sensible presen-
tation of spirit. In contrast to the sculptural work, the architectural
shell can at best only reflect the shining of the divine image it
houses.
Yet, in the beginning the architectural work cannot have had its
meaning outside itself in this manner. For the very concept of be-
ginning prescribes that the beginning must be "something im-
mediate and simple" (A 2:25), hence excluding that separation
(purpose/means, meaning/enclosure) that the very concept of ar-
chitecture necessitates. Hence, in the beginning architecture can
have erected only works with independent meaning, works bearing
their meaning within themselves rather than having it outside in
something they would enclose. The first works of architecture must,
then, have been simple and integral, like inorganic sculptures. And
yet, in bearing their meaning in themselves, such works are not at
all superior to those later ones in which the separation comes about.
On the contrary, the first works are not yet even adequate to the
concept of architecture: rather thari relating in a genuinely archi-
tectural way to a meaning outside themselves (enclosing arid reflect-
ing it), they relate to their meaning only symbolically. Even if car-
ried within them, their meaning is even more external to them than
in the architectur in which the essential separation comes into play.
From Tower to Cathedral 4-9
tiful or purposive" (A 2:64f.). Not only the column itself, but also
its pedestal and capital let its purposiveness shine forth: beginning
and ending are determinations belonging to the very concept of a
supporting column, and these determinations are precisely what
comes to shine forth in the pedestal and the capital. Whatever ma-
. terial may have been used in the earliest stages, certainly the great
classical temples to which Hegel refers-he mentions the Ionic tem-
ple at Ephesus and the Doric temple at Corinth, also the Doric tem-
ple at Paestum, perhaps the same one that will command Heideg-
ger's attention a century later, though one cannot be sure, for there
are in fact three temples at Paestum, two in the Doric style, the
other a mixture of Doric and Ionic-certainly such temples are built
of stone. Especially in the shining of the stone columns the beauty
of such temples is manifest. In the very same stone, shaped, as it is,
into a shell for the spacing of religion, there is displayed the pastness
of art.
From Tower to Cathedral SI
But what about the beginning? For architecture does not begin
by building classical temples. In the beginning it will have erected
edifices bearing their meaning in themselves, though in an impov-
erished, external, merely symbolic way, edifices in which the separa-
tion between enclosure and meaning will not yet have come into
play. In the beginning architecture will have been symbolic, its
works like inorganic sculptures.
With what material would these first architectural works have
been constructed? In the Introduction to his account of architec-
ture, before he begins to discuss the various types, Hegel refers to
an age-old dispute (he mentions Vitruvius) as to whether architec-
ture began building with wood or with stone. He grants the im-
portance of the question, conceding that the character of the ma-
terial affects the fundamental architectural forms. And yet, he
justifies putting the question aside-or rather, deferring it-since it
is linked to a question of external purposes, wood being used to
build huts for men, stone being used for the temples in which im-
ages of gods are to be placed. To decide for wood or for stone would
be to introduce purposiveness (and the separation between purpose
and means) into the beginning where it cannot yet take place, where
it cannot yet take over the place that would be built, degrading ar-
chitecture as such.
Not, then, at the beginning, but only when that degradation
comes to be recollected-the perfect degradation exemplified in the
Greek temple-only then does Hegel really address the age-old dis-
pute as to whether building began with wood or with stone. It is
as though the disjunction, building with wood or building with
stone, could be brought into the account only at the point where
the separation between purpose and means, between meaning and .
enclosure, comes into play, providing the schema through which the
significance of the disjunction can be systematically formulated.
Thus introducing the disjunction, Hegel can then ask about the be-
ginning of classical architecture, can ask: With which material were
temples first built? But then he will also ask, retrospectively, about
the material with which the first architectural works will have been
built. Nowhere does one discern more clearly the recollective char-
acter of Hegel's discourse in the Aesthetics than in this peculiar ret-
rospection.
From Tower to Cathedral 53
Ionic temple is different: in it, says Hegel, there is "no longer any
indication of a derivation from building in wood" (A z:67).n With
the development of the column, in which the beauty of the temple
is concentrated, there is effaced every trace that would betray that
temples were once built of wood. Except in this effaced-and so,
finally, ineffective, inconsequential-beginning of classical architec-
ture, it will always have been principally with stone that architecture
will have built. Whatever the architectural edifice will have been able
to reflect of spirit will have been reflected in the shining of its stone.
But especially in the beginning, in the works of symbolic archi-
tecture. In these works the meanings expressed symbolically by the
edifices are vague and general representations, various confused ab-
stractions drawn from the life of nature and intermingled with
thoughts of the actual life of spirit. The dispersion and manifoldness
of such content is such that it resists being treated exhaustively or
systematically, and Hegel explicitly restricts himself to bringing to-
gether, in as rational an articulation as possible, only the most im-
portant of these contents. He proposes to focus on the purely uni-
versal views that provide a unifying point for a people. In this
connection the architectural edifice itself serves as a unifying point
of a nation, as a place around which the nation assembles; at the
same time, it expresses symbolically that which primarily unifies
men, their religious representations.
The example that Hegel places first-as if it marked the begin-
ning of architecture, indeed the beginning of art as such-is the
Tower of Babel. Its aim and its content Hegel identifies as the com-
munity ( Gemeinsamkeit) of those who built it together, in common
(gemeinsam). Coming together in a unification that superseded
mere familial unity, all the people are to be linked together by this
bond, "by the excavated site and ground, the assembled blocks of
stone [die zusammengefiigte Steinmasse], and the architectural culti-
vation, as it were, of the country" (A 2:31). The Tower of Babel
both is the bond and expresses the bond, indicating, though only
symbolically, only in an external way, that which ultimately unifies
men, the holy. In its assembled stones, the Tower bears its mea11ing,
not because those stones adequately express the meaning but? be-
cause, at this stage, the distinction has not yet been discern~d be-
tween the meaning and the edifice that expresses it. The Tower of
Babel is both, indistinguishably.
The first move that Hegel traces beyond this beginning is one in
which architecture adopts as its content meanings more concrete
than that of an abstract unification of all peoples. To express these
more concrete meanings, recourse is had to more concrete forms. It
is espeCially at this stage that symbolic architecture becomes like in-
organic sculpture, even though its works remain fundamentally ar-
chitectural and :not sculptural. Hence, when the focus of attention
and worship becomes the universal life-force of nature and, more
concretely, the productive energy ( Gewalt) of procreation, this con-
tent comes to be represented in the shape of animal generative or-
gans. Thus were built, especially in India (Hegel draws here from
Herodotus), "monstrous column-like structures of stone" (A 2:34 ),
giant phallic columns, expressing the procreative force symbolically.
One can say of such. a column, as of the Tower of Babel, that it
both is the meaning and expresses the meaning. The distinction re-
mains undrawn, and this is why in the beginning the phallic col-
umns were solid; when, at a later period, openings and hollows were
made in them and images of gods placed in these, so that the sepa-
ration between an inner kernel and an outer shell was introduced,
then symbolic architecture was degraded into an architecture with
its meaning outside itself, an architecture well on its way to becom-
ing merely a means serving a nonarchitectural purpose. As with the
classical temple.
The quasi-sculptural character of such symbolic architecture, its
Stone
the shrines are so small that there is no place in them for a commu-
nity; but a community belongs to a temple, otherwise it is only a
box, a treasury, a receptacle for keeping sacred images, etc." (A
2:37).
Though Hegel describes vividly the other modification found in
the Egyptian temple-precinct, he does not underline its import as
much as one might have expected. The modification consists in
From Tower to Cathedral 59
Cologne Cathedral.
itself together into its inwardness, so the building becomes the place
bounded on all sides for the assembly of the Christian community
and its inward gathering" (A 2:72 ). The enclosedness of the cathe-
dral both expresses the inwardness of Christian spirituality and pro-
vides a place for worship, for all the ~s:tivities prescribed by that
spirituality. Thus, in the cathedral there ar,e no longer open entrance
halls and colonnades left open to the worM outside; rather, the col-
umns are now moved inside the walls, set within a space closed off
from nature and the outside world. From the interior of the cathe-
dral the light of the sun is excluded or allowed only to glimmer
dimly through the stained-glass windows: "For here it is a day other
than the day of external nature that is to give light" (A 2:77). And
yet, Christian worship is not only tranquil enclosedness but also ele-
vation above the finite, and this elevation is what, beyond all pur-
posiveness, determines the independent architectural ch~racter of
the cathedral, which is built so as to express elevation toward the
infinite; its spires soaring into the heavens. These are, then, the two
moments that are brought together within the structure of the
Gothic cathedral: "The impression, therefore, that art now has to
produce is, on the one hand, in distinction from the cheerful open-
ness of the Greek temple, the impression of this tranquility of mind
[Stille des Gemuts], which, released from external nature and from
the mundane in general, closes upon itself [sich in sich zusammen-
schliesst], and, on the other hand, the impression of majestic sub-
limity that aspires and soars beyond the limitations set by intellect
[das verstitndig Be.grenzte]" (A 2:73). Thus situating the architec-
tural sublime within a moment of the beauty of the cathedral, Hegel
draws the contrast with classical architecture: whereas the Greek
temple is primarily set horizontally on the ground, the cathedral
towers up from the ground, rising into the sky. Furthermore, it is
no longer, as in the Greek temple, the supporting as such that pro-
vides the basic form of the building; for in the cathedral the walls
have the appearance of striving upward, and the very difference be-
tween load and support comes to be canceled. The columns now
become pillars: "But because the way the building strives upward
precisely transforms load-bearing into the appearan~e [Schein] of
free ascending, columns cannot occur here in the sense they have in
Stone
speak from behind their masks as if they did not recognize one an-
other, hence speaking about one another as if tq an other; scenes
are staged for each of them by others, whose feigned conversations
serve in both cases to present semblances that evoke, in each, love
for the other, hence a love between Beatrice and Benedick that,
evoked by semblance, remains itself curiously semqlant until the
final scene of the play. But there is also semblance of semblance
when, in the wedding scene, after Hero, disgraced by the words of
Claudio, has fallen into a swoon that looks like death, after Claudio
and his companions have left the scene and Hero has awakened from
her semblance of death, the Friar, who was to have married Claudio
and Hero and will in fact marry them the following day, says:
So will it fare with Claudio.
When he shall hear she died upon his words,
Th' idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come appareled in more precious habit,
More moving, delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Than when she lived indeed.U
Such power of semblance is attested, not only by drama, the very
element of which is Schein, but equally by the theoretical-recollec-
tive discourse of the Aesthetics, echoing logic itself: "Shining itself
is essential to essence" (A r:r9 ). To say nothing of the power of im-
agination (Einbildungskraft), which Hegel once called "nothing but
reason itself. m3
What of living architecture? What of architecture's bearing on
the living? What of its bearing when, for example, by building a
immediately in his text: "only reason as appearing in the sphere of empirical con-
sciousness." The entire discussion has an explicit orientation to Kant's discus-
sions of the productive imagination and of its relation to thought and to
intuition. By the time of the Encyclopedia Hegel has integrated the concept of
imagination into a systematic context that has the effect of limiting its scope and
power as compared with that accorded it in Glauben und Wissen. See Enzyk-
lopitdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grtmdriss (I827), ed. Wolfgang
Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas, vol. 19 of Gesammelte ffi1rke (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner, 1989 ), 333-339 (+55-460 ). I have discussed these sections in
Spacings- of Reason and Imagination, chap. 5.
From Tower to Cathedral 73
14. During the Berlin period Hegel took three extensive trips on which he
visited numerous cathedrals. The first trip, to Belgium and the Netherlands in
1822,.offered him especially rich possibilities. In Marburg he saw "St. Elizabeth
Church in pure Gothic style" (Briefe vrm und an Hegel, ed. J, Hoffmeister [Ham-
burg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1953], 2:348 [ #434 ]). In Cologne he visited the cathe-
dral (and even attended mass there) and wrote to his wife: "I searched out the
cathedral right away. The majesty and gracefulness of it, i.e., of what exists of it,
the slender proportions, the attenuation in them, which is not so much a rising
as an upward flight [HinaujJiiegen], are worth seeing and are fully worthy of
admiration as the conception of a single man and the enterprise of a city. In the
cathedral one vividly beholds in every sense a different condition, a different hu-
man world, as well as a different time. It is not a matter here of utility, enjoy-
ment, pleasure, or satisfied need, but of a spacious wandering about in high,
independent halls [fUr sich bestehenden Hallen], which are, as it were, indifferent
whether men use them for whatever purpose .... [It] stands there for itself and
is there regardless of whether men creep around down below or not. It does not
matter to it at all. What it is, it is for itsel ... All this-standing and walking
around in it-simply disappears in it" (Briefe 2:353 [#436]; cf. 2:355 [#437]).
Hegel continued through Aachen, visiting the cathedral there, then went on to
Ghent, where he saw "the beautiful cathedral" (Briefe 2:358 [ #438]), and then to
76 Stone
thing that will ever have been familiar (even if then repressed), that
will have been indigenous, belonging to the home surroundings;
unlike the Gothic cathedral, which one can visit and behold, the
Tower of Babel will be known of only from reading the biblical
account and perhaps from seeing some highly imaginative repre-
sentations. And yet, precisely because it is so indefinite, defined by
little more than the few verses that Genesis devotes to it, it can serve
as an example in which to gather what one would say of the begin-
ning of architecture, say on the basis of a certain elemental famili-
arity. Is it not indeed largely as such a gathering point that the Tower
of Babel functions in Hegel's text-to such an extent even that he
omits some major elements of the biblical account?
Even before phantasy intervenes to project that point and prepare
the return, the massive correspondences are evident. Both edifices
lay claim to a certain universality, a commonality: the cathedral in
housing the universal religion and in symbolizing the infinite, the
Tower of Babel in symbolizing the community, the unification of
peoples. Most remarkably, Hegel forgoes mentioning something in
this regard that is quite prominent in the biblical accoun~: that the
community of peoples that would be symbolized by the Tower is
linked to a community of language, that at that time "the whole
earth had one language,m6 and that the peoples' forsaking the
Tower and then being dispersed resulted from Yahweh's mixing up
their language, introducing linguistic diversity so that they no
longer shared a common understanding. All of this Hegel leaves
unsaid, as if the claim to universality were not always exposed to
the threat posed by linguistic diversity, as if it were not for the most
part accompanied by an institutional legitimation of the universal-
ity of a language, whether it be that unnameable tongue spoken by
the ancient Babylonians or medieval Latin. Or German. Or English.
But even granted this omission in Hegel's account, there is still
no denying the correspondences between the Gothic cathedral and
the Tower of Babel: not only do both lay claim to universality, but
16. Gen. n:r. In citing from the Genesis account I use the translation given
with notes and commentary by Gordon J. Wenhem, Word J!ibtical Commentary
(Waco, Texas: Word Books, !987), 1:232ff.
78 Stone
also, in the very way their heavy matter is shaped, assembled, perhaps
even marked, both are essentially ascensional, both of them tower
up into the heavens and have their universal meaning preCisely in so
ascending.
There is one other element in the biblical account that is lacking
in what Hegel says of the Tower of Babel, indeed not just lacking
but replaced by something else (that it itself replaced), a misrepre-
sentation, then, an error, as it wereP Whereas Hegel refers to the
assembled blocks of stone, the masses of stone put together (die zu-
sammengefugte Steinmasse) to construct the Tower, the biblical ac-
count reads: "They said to each other, 'come, let us make bricks and
bake them thoroughly.' So they had bricks for stone and asphalt for
mortar. " 18 Lacking stone in the Tigris-Euphrates valley (the biblical
"plain of Shinar"), the Babylonian architects substituted bricks that
they themselves had made, constructing the Tower from these
rather than from masses of stone taken directly from nature. If in
the Gothic cathedral stone is relieved even (and especially) of its
native heaviness, if it is deprived of its very appearance of immediate
17. In his Lectures rm the Philosophy of World History, which stems from the same
period as the Aesthetics, Hegel also mentions the Tower of Babel. But here he
recognizes that according to the biblical account it was made of bricks. Recount-
ing the description given by a contemporaneous observer who had found what
he thought were remnants of the Tower, Hegel writes: "On an elevation he be-
lieved he had discovered the remains of the old Tower of Babel; he supposed
that he had found traces of the numerous roads that wound around the Tower.
. . . Furthermore, there are many hills with remains of old structures. The bricks
[BacksteiHe] correspond to the description in the biblical account of the building
of the Tower; a vast plain is covered by an innumerable multitude of such bricks"
( Vorlesungen uber die Philosophic der Weltgeschichte, vol. 2: Die orientalische Welt,
ed. Georg Lasson [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968], 434). One should not
overlook the fact that the construction of the German word Backstein could le-
gitimate taking brick to be a kind of stone, so that the misrepresentation found
in the Aesthetics would have consisted only in the substitution of the genus for
the species-that is, Hegel would simply have spoken metaphorically, according
to the most classical concept of metaphor (see Aristotle, Poetics1457b7-9). Nev-
ertheless, the crucial difference would remain (or would have been covered up
by the metaphor): bricks are man-made, whereas stone is taken directly from na-
ture.
18. Gen. u:3. See The Interpreter's Bible (New York/Nashville: Abingdon-
Cokesbury Press, 1952), r:S64; and Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary, 1:239.
From Tower to Cathedral 79