Conscience of Stone
A note on Hegel's concept of "The Artificer"
“The conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world.” (T. S. Eliot, “Preludes.”)
Eliot’s lines conjure up (for me at least) an image of damp concrete, or tarmac, or sometimes cobblestones, reflecting the lamp light. It is night and the street is imagined waiting for the first footfall of the morning. The world arrives every day without fail but first comes the silence of night time.
To ascribe a feeling, in this case impatience, to something as cold and dead as stone is perhaps not a surprising thing for a poet to do, especially a modern one.
Paragraph 692 of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes “the artificer,” which is a form of the divine. “The artificer” is the name given to the god who is worshipped through the great stone objects that have been built by human hands. The god is not thought to reside in the object; the “pyramids and obelisks” are merely monuments to the god’s glory. This is in contrast to the worship of nature, where the god is said to be living in the tree, or to be the spirit of the animal.
The pyramids and obelisks do not contain within themselves the light of the divine but merely reflect it; these structures take artificial forms, sharp lines and smooth surfaces; “the significance of the work is not the work itself”; there is an abstract quality to such geometric work that tells us that God is not found within these structures but only outside of it. Unlike in nature, where the organic form of the plant or animal might be said to embody the power and life of the divine.
“Thus either the works receive Spirit into them only as an alien, departed spirit that has forsaken its living saturation with reality and, being itself dead, takes up its abode in this lifeless crystal; or they have an external relation to Spirit [...] related to it as to the dawning light, which casts its significance on them.”
When I read those lines from Eliot I quoted at the start, that blackened street brings such an obelisk to mind, as something inert and yet reflecting the street lights, or the light of the moon, or the dawning light, all of these representing the light of the divine; because this road has been built in the name of living things it can, in the mind of a poet, be imagined to have such passion and life contained within it, despite the impossibility of such. The empty street reflects not only the light of the divine seen in the moon, sun, and stars, but also that found in human hopes, activity, and purpose; the footfall as the working of the world, the turning of the wheel, the carrying out of the god’s plan.
(Quotations from the Phenomenology of Spirit are from the A.V. Miller translation, published in 1977 by Oxford University Press.)
Thoughtful connection between Hegel and Eliot. The distinction you draw between obelisks reflecting versus containing divinity cuts straight to how abstraction seperates human structures from nature. That geometric lifelessness is what makes these monuments feel more conceptual than alive, which is why Eliot's street can evoke similiar feelings. Saw this in DC when I visited the Washington Monument, the abstraction creates distance from imediacy.