Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Aesthetics

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (b. 1770–d. 1831) developed his aesthetics by a series of lectures, held four times at Heidelberg and Berlin Universities. The text in three parts, titled Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, got compiled and edited by Heinrich Gustav Hotho four years after Hegel’s death. So we have to get straight about the fact that a remarkable edifice of teachings, though lacking any written proof by its author, became a headstone of art history, literary studies, and philosophical aesthetics. Hegel’s approach is the first philosophical attempt to focus aesthetics specifically on art. He does so by a critique of moralist and sensualist positions that both hardly distinguish whether aesthetic experience is generated by natural or artificial phenomena. Hegel’s critical argument culminates in a refusal of Immanuel Kant’s idea about aesthetic judgment. The latter’s definition of beauty—as a cognition that pleases without a concept—performs, according to Hegel, a relapse into a fixed opposite between the subjectivity of thought and objective nature. According to Hegel, instead, artistic beauty is the mediating “middle” between spirit and nature. Hegel puts a “phenomenological” antithesis to Kant’s concept of transcendental perception. By the idea of artistic beauty, the realm of absolute spirit is entered. The lectures on aesthetics follow the hierarchical concept of perception, deployed in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: the work of comprehension starts with the artistic mode of beholding, continues with the religious mode of imagination, and culminates in the philosophical mode of thinking. The “peripathetic” performative character is constitutive to Hegel’s aesthetics, as it mirrors the work of thinking as such. Hegel’s “world spirit” is literally wandering across three eras: the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic art forms, represented by the early ancient cultures from Persia, India, and Egypt; Greek and Roman Antiquity; and Occidental culture from the Middle Ages to modernity. By historicizing the meaning of art, Hegel relinquishes rule-based poetics and aesthetics in the classical tradition of rhetorics, laying so the foundation of a sociological approach to cultural phenomena. At the same time, his historico-philosophical aesthetics is a first attempt to draft a global history of art, though Eurocentrically limited, including the genres of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry.