Art and Idealization

Art, for Hegel, is essentially figurative. This is not because it seeks to imitate nature, but because its purpose is to express and embody free spirit and this is achieved most adequately through images of human beings. (We will consider the exceptions to this—architecture and music—below.) More specifically, art's role is to bring to mind truths about ourselves and our freedom that we often lose sight of in our everyday activity. Its role is to show us (or remind us of) thetrue character of freedom. Art fulfills this role by showing us the freedom of spirit in its purest form without the contingencies of everyday life. That is to say, art at its best presents us not with the all too familiar dependencies and drudgery of daily existence, but with the ideal of freedom (see Aesthetics, 1: 155–6). This ideal of human (and divine) freedom constitutes true beauty and is found above all, Hegel claims, in ancient Greek sculptures of gods and heroes.
Note that the work of idealization is undertaken not (like modern fashion photography) to provide an escape from life into a world of fantasy, but to enable us to see our freedom more clearly. Idealization is undertaken, therefore, in the interests of a clearer revelation of the true character of humanity (and of the divine). The paradox is that art communicates truth through idealizedimages of human beings (and indeed—in painting—through the illusion of external reality).
It is worth noting at this stage that Hegel's account of art is meant to be both descriptive and normative. Hegel thinks that the account he gives describes the principal features of the greatest works of art in the Western tradition, such as the sculptures of Phidias or Praxiteles or the dramas of Aeschylus or Sophocles. At the same time, his account is normative in so far as it tells us what true art is. There are many things that we call “art”: cave paintings, a child's drawing, Greek sculpture, Shakespeare's plays, adolescent love poetry, and (in the twentieth century) Carl André's bricks. Not everything called “art” deserves the name, however, because not everything so called does what true art is meant to do: namely, give sensuous expression to free spirit and thereby create works of beauty. Hegel does not prescribe strict rules for the production of beauty; but he does set out broad criteria that truly beautiful art must meet, and he is critical of work that claims to be “art” but that fails to meet these criteria. Hegel's critique of certain developments in post-Reformation art—such as the aspiration to do no more than imitate nature—is thus based, not on contingent personal preferences, but on his philosophical understanding of the true nature and purpose of art.

6. Hegel's Systematic Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art

Hegel's philosophical account of art and beauty has three parts: 1) ideal beauty as such, or beauty proper, 2) the different forms that beauty takes in history, and 3) the different arts in which beauty is encountered. We will look first at Hegel's account of ideal beauty as such.

6.1 Ideal Beauty as such

Hegel is well aware that art can perform various functions: it can teach, edify, provoke, adorn, and so on. His concern, however, is to identify art's proper and most distinctive function. This, he claims, is to give intuitive, sensuous expression to the freedom of spirit. The point of art, therefore, is not to be “realistic”—to imitate or mirror the contingencies of everyday life—but to show us what divine and human freedom look like. Such sensuous expression of spiritual freedom is what Hegel calls the “Ideal,” or true beauty.
The realm of the sensuous is the realm of individual things in space and time. Freedom is given sensuous expression, therefore, when it is embodied in an individual who stands alone in his or her “self-enjoyment, repose, and bliss [Seligkeit]” (Aesthetics, 1: 179). Such an individual must not be abstract and formal (as, for example, in the early Greek Geometric style), nor should he be static and rigid (as in much ancient Egyptian sculpture), but his body and posture should be visibly animated by freedom and life, without, however, sacrificing the stillness and serenity that belongs to ideal self-containment. Such ideal beauty, Hegel claims, is found above all in fifth- and fourth-century Greek sculptures of the gods, such as the Dresden Zeus (a cast of which Hegel saw in the early 1820s) or Praxiteles' Cnidian Aphrodite (see PKÄ, 143 and Houlgate 2007, 58).
Ancient Greek sculpture, which Hegel would have known almost exclusively from Roman copies or from plaster casts, presents what he calls pure or “absolute” beauty (PKÄ, 124). It does not, however, exhaust the idea of beauty, for it does not give us beauty in its most concrete and developed form. This we find in ancient Greek drama—especially tragedy—in which free individuals proceed to action that leads to conflict and, finally, to resolution (sometimes violently, as in Sophocles' Antigone, sometimes peacefully, as in Aeschylus' Oresteian trilogy). The gods represented in Greek sculpture are beautiful because their physical shape perfectly embodies their spiritual freedom and is not marred by marks of physical frailty or dependence. The principal heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy are beautiful because their free activity is informed and animated by an ethical interest or “pathos” (such as care for the family, as in the case of Antigone, or concern for the welfare of the state, as in the case of Creon), rather than by petty human foibles or passions. These heroes are not allegorical representations of abstract virtues, but are living human beings with imagination, character and free will; but what moves them is a passion for an aspect of our ethical life, an aspect that is supported and promoted by a god.
This distinction between pure beauty, found in Greek sculpture, and the more concrete beauty found in Greek drama means that ideal beauty actually takes two subtly different forms. Beauty takes these different forms because pure sculptural beauty—though it is the pinnacle of art's achievement—has a certain abstractness about it. Beauty is the sensuous expression of freedom and so must exhibit the concreteness, animation and humanity that are missing, for example, in Egyptian sculpture. Yet since pure beauty, as exemplified by Greek sculpture, is spiritual freedom immersed in spatial, bodily shape, it lacks the more concrete dynamism of action in time, action that is animated by imagination and language. This is what lends a certain “abstractness” (and, indeed, coldness) to pure beauty (PKÄ, 57, 125). If art's role is to give sensuous expression to true freedom, however, it must move beyond abstraction towards concreteness. This means that it must move beyond pure beauty to the more concrete and genuinely human beauty of drama. These two kinds of ideal beauty thus constitute the most appropriate objects of art and, taken together, form what Hegel calls the “centre” (Mittelpunkt) of art itself (PKÄ, 126).

6.2 The Particular Forms of Art

Hegel also acknowledges that art can, indeed must, both fall short of and go beyond such ideal beauty. It falls short of ideal beauty when it takes the form of symbolic art, and it goes beyond such beauty when it takes the form of romantic art. The form of art that is characterized by works of ideal beauty itself is classical art. These are the three forms of art (Kunstformen), or “forms of the beautiful” (PKÄ, 68), that Hegel believes are made necessary by the very idea of art itself. The development of art from one form to another generates what Hegel regards as the distinctivehistory of art.
What produces these three art-forms is the changing relation between the content of art—the Idea as spirit—and its mode of presentation. The changes in this relation are in turn determined by the way in which the content of art is itself conceived. In symbolic art the content is conceived abstractly, such that it is not able to manifest itself adequately in a sensuous, visible form. In classical art, by contrast, the content is conceived in such a way that it is able to find perfect expression in sensuous, visible form. In romantic art, the content is conceived in such a way that it is able to find adequate expression in sensuous, visible form and yet also ultimately transcends the realm of the sensuous and visible.
Classical art is the home of ideal beauty proper, whereas romantic art is the home of what Hegel calls the “beauty of inwardness” (Schönheit der Innigkeit) or, as Knox translates it, “beauty of deep feeling” (Aesthetics, 1: 531). Symbolic art, by contrast, falls short of genuine beauty altogether. This does not mean that it is simply bad art: Hegel recognizes that symbolic art is often the product of the highest level of artistry. Symbolic art falls short of beauty because it does not yet have a rich enough understanding of the nature of divine and human spirit. The artistic shapes it produces are deficient, therefore, because the conceptions of spirit that underlie it—conceptions that are contained above all in religion—are deficient (PKÄ, 68).

6.2.1 Symbolic Art

Hegel's account of symbolic art encompasses the art of many different civilizations and shows his considerable understanding of, and appreciation for, non-Western art. Not all of the types of symbolic art Hegel discusses, however, are fully and properly symbolic. So what connects them all? The fact that they all belong to the sphere of what Hegel calls “pre-art” (Vorkunst) (PKÄ, 73). Art proper, for Hegel, is the sensuous expression or manifestation of free spirit in a medium (such as metal, stone or color) that has been deliberately shaped or worked by human beings into the expression of freedom. The sphere of “pre-art” comprises art that falls short of art proper in some way. This is either because it is the product of a spirit that does not yet understand itself to be truly free, or because it is the product of a spirit that does have a sense of its own freedom but does not yet understand such freedom to involve the manifestation of itself in a sensuous medium that has been specifically shaped to that end. In either case, compared to genuine art, “pre-art” rests on a relatively abstract conception of spirit.
Hegel's intention in his account of symbolic art is not to comment exhaustively on every kind of “pre-art” there is. He says nothing, for example, about prehistoric art (such as cave painting), nor does he discuss Chinese art or Buddhist art (even though he discusses both Chinese religion and Buddhism in his lectures on the philosophy of religion). Hegel's aim in his account of symbolic art is to examine the various kinds of art that are made necessary by the very concept of art itself, the stages through which art has to pass on its journey from pre-art to art proper.
The first stage is that in which spirit is conceived as being in an immediate unity with nature. This stage is encountered in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrians, Hegel claims, believe in a divine power—the Good—but they identify this divinity with an aspect of nature itself, namely with light. Light does not symbolize or point to a separate God or Good; rather, in Zoroastrianism (as Hegel understands it) light is the Good, is God (Aesthetics, 1: 325). Light is thus the substance in all things and that which gives life to all plants and animals. This light, Hegel tells us, is personified as Ormuzd (or Ahura Mazda). Unlike the God of the Jews, however, Ormuzd is not a free, self-conscious subject. He (or it) is the Good in the form of light itself, and so is present in all sources of light, such as the sun, stars and fire.
The question we have to ask, Hegel remarks, is whether seeing the Good as light (or giving utterance to such an intuition) counts as art (PKÄ, 76). In Hegel's view, it does not do so for two reasons: on the one hand, the Good is not understood to be free spirit that is distinct from, but manifests itself in, the light; on the other hand, the sensuous element in which the Good is present—the light itself—is understood not to be something shaped or produced by free spirit for the purpose of its self-expression, but simply to be a given feature of nature with which the Good is immediately identical.
In the Zoroastrian vision of the Good as light, we encounter the “sensuous presentation [Darstellung] of the divine” (PKÄ, 76). This vision, however, does not constitute a work of art, even though it finds expression in well-crafted prayers and utterances.
The second stage in the development of pre-art is that in which there is an immediate differencebetween spirit and nature. This is found, in Hegel's view, in Hindu art. The difference between the spiritual and the natural means that the spiritual—i.e., the divine—cannot be understood (as in Persia) to be simply identical with some immediately given aspect of nature. On the other hand, Hegel claims, the divine in Hinduism is conceived in such an abstract and indeterminate way that it acquires determinate form only in and through something immediately sensuous, external and natural. The divine is thus understood to be present in the very form of something sensuous and natural. As Hegel puts it in his 1826 lectures on aesthetics: “natural objects—the human being, animals—are revered as divine” (PKÄ, 79).
Hindu art marks the difference between the spiritual (or divine) and the merely natural by extending, exaggerating and distorting the natural forms in which the divine is imagined to be present. The divine is portrayed not in the purely natural form of an animal or human being, therefore, but in the unnaturally distorted form of an animal or human being. (Shiva is portrayed with many arms, for example, and Brahma with four faces.)
Hegel notes that such portrayal involves the work of “shaping” or “forming” the medium of expression(PKÄ, 78). In that sense, one can speak of Hindu “art.” He claims, however, that Hindu art does not fulfill the true purpose of art because it does not give appropriate and adequate shape to free spirit and thereby create images of beauty. Rather, it simply distorts the natural shape of animals and human beings—to the point at which they become “ugly” (unschön), “monstrous,” “grotesque” or “bizarre” (PKÄ, 78, 84)—in order to show that the divine or spiritual, which cannot be understood except in terms of the natural and sensuous, is at the same time different from, and finds no adequate expression in, the realm of the natural and sensuous. Hindu divinity is inseparable from natural forms, but it indicates its distinctive presence by the unnaturalness of the natural forms it adopts.
Hegel's judgment on Hindu art does not mean, by the way, that he finds no merit at all in such art. He remarks on the splendor of Hindu art and on the “most tender feeling” and the “wealth of the finest sensuous naturalness” that such art can display. He insists, however, that Hindu art fails to reach the height of art, in which spirit is shown to be free in itself and is given appropriate natural, visible shape (PKÄ, 84).
The third stage in the development of “pre-art” is that of genuinely symbolic art in which shapes and images are deliberately designed and created to point to a determinate and quite separatesphere of “interiority” (Innerlichkeit) (PKÄ, 86). This is the province of ancient Egyptian art. The Egyptians, Hegel tells us, were the first people to “fix” (fixieren) the idea of spirit as something inward that is separate and independent in itself (PKÄ, 85). (In this context he refers to Herodotus, who maintained that the Egyptians were “the first people to put forward the doctrine of the immortality of the soul” [Herodotus, 145 [2: 123]].) Spirit, as Hegel understands it (in his philosophy of subjective and objective spirit), is the activity of externalizing and expressing itself in images, words, actions and institutions. With the idea of spirit as “interiority,” therefore, there necessarily comes the drive to give an external shape to this inner spirit, that is, to produce a shape for spirit from out of spirit itself. The drive to create shapes and images—works of art—through which the inner realm can make itself known is thus an “instinct” in the Egyptians that is deeply rooted in the way they understand spirit. In this sense, in Hegel's view, Egyptian civilization is a more profoundly artistic civilization than that of the Hindus (Aesthetics, 1: 354;PKÄ, 86).
Egyptian art, however, is only symbolic art, not art in its full sense. This is because the created shapes and images of Egyptian art do not give direct, adequate expression to spirit, but merelypoint to, or symbolize, an interiority that remains hidden from view. Furthermore, the inner spirit, though fixed in the Egyptian understanding as a “separate, independent inwardness” (PKÄ, 86), is not itself understood as fully free spirit. Indeed, the realm of spirit is understood by the Egyptians to a large degree as the simple negation of the realm of nature and life. That is to say, it is understood above all as the realm of the dead.
The fact that death is the principal realm in which the independence of the soul is preserved explains why the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is so important to the Egyptians. It also explains why Hegel sees the pyramid as the image that epitomizes Egyptian symbolic art. The pyramid is a created shape that hides within it something separate from it, namely a dead body. It thus serves as the perfect image of Egyptian symbols which point to, but do not themselves reveal and express, a realm of interiority that is independent but still lacks the freedom and life of genuine spirit (Aesthetics, 1: 356).
For Hegel, Greek art contains symbolic elements (such as the eagle to symbolize the power of Zeus), but the core of Greek art is not the symbol. Egyptian art, by contrast, is symbolic through and through. Indeed, Egyptian consciousness as a whole, in Hegel's view, is essentially symbolic. Animals, for example, are regarded as symbols or masks of something deeper, and so animal faces are often used as masks (by amongst others, embalmers). Symbolism can also be multi-layered: the image of the phoenix, Hegel claims, symbolizes natural (especially, celestial) processes of disappearance and reemergence, but those processes are themselves viewed as symbols of spiritual rebirth (PKÄ, 87).
As noted above, the pyramid epitomizes the symbolic art of the Egyptians. Such art, however, does not just point symbolically to the realm of the dead; it also bears witness to an incipient but still undeveloped awareness that true inwardness is found in the living human spirit. It does so, Hegel maintains, by showing the human spirit struggling to emerge from the animal. The image that best depicts this emergence is, of course, that of the sphinx (which has the body of a lion and the head of a human being). The human form is also mixed with that of animals in images of gods, such as Horus (who has a human body and a falcon's head). Such images, however, do not constitute art in the full sense because they fail to give adequate expression to free spirit in the form of the fully human being. They are mere symbols that partially disclose an interiority whose true character remains hidden from view (and mysterious even to the Egyptians themselves).
Even when the human form is depicted in Egyptian art without adulteration, it is still not animated by a genuinely free and living spirit and so does not become the shape of freedom itself. Figures, such as the Memnon Colossi of Amenhotep III in Western Thebes, display no “freedom of movement” (PKÄ, 89), in Hegel's view, and other smaller figures, which stand with their arms pressed to their sides and their feet firmly planted on the ground, lack “grace [Grazie] of movement.” Egyptian sculpture is praised by Hegel as “worthy of admiration”; indeed, he claims that under the Ptolemies (305–30 B.C.) Egyptian sculpture exhibited great “delicacy” (or “elegance”) (Zierlichkeit). Nonetheless, for all its merits, Egyptian art does not give shape to real freedom and life and so fails to fulfill the true purpose of art.
The fourth stage of pre-art is that in which spirit gains such a degree of freedom and independence that spirit and nature “fall apart” (PKÄ, 89). This stage is in turn sub-divided into three. The first sub-division comprises sublime art: the poetic art of the Jewish people.
In Judaism, Hegel maintains, spirit is understood to be fully free and independent. This freedom and independence is, however, attributed to the divine rather than the human spirit. God is thus conceived as a “free spiritual subject” (PKÄ, 75), who is the creator of the world and the power over everything natural and finite. That which is natural and finite is, by contrast, regarded as something “negative” in relation to God, that is, as something that does not exist for its own sake but that has been created to serve God (PKÄ, 90).
Judaic spirituality, in Hegel's view, is not capable of producing works of true beauty because the Jewish God transcends the world of nature and finitude and cannot manifest itself in that world and be given visible shape in it. Jewish poetry (the Psalms) gives expression, rather, to the sublimity of God by praising and exalting Him as the source of all things. At the same time, such poetry gives “brilliant” (glänzend) expression to the pain and fear felt by the sinful in relation to their Lord (PKÄ, 91).
The second sub-division of this fourth stage of pre-art comprises what Hegel calls “oriental pantheism” and is found in the poetry of Islamic “Arabs, Persians, and Turks” (PKÄ, 93), such as the Persian lyric poet Hafez (German: Hafis) (c. 1310–1389). In such pantheism, God is also understood to stand sublimely above and apart from the realm of the finite and natural, but his relation to that realm is held to be affirmative, rather than negative. The divine raises things to their own magnificence, fills them with spirit, gives them life and in this sense is actuallyimmanent in things (Aesthetics, 1: 368; PKÄ, 93).
This in turn determines the relation that the poet has to objects. For the poet, too, is free and independent of things, but also has an affirmative relation to them. That is to say, he feels an identity with things and sees his own untroubled freedom reflected in them. Such pantheism thus comes close to genuine art, for it uses natural objects, such as a rose, as poetic “images” (Bilder) of its own feeling of “cheerful, blessed inwardness” (PKÄ, 94). The pantheistic spirit remains, however, free within itself in distinction from and in relation to natural objects; it does not create shapes of its own—such as the idealized figures of the Greek gods—in which its freedom comes directly into view.
The third sub-division of the fourth stage of pre-art is that in which there is the clearest break between spirit and the realm of the natural or sensuous. At this stage, the spiritual aspect—that which is inner and, as it were, invisible—takes the form of something quite separate and distinct. It is also something finite and limited: an idea or meaning entertained by human beings. The sensuous element is in turn something separate and distinct from the meaning. It has no intrinsic connection to the meaning, but is, as Hegel puts it, “external” to that meaning. The sensuous element—the pictorial or poetic image—is thus connected with the meaning by nothing but the subjective “wit” or imagination of the poet (PKÄ, 95). This occurs, Hegel maintains, in fables, parables, allegories, metaphors and similes.
This third sub-division is not associated with any particular civilization, but is a form of expression that is found in many different ones. Hegel contends, however, that allegory, metaphor and simile do not constitute the core of truly beautiful art, because they do not present us with the very freedom of spirit itself, but point to (and so symbolize) a meaning that is separate and independent. A metaphor, such as “Achilles is a lion,” does not embody the spirit of the individual hero in the way that a Greek sculpture does, but is a metaphor for something that is distinct from the metaphor itself (see Aesthetics, 1: 402–8; PKÄ, 104).
Hegel's account of symbolic art (or “pre-art”) draws widely on the work of other writers, such as his former colleague at Heidelberg, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, the author of Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples, especially the Greeks (1810–12). Hegel's account is not meant to be strictly historical, but rather to place the various forms of pre-art discussed in a logicalrelation to one another. This relation is determined by the degree to which, in each form of pre-art, spirit and nature (or the sensuous) are differentiated from one another.
To recapitulate: in Zoroastrianism, spirit and nature are in immediate identity with one another (as the Light). In Hindu art, there is an immediate difference between the spiritual (the divine) and nature, but the spiritual remains abstract and indeterminate in itself and so can be brought to mind only through images of natural things (unnaturally distorted). In Egyptian art, the spiritual is againdifferent from the realm of the merely natural and sensuous. In contrast to the indeterminate divinity of the Hindus, however, Egyptian spirituality (in the form of the gods and of the human soul) is fixed, separate and determinate in itself. The images of Egyptian art thus pointsymbolically to a realm of spirit that remains hidden from direct view. The spirit to which such symbolic images point, however, lacks genuine freedom and life and is often identified with the realm of the dead.
In the sublime poetry of the Jews, God is represented as transcendent and as a “free spiritual subject.” Finite human beings, however, are portrayed in a negative relation to God in that they are created to serve and praise God and are pained by their own sinfulness. In the sublime poetry of “oriental pantheism” God is once again portrayed as transcendent, but, in contrast to Judaism, God and finite things are shown to stand in an affirmative relation to one another: things are infused with spirit and life by God. The poet's relation to things is, accordingly, one in which his own free spirit finds itself reflected in the natural things around him.
In the last stage of pre-art, the difference between the spiritual and the natural (or sensuous) is taken to its limit: the spiritual element (the “meaning”) and the sensuous element (the “shape” or “image”) are now completely independent of, and external to, one another. Furthermore, each is finite and limited. This is the realm of allegory and metaphor.

6.2.2 Classical Art

Hegel does not deny the magnificence or elegance of pre-art, but he maintains that it falls short of art proper. The latter is found in classical art, or the art of the ancient Greeks.
Classical art, Hegel contends, fulfills the concept of art in that it is the perfect sensuous expression of the freedom of spirit. It is in classical art, therefore—above all in ancient Greek sculpture (and drama)—that true beauty is to be found. Indeed, Hegel maintains, the gods of ancient Greece exhibit “absolute beauty as such”: “there can be nothing more beautiful than the classical; there is the ideal” (PKÄ, 124, 135; see also Aesthetics, 1: 427).
Such beauty consists in the perfect fusion of the spiritual and the sensuous (or natural). In true beauty the visible shape before us does not merely intimate the presence of the divine through the unnatural distortion of its form, nor does it point beyond itself to a hidden spirituality or to divine transcendence. Rather, the shape manifests and embodies free spirituality in its very contours. In true beauty, therefore, the visible shape is not a symbol of, or metaphor for, a meaning that lies beyond the shape, but is the expression of spirit's freedom that brings that freedom directly into view. Beauty is sensuous, visible shape so transformed that it stands as the visible embodiment of freedom itself.
Hegel does not deny that Greek art and mythology contain many symbolic elements: the story, for example, that Cronus, the father of Zeus, consumed his own children symbolizes the destructive power of time (Aesthetics, 1: 492; PKÄ, 120). In Hegel's view, however, the distinctive core of Greek art consists in works of ideal beauty in which the freedom of spirit is made visible for the first time in history. Three conditions had to be met for such beautiful art to be produced.
First, the divine had to be understood to be freely self-determining spirit, to be divinesubjectivity (not just an abstract power such as the Light). Second, the divine had to be understood to take the form of individuals who could be portrayed in sculpture and drama. The divine had to be conceived, in other words, not as sublimely transcendent, but as spirituality that is embodied in many different ways. The beauty of Greek art thus presupposed Greek polytheism. Third, the proper shape of free spirit had to be recognized to be the human body, not that of an animal. Hindu and Egyptian gods were often portrayed as a fusion of human and animal forms; by contrast, the principal Greek gods were depicted in ideal human form. Hegel notes that Zeus would sometimes take on animal form, for example when he was engaged in seduction; but he sees Zeus' transformation of himself into a bull for the purpose of seduction as a lingering echo of Egyptian mythology in the Greek world (see PKÄ, 119–20, in which Hegel confuses Io, who was herself changed into a white cow by Hera in another story, with Europa, who was the object of Zeus' love in the story Hegel has in mind).
Not only do Greek art and beauty presuppose Greek religion and mythology, but Greek religion itself requires art in order to give a determinate identity to the gods. As Hegel notes (following Herodotus), it was the poets Homer and Hesiod who gave the Greeks their gods, and Greek understanding of the gods was developed and expressed above all in their sculpture and drama (rather than in distinctively theological writings) (PKÄ, 123–4). Greek religion thus took the form of what Hegel in the Phenomenology called a “religion of art.” Moreover, Greek art achieved the highest degree of beauty, in Hegel's view, precisely because it was the highest expression of the freedom of spirit enshrined in Greek religion.
Although Greek sculpture and drama achieved unsurpassed heights of beauty, such art did not give expression to the deepest freedom of the spirit. This is because of a deficiency in the Greek conception of divine and human freedom. Greek religion was so well suited to aesthetic expression because the gods were conceived as free individuals who were wholly at one with their bodies and their sensuous life. In other words, they were free spirits still immersed in nature (PKÄ, 132–3). In Hegel's view, however, a deeper freedom is attained when the spirit withdraws into itself out of nature and becomes pure self-knowing interiority. Such an understanding of spirit is expressed, according to Hegel, in Christianity. The Christian God is thus pure self-knowing spirit and love who created human beings so that they, too, may become such pure spirit and love. With the emergence of Christianity comes a new form of art: romantic art. Hegel uses the term “romantic” to refer not to the art of the late 18th- and early 19th-century German Romantics (many of whom he knew personally), but to the whole tradition of art that emerged in Western Christendom.

6.2.3 Romantic Art

Romantic art, like classical art, is the sensuous expression or manifestation of the freedom of spirit. It is thus capable of genuine beauty. The freedom it manifests, however, is a profoundlyinward freedom that finds its highest expression and articulation not in art itself but in religious faith and philosophy. Unlike classical art, therefore, romantic art gives expression to a freedom of the spirit whose true home lies beyond art. If classical art can be compared to the human body which is thoroughly suffused with spirit and life, romantic art can be compared to the human face which discloses the spirit and personality within. Since romantic art actually discloses the inner spirit, however, rather than merely pointing to it, it differs from symbolic art which it otherwise resembles.
Romantic art, for Hegel, takes three basic forms. The first is that of explicitly religious art. It is in Christianity, Hegel contends, that the true nature of spirit is revealed. What is represented in the story of Christ's life, death and resurrection is the idea that a truly divine life of freedom and love is at the same time a fully human life in which we are willing to “die” to ourselves and let go of what is most precious to us. Much religious romantic art, therefore, focuses on the suffering and death of Christ.
Hegel notes that it is not appropriate in romantic art to depict Christ with the idealized body of a Greek god or hero, because what is central to Christ is his irreducible humanity and mortality. Romantic art, therefore, breaks with the classical ideal of beauty and incorporates real human frailty, pain and suffering into its images of Christ (and also of religious martyrs). Indeed, such art can even go to the point of being “ugly” (unschön) in its depiction of suffering (PKÄ, 136).
If, however, romantic art is to fulfill the purpose of art and present true freedom of spirit in the form of beauty, it must show the suffering Christ or suffering martyrs to be imbued with a profound inwardness (Innigkeit) of feeling and a genuine sense of reconciliation (Versöhnung) (PKÄ, 136–7): for such an inward sense of reconciliation, in Hegel's view, is the deepest spiritual freedom. The sensuous expression(in color or words) of this inner sense of reconciliation constitutes what Hegel calls the “beauty of inwardness” or “spiritual beauty” (geistige Schönheit) (PKÄ, 137). Strictly speaking, such spiritual beauty is not as consummately beautiful as classical beauty, in which the spirit and the body are perfectly fused with one another. Spiritual beauty, however, is the product of, and reveals, a much more profound inner freedom of spirit than classical beauty and so moves and engages us much more readily than do the relatively cold statues of Greek gods.
The most profound spiritual beauty in the visual arts is found, in Hegel's view, in painted images of the Madonna and Child, for in these what is expressed is the feeling of boundless love. Hegel had a special affection for the paintings of the Flemish Primitives, Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling, whose work he saw on his visits to Ghent and Bruges in 1827 (Hegel: The Letters, 661–2), but he also held Raphael in high regard and was particularly moved by the expression of “pious, modest mother-love” in Raphael's Sistine Madonna which he saw in Dresden in 1820 (PKÄ, 39; Pöggeler et al 1981, 142). Greek sculptors portrayed Niobe as simply “petrified in her pain” at the loss of her children. By contrast, the painted images of the Virgin Mary are imbued by van Eyck and Raphael with an “eternal love” and a “soulfulness” that Greek statues can never match (PKÄ, 142, 184).
The second fundamental form of romantic art identified by Hegel depicts what he calls the secular “virtues” of the free spirit (Aesthetics, 1: 553; PKÄ, 135). These are not the ethicalvirtues displayed by the heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy: they do not involve a commitment to the necessary institutions of freedom, such as the family or the state. Rather, they are theformal virtues of the romantic hero: that is to say, they involve a commitment by the free individual to an object or person determined by the individual's contingent choice or passion.
Such virtues include that of romantic love (which concentrates on a particular, contingent person), loyalty towards an individual (that can change if it is to one's advantage), and courage (which is often displayed in the pursuit of personal ends, such as rescuing a damsel in distress, but can also be displayed in the pursuit of quasi-religious ends, such as the hunt for the Holy Grail) (PKÄ, 143–4).
Such virtues are found primarily in the world of mediaeval chivalry (and are subjected to ridicule, Hegel points out, in Cervantes' Don Quixote) (Aesthetics, 1: 591–2; PKÄ, 150). They can, however, also crop up in more modern works and, indeed, are precisely the virtues displayed in an art-form of which Hegel could know nothing, namely the American Western.
The third fundamental form of romantic art depicts the formal freedom and independence of character. Such freedom is not associated with any ethical principles or, indeed, with any of the formal virtues just mentioned, but consists simply in the “firmness” (Festigkeit) of character (Aesthetics, 1: 577; PKÄ, 145–6). This is freedom in its modern, secular form. It is displayed most magnificently, Hegel believes, by characters, such as Richard III, Othello and Macbeth, in the plays of Shakespeare. Note that what interests us about such individuals is not any moral purpose that they may have, but simply the energy and self-determination (and often ruthlessness) that they exhibit. Such characters must have an internal richness (revealed through imagination and language) and not just be one-dimensional, but their main appeal is their formal freedom to commit themselves to a course of action, even at the cost of their own lives. These characters do not constitute moral or political ideals, but they are the appropriate objects of modern, romantic art whose task is to depict freedom even in its most secular and amoral forms.
Hegel also sees romantic beauty in more inwardly sensitive characters, such as Shakespeare's Juliet. After meeting Romeo, Hegel remarks, Juliet suddenly opens up with love like a rosebud, full of childlike naivety. Her beauty thus lies in being the embodiment of love. Hamlet is a somewhat similar character: far from being simply weak (as Goethe thought), Hamlet, in Hegel's view, displays the inner beauty of a profoundly noble soul (Aesthetics, 1: 583; PKÄ, 147–8).

6.2.4 The “End” of Art

One should note that the development of romantic art, as Hegel describes it, involves the increasing secularization and humanization of art. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (as in ancient Greece) art was closely tied to religion: art's function was to a large degree to make the divine visible. With the Reformation, however, religion turned inward and found God to be present in faith alone, not in the icons and images of art. As a result, Hegel points out, we who live after the Reformation “no longer venerate works of art” (VPK, 6). Furthermore, art itself was released from its close ties to religion and allowed to become fully secular. “To Protestantism alone,” Hegel states, “the important thing is to get a sure footing in the prose of life, to make it absolutely valid in itself independently of religious associations, and to let it develop in unrestricted freedom” (Aesthetics, 1: 598).
It is for this reason, in Hegel's view, that art in the modern age no longer meets our highest needs and no longer affords us the satisfaction that it gave to earlier cultures and civilizations. Art satisfied our highest needs when it formed an integral part of our religious life and revealed to us the nature of the divine (and, as in Greece, the true character of our fundamental ethical obligations). In the modern, post-Reformation world, however, art has been released (or has emancipated itself) from subservience to religion. As a result, “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Aesthetics, 1: 11).
This does not mean that art now has no role to play and that it provides no satisfaction at all. Art is no longer the highest and most adequate way of expressing the truth (as it was, according to Hegel, in fifth-century Athens); we moderns now seek ultimate or “absolute” truth in religious faith or in philosophy, rather than in art. (Indeed, the considerable importance we assign to philosophy is evident, in Hegel's view, in the prominence of the philosophical study of art itself in modernity [Aesthetics, 1: 11; VPK, 6].) Yet art in modernity continues to perform the significant function of giving visible and audible expression to our distinctively human freedom and to our understanding of ourselves in all our finite humanity.
Hegel does not claim, therefore, that art as a whole simply comes to an end or “dies” in the modern age. His view is, rather, that art plays (or at least should play) a more limited role now than it did in ancient Greece or in the Middle Ages. Yet Hegel does think that art in modernity comes to an end in a certain respect. To understand why he thinks this, we need to consider his claim that art in modernity “falls apart” (zerfällt) into the exploration of everyday contingencies, on the one hand, and the celebration of witty, “humorous” subjectivity, on the other (PKÄ, 151).
In Hegel's view, much painting and poetry after the Reformation focuses its attention on the prosaic details of ordinary daily life, rather than on the intimacy of religious love or the magnificent resolve and energy of tragic heroes. To the extent that such works of art no longer aim to give expression to divine or human freedom but seek (apparently at least) to do no more than “imitate nature,” they prompt Hegel to consider whether they still count as “art works” in the strictly philosophical (as opposed to the more generally accepted) sense of the term. In the twentieth century it is the abstract creations of, for example, Jackson Pollock or Carl André that usually provoke the question: “is this art?”. In Hegel's mind, however, it is works that appear to be purely naturalistic and “representational” that raise this question. His view is that such works count as genuine works of art only when they do more than merely imitate nature. The naturalistic and prosaic works that best meet this criterion, he maintains, are the paintings of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch masters.
In such works, Hegel claims, the painter does not aim simply to show us what grapes, flowers or trees look like: we know that already from nature. The painter aims, rather, to capture the—often fleeting—“life” (Lebendigkeit) of things: “the lustre of metal, the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by candlelight, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun, a smile, the expression of a swiftly passing emotion” (Aesthetics, 1: 599). Often, indeed, the painter seeks to delight us specifically with the animated play of the colors of gold, silver, velvet or fur. In such works, Hegel notes, we encounter not just the depiction of things, but “as it were, an objective music, a peal in colour [ein Tönen in Farben]” (Aesthetics, 1: 598–600).
A genuine work of art is the sensuous expression of divine or human freedom and life. Paintings that are no more than prosaic, naturalistic depictions of everyday objects or human activity would thus appear to fall short of genuine art. Dutch artists, however, turn such depictions into true works of art precisely by imbuing objects with “the fullness of life.” In so doing, Hegel claims, they give expression to their own sense of freedom, “comfort” and “contentment” and their own exuberant subjective skill (Aesthetics, 1: 599; PKÄ, 152). The paintings of such artists may lack the classical beauty of Greek art, but they exhibit magnificently the subtle beauties and delights of everyday modern life.
A much more overt expression of subjectivity is found by Hegel in works of modern humor. Such witty, ironic, humorous subjectivity—one we might now describe as “anarchic”—manifests itself in playing or “sporting” with objects, “deranging” and “perverting” material and “rambling to and fro,” and in the “criss-cross movement of subjective expressions, views, and attitudes whereby the author sacrifices himself and his topics alike” (Aesthetics, 1: 601). Hegel claims that works of “true humour,” such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759), succeed in making “what is substantial emerge out of contingency.” Their “triviality [thus] affords precisely the supreme idea of depth” (Aesthetics, 1: 602). In other works, by contrast—such as those of Hegel's contemporary, Jean Paul Richter—all we encounter is the “baroque mustering of things objectively furthest removed from one another” and “the most confused disorderly jumbling of topics related only in his own subjective imagination” (Aesthetics, 1: 601). In such works, we do not see human freedom giving itself objective expression, but rather witness subjectivity “destroying and dissolving everything that proposes to make itself objective and win a firm shape for itself in reality” (Aesthetics, 1: 601).
To the extent that works of humor do not give body to true self-determining freedom and life—or afford “the supreme idea of depth”—but merely manifest the power of arbitrary, subjective wit to subvert the settled order, such works, in Hegel's view, no longer count as genuine works of art. Consequently, “when the subject lets itself go in this way, art thereby comes to an end [so hört damit die Kunst auf]” (PKÄ, 153). In this respect, Hegel does after all proclaim that art comes to an end in modernity. This is not because art no longer performs a religious function and so no longer fulfills the highest vocation of art; it is because there emerge in modernity certain “art works” that are no longer the expressions of true human freedom and life and so no longer genuine art works at all.
As was noted above, however, this does not mean that art as a whole comes to an end in the early nineteenth century. Art, in Hegel's view, still has a future: “we may well hope,” he says, “that art will always rise higher and come to perfection” (Aesthetics, 1: 103). For Hegel, the distinctive character of genuine art in contemporary (and future) modernity—and thus of genuinely modern art—is twofold. On the one hand, it remains bound to give expression to concrete human life and freedom; on the other hand, it is no longer restricted to any of the three art-forms. That is to say, it does not have to observe the proprieties of classical art or explore the intense emotional inwardness or heroic freedom or comfortable ordinariness that we find in romantic art. Modern art, for Hegel, can draw on features of any of the art-forms (including symbolic art) in its presentation of human life. Indeed, it can also present human life and freedom indirectly through the depiction of nature.
The focus of modern art, therefore, does not have to be on one particular conception of human freedom rather than another. The new “holy of holies” in art is humanity itself— “Humanus”—that is, “the depths and heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates” (Aesthetics, 1: 607). Modern art, in Hegel's view, thus enjoys an unprecedented freedom to explore “the infinity of the human heart” in manifold ways (VÄ, 181). For this reason, there is little that Hegel can say about the path that art should take in the future; that is for artists to decide.
Hegel's judgment that modern artists are—and are quite rightly—free to adopt whatever style they please has surely been confirmed by the history of art since Hegel's death in 1831. There is reason to suspect, however, that Hegel might not have welcomed many of the developments in post-Hegelian art. This is due to the fact that, although he does not lay down any rules that are to govern modern art, he does identify certain conditions that should be met if modern art is to be genuine art. Hegel notes, for example, that such art should “not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful and capable of artistic treatment” (Aesthetics, 1: 605; VPK, 204). He insists that modern artists should draw their content from their own human spirit and that “nothing that can beliving [lebendig] in the human breast is alien to that spirit.” He also remarks that modern art may represent “everything in which the human being as such is capable of being at home [heimisch]” (Aesthetics, 1: 607). These may appear to be fairly innocuous conditions, but they suggest that certain post-Hegelian art works would not count in Hegel's eyes as genuine works of art. These might include works that by no stretch of the imagination can be called “beautiful” (such as some of the paintings of Willem De Kooning or Francis Bacon), or works in which it is evidently hard to feel very much “at home” (such as the writings of Franz Kafka). Hegel's account of the different arts (such as sculpture and painting) also suggests that he would not have regarded the move from figurative to abstract visual art as appropriate: Netherlandish and Dutch painters excelled in the creating of “objective music” through the play of colors, yet they did so not in the abstract but in the very depiction of concrete, identifiable objects. (Robert Pippin takes a different view on this last point; see Pippin 2007.)
From a twentieth- or twenty-first-century point of view, Hegel's stance may well look conservative. From his point of view, however, he was trying to understand what conditions would have to be met for works of art to be genuine works of art and genuinely modern. The conditions that Hegel identified—namely that art should present the richness of human freedom and life and should allow us to feel at home in its depictions—are ones that many modern artists (for example, Impressionists such as Monet, Sisley and Pissarro) have felt no trouble in meeting. For others, these conditions are simply too restrictive. They have thus taken modern art in a direction in which, from a Hegelian perspective, it has ceased to be art in the true sense any longe

Art and Idealization

6. Hegel's Systematic Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art

6.1 Ideal Beauty as such

6.2 The Particular Forms of Art

6.2.1 Symbolic Art

Art and Idealization :: تعاليق

6.2.2 Classical Art

6.2.3 Romantic Art

6.2.4 The “End” of Art

Art and Idealization