Hegel's Aesthetics

G.W.F. Hegel's aesthetics, or philosophy of art, forms part of the extraordinarily rich German aesthetic tradition that stretches from J.J. Winckelmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) and G.E. Lessing's Laocoon (1766) through Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) to Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (1872) and (in the twentieth century) Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–6) and T.W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970). Hegel was influenced in particular by Winckelmann, Kant and Schiller, and his own thesis of the “end of art” (or what has been taken to be that thesis) has itself been the focus of close attention by Heidegger and Adorno. Hegel's philosophy of art is a wide ranging account of beauty in art, the historical development of art, and the individual arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. It contains distinctive and influential analyses of Egyptian art, Greek sculpture, and ancient and modern tragedy, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest aesthetic theories to have been produced since Aristotle's Poetics.

[size=30]1. Hegel's Knowledge of Art

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) contains chapters on the ancient Greek “religion of art” (Kunstreligion) and on the world-view presented in Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus the King. His philosophy of art proper, however, forms part of his philosophy (rather than phenomenology) of spirit. The Phenomenology can be regarded as the introduction to Hegel's philosophical system. The system itself comprises three parts: logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit, and is set out (in numbered paragraphs) in Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the philosophical Sciences (1817, 1827, 1830). The philosophy of spirit is in turn divided into three sections: on subjective, objective and absolute spirit. Hegel's philosophy of art or “aesthetics” constitutes the first sub-section of his philosophy of absolute spirit, and is followed by his philosophy of religion and his account of the history of philosophy.
Hegel's philosophy of art provides an a priori derivation—from the very concept of beauty itself—of various forms of beauty and various individual arts. In marked contrast to Kant, however, Hegel weaves into his philosophical study of beauty numerous references to and analyses of individual works of art—to such an extent, indeed, that his aesthetics constitutes, in Kai Hammermeister's words, “a veritable world history of art” (Hammermeister, 24).
Hegel read both Greek and Latin (indeed, he wrote his diary partly in Latin from the age of fourteen); he also read English and French. He was thus able to study the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Shakespeare and Molière in the original languages. He never travelled to Greece or Italy, but he did undertake several long journeys from Berlin (where he was appointed Professor in 1818) to Dresden (1820, 1821, 1824), the Low Countries (1822, 1827), Vienna (1824) and Paris (1827). On these journeys he saw Raphael's Sistine Madonnaand several paintings by Correggio (in Dresden), Rembrandt's Night Watch (in Amsterdam), the central section of the van Eyck brothers' Adoration of the Lamb (in Ghent)—the wing panels were at that time in Berlin—and “famous items by the noblest masters one has seen a hundred times in copper engravings: Raphael, Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian” (in Paris) (Hegel: The Letters, 654). He liked to visit the theatre and opera, both on his travels and in Berlin, and he was acquainted with leading singers, such as Anna Milder-Hauptmann (who sang in the first production of Beethoven's Fidelio in 1814), as well as the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (whose revival of J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion Hegel attended in March 1829). Hegel was also on close personal terms with Goethe and knew his drama and poetry especially well (as he did those of Friedrich Schiller).
Adorno complains that “Hegel and Kant [ … ] were able to write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art” (Adorno, 334). This may or may not be true of Kant, but it is clearly quite untrue of Hegel: he had an extensive knowledge and a good understanding of many of the great works of art in the Western tradition. Nor was Hegel's knowledge and interest restricted to Western art: he read (in translation) works of Indian and Persian poetry, and he saw at first hand works of Egyptian art in Berlin (Pöggeler 1981, 206–8). Hegel's philosophy of art is thus an a priori derivation of the various forms of beauty that, pace Adorno, is informed and mediated by a thorough knowledge and understanding of individual works of art from around the world.

[size=30]2. Hegel's Texts and Lectures on Aesthetics[/size]

Hegel's published thoughts on aesthetics are to be found in pars. 556–63 of the 1830Encyclopaedia. Hegel also held lectures on aesthetics in Heidelberg in 1818 and in Berlin in 1820/21 (winter semester), 1823 and 1826 (summer semesters), and 1828/29 (winter semester). Transcripts of Hegel's lectures made by his students in 1820/21, 1823 and 1826 have now been published (though so far only the 1823 lectures have been translated into English) (see Bibliography). In 1835 (and then again in 1842) one of Hegel's students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, published an edition of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics based on a manuscript of Hegel's (now lost) and a series of lecture transcripts. This is available in English as: G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Most of the secondary literature on Hegel's aesthetics (in English and German) makes reference to Hotho's edition. Yet according to one of the leading specialists on Hegel's aesthetics, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Hotho distorted Hegel's thought in various ways: he gave Hegel's account of art a much stricter systematic structure than Hegel himself had given it, and he supplemented Hegel's account with material of his own (PKÄ, xiii–xv). Gethmann-Siefert argues, therefore, that we should not rely on Hotho's edition for our understanding of Hegel's aesthetics, but should instead base our interpretation on the available lecture transcripts.
Since Hegel's manuscript, on which Hotho based much of his edition, has been lost, it is no longer possible to determine with certainty to what extent (if at all) Hotho did in fact distort Hegel's account of art. It should also be noted that Gethmann-Siefert's own interpretation of Hegel's aesthetics has been called into question (see Houlgate 1986a). Nevertheless Gethmann-Siefert is right to encourage readers with a knowledge of German to consult the published transcripts, since they contain a wealth of important material, and in some cases material that is missing from the Hotho edition (such as the brief reference to Caspar David Friedrich in the 1820/21 lectures [VÄ, 192]).
Hegel's philosophy of art has provoked considerable debate since his death in 1831. Does he believe that only Greek art is beautiful? Does he hold that art comes to an end in the modern age? The answers one gives to such questions should, however, be offered with a degree of caution, for, sadly, there is no fully worked out philosophy of art by Hegel that was officially endorsed by Hegel himself. The paragraphs in the Encyclopaedia are written by Hegel, but they are very brief and condensed and were intended to be supplemented by his lectures; the transcripts of the lectures are written by students of Hegel (some taken down in class, some compiled afterwards from notes taken in class); and the “standard” edition of Hegel's lectures is a work put together by his student, Hotho (albeit using a manuscript by Hegel himself). There is, therefore, no definitive edition of Hegel's fully developed aesthetic theory that would trump all others and settle all debate.[/size]

Hegel's Aesthetics

[size=30]1. Hegel's Knowledge of Art

[size=30]2. Hegel's Texts and Lectures on Aesthetics[/size]

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Hegel's Aesthetics