Embodied Reconciliation

Hegel’s analysis of poetry’s genres begins with epic poetry, which is the action-based articulation of a nation’s dawning self-awareness. Lyric poetry, by contrast, allows poets to express their deepest subjectivity and interpret the world through their own experience. Drama brings action back into art, allowing actors themselves to emerge as artists and correcting for the vanishing subjectivity in painting and music. Drama also incorporates the two other poetic genres, as well as the other arts. Because it achieves these syntheses, it is, according to Hegel, the highest art. Hegel gives special consideration to tragedy and comedy, assessing both in their ancient and modern forms. His conclusion is that although both subgenres are more difficult to achieve in the modern world, successful examples are possible, ensuring that poetry will continue. With these poetic subgenres, the individual arts reach their conceptual end.

Truth and Beauty

This chapter provides the framework for Hegel’s philosophy of art within his philosophical system, as found in Part I in his lectures on aesthetics. It describes art’s place as one moment of Absolute Spirit and discusses Hegel’s definition of beauty as the “sensible appearance of the Idea.” It recounts theories of art Hegel dismisses and then turns to the general components he claims art must have. Together, these components—for instance setting, situation, action, and character—allow humans to experience truth sensuously. When they fail, they contribute to ways that art can end. Finally, Hegel discusses aspects of the artistic process such as genius, inspiration, and originality.

Conclusion

Hegel’s wide-ranging philosophy of art allows us both to assess the expression of different worldviews in art and the ways in which individual arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry—allow us to sense ourselves and become aware of the world around us. His aesthetic theory elucidates crucial components of philosophical idealism generally, and his description of how art gives us joy illuminates modern aesthetic experience as well. This chapter connects Hegel’s “aesthetics of truth,” and so his idealism, to a description of aesthetic pleasure, then briefly speculates on how Hegel’s theory of art can be applied and extended to our experiences of contemporary art today.

Classical Art

Hegel claims that the human body is the only physical form that can fully embody the divine. Classical Greek artists perfectly depicted this embodiment in their mythology and statues. Hegel traces the emergence of the human out of earlier evocations of nature as the divine and argues that the perfect repose of Phidian sculpture represents the complete interpenetration of spirit and nature. But once human subjectivity begins to develop, it ruptures this unity and precipitates classical art’s decline. Aristophanes, Hegel claims, achieved a late example of classical perfection in his comedies. But soon afterward, classical art dissolves into incomplete forms such as satire, domestic comedy, and merely pleasant sculpture. After this decline, art will never again achieve the highest level of beauty or regain its prominence in human culture.

The Language of Inner Imagination

Unlike sculpture’s use of marble or painting’s use of color, poetry, according to Hegel, uses inner images as its material. In using words to evoke these inner images, poetry enables us to recognize them as jointly produced human creations: as having a history, cultural nuances, and evolving social significance. Through poetry, that is, humans can pause to consider their own concepts through the words they themselves jointly invent to signify those concepts. Poetry allows us, then, to become aware of our own minds. Hegel traces the development of poetry and then its evolution into prose. Modern poetry, he suggests, must overcome prose through a combination of word choice, meter, and rhyme scheme. It can fail to be art if it is too didactic or too florid. It also ceases to be art if it becomes too philosophical. At that point, poetry reaches its conceptual end.

The Sound of Feeling

Music is the most subjective of the arts and is, in Hegel’s view, intimately linked to the self’s feeling of itself. We experience ourselves through time, and music—through rhythm, harmony, and melody—allows us to sense time. Hegel associates music with feeling that is not linked to content: it allows us to feel sadness, for instance, without being sad about a particular thing. Music can also elevate our emotions and allow us to transcend them. Hegel considers the relative value of independent music and music with text, concluding that while independent music may achieve music’s highest developmental potential, it can become less capable of evoking feeling and so fail to fulfill music’s essential task. This chapter also considers contemporary music in light of Hegel’s theory.

Subjectivity in Retreat

Modern subjectivity is difficult to capture in art’s sensuous media. Painting is the first of Hegel’s individual arts to attempt this challenge. Christian painting especially, Hegel claims, is able to depict spirit’s disappearance into a human’s sense of interiority. It does so by cancelling sculpture’s third dimension and by evoking particularly subjective emotions such as love and bliss. Hegel sides with those who define painting’s essence as based in color rather than drawing. He praises masters of color such as Titian and Correggio as well as Dutch genre painting and still lifes for achieving maximum effect. This chapter also considers ways Hegel’s theory of painting can be extended to contemporary, non-representational painting.

Introduction

Hegel has long been considered both the father of art history and the prophet of art’s end. This chapter explains this hybrid reputation and argues that a misunderstanding of both what Hegel means by the “end of art” and the “end of history” prevents us from understanding art’s role in his philosophical idealism. It argues that art has three kinds of endings in Hegel’s system: conceptual ends, prosaic ends, and a historical end. It suggests that while Part II of Hegel’s aesthetics enhances our understanding of his social-political philosophy, the less-discussed Part III enables us to understand his theory of selfhood, perception, feeling, and freedom. It describes the intense philosophizing about art among Hegel’s contemporaries and discusses the complex state of the sources available for analyzing Hegel’s thoughts about art.

Externality as Symbol

Architecture is the first of Hegel’s “individual arts”—which also include sculpture, painting, music, and poetry—discussed in Part III of his lectures on aesthetics. These arts are defined by the senses they engage. Architecture’s task is to give shape to tactile materials in order to house the spiritual. Hegel describes architecture’s origins in the Tower of Babel and figures representing natural forces, then considers the emergence of architecture proper in Egyptian pyramids. Architecture reached its highest point in the classical world, where its function—housing the spiritual—was made explicit by structures that balanced the organic and the mathematical. Romantic architecture, for instance the gothic splendor of the Cologne Cathedral, instead hides its functionality and becomes more sculptural. Hegel also discusses horticulture as an example of humans defining space in an architectural way.

The Dissolution and Future of the Particular Arts

As the romantic age progresses, humans’ increasing sense of themselves as the source of normativity is reflected in art. Finally, anything of human concern can become art: a fact reflected in Dutch genre painting, still lifes, and the development of humor. As a new aesthetic form during Hegel’s lifetime, humor denoted gentle amusement at human eccentricities and foibles, as expressed by characters in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Hegel is sharply critical of “subjective humorists,” such as Jean Paul Richter, who think anything to do with their subjectivity can be art, but he defines an “objective humor,” achieved by Goethe, Petrarch, and Shakespeare, that allows subjectivity to emerge from deeper engagement with the world. At the end of romantic art, the particular art forms reach their conceptual end: no further development of their concept is possible.