Selections from Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (1830s)

Hegel explores relationships between art and human experience. For Hegel, art can function as a representation that expresses what it might mean to be fully human. Even though Hegel is trying to work with Kant’s universalities in more concrete ways, Hegel is also making new moves for “art” with respect to form and content in an effort to connect mind and body with some kind of spirit.

Hegel works through familiar structures: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, drama and poetry. According to Hegel, art found in these six realms has the potential to be more than a mere imitation of the physical world. These processes can produce something that is more than an object, or more than an object that produces effects for human viewers (Kant). For Hegel, particular kinds of art can function as objects with meaningful content that manifests or embodies human perfection. This moves away from Kant’s ideas that the “right” kind of people can perceive aesthetics/beauty/Beauty/the sublime through their individual faculties.

Hegel divides art into three foundational categories. Certainly Symbolic Art, with its classification as a less than adequate attempt at representation, and its forced connection with Indian, Persian, or Egyptian models “primitivizes” the Other. Classical Art would seem to be the penultimate, or the Ideal, with respect to form and content because it intimately connected Greeks to their Gods, but Hegel's claim for Romantic Art seems more complicated. It moves inward and can connect man and the divine through some kinds of representation (religious iconography), but it can also function in certain kinds of representations of every day experience (the Dutch masters) that produce momentary freedom or some kind of transcendence. Are some of these principles resonating with earlier views we have seen regarding stages of human development?

I have remaining questions about form and content for Romantic Art, defining beauty/Beauty, sensate/sensuous perception, immortality, and the relationship between reason and spirit, as well as the place of pain, pleasure, and the sublime in Hegel’s text.