Hegel and the ‘end of art’

G.W.F. Hegel. Portrait by
Jakob Schlesinger, 1831

Hegel was heavily influenced by Kant and Schiller, and influenced in turn such key figures as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno. His aesthetic theory is systematic and impressive, but it is less widely appreciated than Kant’s. The theme that is mentioned ahead of all others these days is his so-called ‘end of art thesis’. This is probably the most contentious notion in his aesthetics, and it has been presented by some commentators as a death sentence to art. The Italian aesthetician Benedetto Croce declared:

The German refused to evade the logical exigencies of his system and proclaimed the mortality, nay the very death, of art... He passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave, leaving philosophy to write its epitaph.¹

Even the less dramatic interpretations (such as Arthur Danto’s) have sometimes claimed that Hegel thought we had outgrown art.

These are misrepresentations of Hegel, who never uses the phrase ‘the end of art’, let alone proclaiming art’s ‘death’. There have been various attempts since the 1960s to theorise an ‘end of art’ which claim some inspiration from his alleged thesis. To explain what Hegel really meant, we must look at his philosophical outlook and its relation to art, and along the way we will get an opportunity to learn a bit more about his aesthetics. 

Hegel’s system

For Hegel, everything real and finite exists by virtue of the Idea (dialectical reason inherent in being), which grounds physical matter. Life is more rational than the non-living because it is self-determining; human beings, uniquely, are able to think and reflect upon themselves. Hegel called this self-reflection ‘spirit’, by which he meant not a cosmic world-consciousness, or individual minds (subjective spirit) so much as a cultural, collective human thought (objective spirit) built on law and morality. The world is a complex, structured, organic unity and human beings are one part of that whole; we should be capable, through reason, of discovering the principles behind the world and grasping its totality.

Hegel conceived his philosophical system as a ‘circle of circles’: each philosophical topic forms a complete circle in itself, bounded within a totality that is a wider circle that contains them.²

Subjects like phenomenology, logic, politics or biology are discrete topics, limited to themselves, which tend to split nature into parts. A systematic philosophy contains ‘all particular principles within itself’.³

The part, if it is to be something true, must be not an isolated member merely, but itself an organic whole. The entire field of philosophy therefore really forms a single science; but it may also be viewed as a total, composed of several particular sciences.⁴

Through such a philosophy, Hegel hopes that human beings can discover the unified, structured whole that is the world (the ‘absolute’ or the ‘truth’). History is the process by which human self-reflection upon our general nature, values and interests deepens our understanding both of ourselves and of the world. Along the way, we find out which social and political forms are most agreeable to attaining our ultimate vocation, namely freedom. When this self-reflection goes beyond the particular and contingent to the shared organising principles of all things, Hegel calls it ‘absolute spirit’: the highest and fullest form of reflection through which spirit will finally come to know itself.

Absolute spirit has three basic forms of the highest self-reflection: art, religion and philosophy. They are not individual acts of reflection but social ones. Each is a different approach to understanding ourselves and the world we live in.

1. Art: through immediate, sensuous objects made by human beings.
2. Religion: through the feeling and imagery of faith.
3. Philosophy: through conceptual knowledge.

The three forms sit in a hierarchy of how adequately they can understand the truth. Art tries to make it sensible through representations; religion goes further by applying universals; philosophy goes furthest by applying concepts, making it best suited of the three for understanding the absolute. Only philosophy can entirely understand the parts, the whole, and the relation between them. But this doesn’t mean we can discard the other two forms. We need all three – sensuousness, feeling and understanding – as distinct approaches to the truth.

Let’s focus on art. When Hegel talks about art, he is interested in it as a means of discovering the absolute:

The universal need for art... is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognises again his own self.⁵

The role of art is to express spirit through human-made objects for the senses, standing in the middle between sensuousness and ideal thought⁶. It is spirit’s sensuous manifestation. Art’s aim for Hegel, as summarised by the SEP, is not

to imitate nature, to decorate our surroundings, to prompt us to engage in moral or political action, or to shock us out of our complacency. It is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom – images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art’s purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are. Art is there not just for art’s sake, but for beauty’s sake, that is, for the sake of a distinctively sensuous form of human self-expression and self-understanding.⁷

Beauty is the sensuous expression or appearance of the Idea or the ‘true’;⁸ it is objective, not a matter of subjective taste and feeling as in Kant, and it is based on the relation between art and spirit at a given point in history. Hegel is often seen as rebalancing Kant by restoring content alongside form as part of a work’s unified whole. As concrete and sensuous beings we need beauty as a concrete and sensuous point of contact with truth and freedom, and art presents this to us through our own works.

For Hegel the self-discovery of the spirit is a historical process during which the conceptual complexity of thought increases. During the ‘classical’ era of ancient Greece, the best means for grasping the truth was art. During the post-Roman, medieval world, the best means was religion. As for the modern world, its conceptual complexity requires philosophy. This is a gradual unfolding of the spirit towards self-awareness and freedom. This idea of spirit coming to know itself is not just an odd, abstract notion – when we think for example of the development of subjectivity in the modern era, and the consequent advent of psychology, etc, we can see that our insight into ourselves really can increase across history, in the same way that an adult has greater self-knowledge than a child.

Art helps a community become aware of its collective self-knowledge across history. Through history, art advances in stages or forms (Kunstformen) – symbolic, classical, romantic – of increasing complexity and conceptuality, and thus increasing capacity to reflect upon the absolute. The development from one form to another comprises the history of art.

1. Symbolic: In the symbolic stage (e.g. India, Persia and Egypt prior to ancient Greece), artists’ understanding of the spirit was not yet advanced enough – however fine their technical skills – to express the absolute. The religion of these cultures was too poorly determined. The supreme case was the art of ancient Egypt, whose mysterious gods of death could not be clearly manifested in art. 

2. Classical: In the ‘classical’ world of ancient Greece, assisted by the interest in the harmony of mind and body and the philosophical quest for beauty, artists achieved a balance of sensuous liveliness and spiritual self-containment that realised a perfect expression of free spirit. Again, the fundamental was the Greeks’ conception of religion: their gods were active free individuals, more readily manifested in art objects.

Greek art achieved perfect beauty, but fell short of the profoundest expression of the spirit, as it had not yet discovered the inwardness that Hegel thought necessary.

3. Romantic: In the modern world, the introduction of (bourgeois) subjectivity meant we could now think of selfhood in new, inward-looking ways, as expressed in romantic art. (This is not the customary ‘Romantic’ periodisation dated to roughly the 1770s–1830s, but begins in the late Middle Ages.) This era is associated with Christianity, which for Hegel offers the best religious grasp of the truth, as the incarnation of Jesus brought together divine and human action. Romantic art explored subjectivity to the limit, through characters with complex psychology and an urge for personal freedom.

This, for Hegel, was where art reached its limits as a means for grasping the whole.

The spirit of our world today, or, more particularly, of our religion and the development of our reason, appears as beyond the stage at which art is the supreme mode of our knowledge of the Absolute. The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fills our highest need. We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them. The impression they make is of a more reflective kind, and what they arouse in us needs a higher touchstone and a different test. (p10)

As religion under Protestantism took more interest in inner faith, art – as the representation of the Idea in external objects – lost touch with the divine and became secular. It acquired autonomy at the cost of its vocation. For this reason, the highest truths of spirit could no longer be expressed through art, and were now better expressed in religion and philosophy.

The alleged ‘end of art’

The ‘end of art thesis’ sometimes attributed to Hegel derives from two main sources in the Lectures. The first occurs early in the Introduction, where he is discussing art’s ability to bring awareness of the spirit:

Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. (p11, my emphasis)

Hegel is not saying that art has ‘ended’, let alone ‘died’; rather, that its peak historical moment is past. He is making the modest claim that art is no longer the most effective way of struggling to grasp the complex, organic whole of reality. Since the Reformation, art has become secular and we no longer ‘venerate’ artworks. ‘Art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it’ (p10), as in ancient Greece when it was still tied to the divine. Instead, we must now look to higher forms of knowledge, namely religion and philosophy.

Nonetheless, we humans are sensuous beings as well as rational ones, and we need art to give freedom concrete, sensuous expression through the beauty of human-made objects (which of course also appeal to the mind). Art therefore remains one of the forms of ‘absolute spirit’ that help us understand ourselves and the world, and continues to be not just valuable but essential. Artists will continue to make art, even great art, and it will not lose its capacity to reveal truths about our society. In fact Hegel says positively that

we may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection. (p103)

The other main source for the ‘end of art’ thesis is Hegel’s discussion of the dissolution [Auflösung] of Romantic art (p593). However, to dissolve is not necessarily to die. In the context of Hegel’s dialectics, when a historical stage fades, something new comes in to replace it. We may see this in terms not of death but of new possibilities. The philosophy professor Craig Matarrese has suggested one such:

It may be that modern art has an important function in showing us the many levels of fragmentation and dispersion that characterise the modern heterogeneous and pluralistic state; even if modern artists are alienated and unable to do more than represent their own idiosyncrasies, their work may still help us understand some of the key features of our world.⁹

Only in one specific sense does art come to an ‘end’. Hegel has his own idiosyncratic position that genuine works of art aim for the sensuous expression of freedom of spirit (see p7). Many works of modernity do not – for example those that seek only a prosaic realism, or humour – and therefore are not proper art in Hegel’s view.

We should try to represent his elaborate theory accurately, whether or not we agree with it. If theorists wish to make theories about the ‘end of art’, they are free to do so, but they should be wary of appealing to the authority of Hegel.

The liberation of art

For Hegel genuine art is still possible. In fact, modern artists have a promising future, laid out in the final section of Volume 1 of the Lectures. They need not feel constrained by the three Kunstformen of the past and may work freely in any manner they please:

In our day, in the case of almost all peoples, criticism, the cultivation of reflection, and, in our German case, freedom of thought have mastered the artists too, and have made them, so to say, a tabula rasa in respect of the material and the form of their productions, after the necessary particular stages of the romantic art-form have been traversed. Bondage to a particular subject-matter and a mode of portrayal suitable for this material alone are for artists today something past, and art therefore has become a free instrument which the artist can wield in proportion to his subjective skill in relation to any material of whatever kind. The artist thus stands above specific consecrated forms and configurations and moves freely on his own account, independent of the subject-matter and mode of conception in which the holy and eternal was previously made visible to human apprehension. No content, no form, is any longer immediately identical with the inwardness, the nature, the unconscious substantial essence of the artist; every material may be indifferent to him if only it does not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful [überhaupt schön] and capable of artistic treatment. (p605)

Again, there is no ‘death of art’ here. Hegel has a positive vision of artistic freedom: art can pursue new forms, new relationships, new content. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has called this the ‘liberation of art as art.’¹⁰ Art transcends itself and can embrace any aspect of the human spirit.

Art strips away from itself all fixed restriction to a specific range of content and treatment, and makes Humanus its new holy of holies: i.e. the depths and heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates. (p607)

Hegel’s caveat would be that art should always try to depict the freedom of human spirit, and obey the ‘formal law of being simply beautiful’. For many contemporary artists, beauty falls outside their consideration altogether, and it is doubtful whether Hegel would have liked jarring work like Manzoni’s infamous ninety tin cans of shit... He could not have foreseen how far artists would take their freedom.

Hegel is often seen as a conservative, but his remarks are sometimes prescient. His insistence on beauty is proscriptive, but in his call for the freedom to dip into artistic styles and for a self-reflective art – ‘art invites us to intellectual consideration... for knowing philosophically what art is’ (p11) – we detect a foreshadowing of self-aware and conceptual modern art movements. For example Arthur Danto, in a (flawed) 1999 article on the ‘end of art thesis’ in Hegel, commented:

Only late in the twentieth century, through the realisation in artistic practice of the freedom Hegel foresaw, is his philosophy of art once again at the centre of aesthetic discussion.¹¹

The academic Martin Donougho made another point concerning its contemporary relevance:

[The theme] suits our late modern (or postmodern) climate, a time of cultural crisis when contemporary art seems either to have run its course or to be of interest to just the few.¹²

Well, in a way. But our conception and practice of art is historical and therefore always in flux, and Hegel’s theory has dated. We no longer give credence to strange stuff about absolute Ideas, and his definition of art as a kind of fine art that fuses sensuousness and spirit through beauty was too narrow. The advent of new forms such as photography, cinema, pop music and digital animation shows that art is not at all a ‘thing of the past’, and there is no good reason to think its ability to reveal our humanity to us is diminished. Nor is there any need to place it in an arbitrary hierarchy: we are sceptical of his estimation of art as a lesser means to ‘truth’ compared to religion or philosophy. But I am not trying here to assess Hegelian aesthetics for the modern day. I am merely hoping to correct a common misrepresentation. 

Meanwhile it would help if people used more appropriate and less sensational labels than ‘the end of art’ for theories which don’t actually involve art ending. Just a thought.

Notes

Hegel: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, translated by T.M. Knox (1975). Page numbers refer to this edition.

1. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic (1902).
2. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic §15. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slintro.htm#SL15
3. Ibid., §14.
4. Ibid., §16.
5. Hegel, Introduction to Lectures on Fine Art, §5d, p31. All quotes are from the Knox translation.
6. Ibid., p38.
7. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/ 
8. Hegel Lectures, p111.
9. Craig Matarrese, Starting with Hegel (2010), p157.
10. Cited in Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (2002), p103.
11. Arthur Danto, ‘Hegel’s End-of-Art Thesis’ in A New History of German Literature, eds. D.E. Wellbery and J. Ryan (2004). Danto has his own ‘end of art’ theory in which he claims that linear art history is over and has been replaced by a pluralism in which anything goes. This theory does not involve the actual ‘end’ of art any more than Hegel’s aesthetics does.
12. Martin Donougho, ‘Art and History: Hegel on the End, the Beginning and the Future of Art’ in Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Arts (2007).

Hegel: Introduction to Lectures on Fine Art

Hegel’s aesthetic theory can be found in two places.

First there are paragraphs 556–63 of the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (in its third part, called The Philosophy of Mind, IIIA). You can read the Philosophy of Mind excerpt on archive.org – the piece on art starts on p169. This is, mind you, a poor translation from 1894; I think Michael Inwood’s revision is a great improvement if you can find it. German speakers can read the original here.

The other, much more substantial source is a series of lectures Hegel gave between 1818-1829, first in Heidelberg then in Berlin. These were later compiled from a (now lost) manuscript plus lecture notes by his students and published after his death as the Lectures on Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik). These were not published by Hegel himself – they are the work of an editor – but with that caveat¹ they form one of philosophy’s most immense and systematic philosophies of art.

It’s worth being aware, by the way, that this work is sometimes known by the alternative title the Philosophy of Fine Art.

You can read the Lectures on Fine Art on marxists.org (or in German here). They have been published in two volumes in English as: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T.M. Knox (1975). The occasional page numbers below refer to this edition.

The 90-page Introduction to Vol I of the Lectures is an overview of Hegel’s theory of fine art – if you only read one thing by Hegel on art, read that. Don’t be put off by his reputation for being difficult. This Introduction is pretty readable, though there are some dense passages for which some familiarity with his broader philosophy and the rest of the Lectures will be helpful. This blog post is just my synopsis of the Introduction, presented section by section (there are eight in total) in the same order as the original, and with minimal comment. Note that any synopsis is an interpretation and so not a substitute for reading Hegel for yourself.

1. Prefatory remarks

Hegel begins by describing the lectures as devoted to aesthetics, and briefly comments on the term:

The word Aesthetics, taken literally, is not wholly satisfactory, since ‘Aesthetics’ means, more precisely, the science of sensation, of feeling. In this sense it had its origin as a new science, or rather as something which for the first time was to become a philosophical discipline.

He admits the word is inadequate and superficial, but will keep using it since there is no satisfactory replacement and it has passed into common speech. However,

the proper expression for our science is Philosophy of Art and, more definitely, Philosophy of Fine Art.

This complacent approach to terminology by Hegel helped to confuse the distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art in later debates.

As the title suggests, Hegel is only interested in what in English we call fine art – the bourgeois historical construct that typically privileges painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture and music – not art in general. This because he associates beauty (found in schöne Kunst or ‘beautiful art’) with truth.

2. Limitation and defence of aesthetics

Hegel excludes the beauty of nature. We talk of a beautiful river, flower or person, etc, but he claims that ‘the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature.’ Beauty in art is a product born of the spirit and thus stands above nature, which is only a reflection of the spirit. By ‘higher’ Hegel means that only spirit is true, and the beautiful is only beautiful insofar as it shares in the spirit.

Even a useless notion that enters a man’s head is higher than any product of nature, because in such a notion spirituality and freedom are always present. (p2)

No one tries to classify nature in terms of beauty, because the notion is vague, with no criterion. Hegel will limit his investigation to beauty in art. If beauty is to express human freedom, it must be made by human beings.

3. Refutation of objections

Hegel considers two objections to the philosophy of art (which he will refute).

1) Fine art does not deserve scientific treatment. Art and beauty please us in many areas of our lives, but we may question how important they are.

Art belongs rather to the indulgence and relaxation of the spirit, whereas substantial interests require its exertion.

Why should we attempt a science of an unserious ‘superfluity’ and luxury? Sometimes we ascribe seriousness to art in relation to practical necessities, morality, religion, or as ‘a mediator between reason and sense’, i.e. sensuousness.² But this is to reduce art to a means rather than an end in itself. Art’s means are deception and its beauty is mere appearance.

2) Art does not deserve scientific treatment because

the beauty of art presents itself to sense, feeling, intuition, imagination;... the apprehension of its activity and its products demands an organ other than scientific thinking.

Science follows rules, but in art we enjoy freedom, peace and liveliness. Art (a product of imagination and spirit) is more free than nature (conformity to law) and can reach beyond it with fanciful creations. Beauty is universal, but there can’t be universal laws for it, since it is so various and particular. Therefore art is not suited to scientific discussion.

Hegel then refutes these objections.

1) We aren’t interested in art as mere play or entertainment – in its freedom it can reveal the truth of the spirit:

It only fulfils its supreme task when it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit. (p7)

The spirit generates works of art as a bridge between 1) pure thought and infinite freedom and 2) sensuous, finite reality. Art cannot be dismissed as ‘pure appearance’ because truth must ‘appear’ in order to be known. As for deception: the life of experience and empirical reality is not true reality anyway. The really real, so to speak, is the ideal, the self-knowing spirit, which is what art reveals:

Art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit. Thus, far from being mere pure appearance, a higher reality and truer existence is to be ascribed to the phenomena of art in comparison with [those of] ordinary reality. 

Art ranks higher than nature/ordinary reality, as it hints at the spiritual in a way the ‘hard shell’ of the ordinary world cannot. But Hegel ranks the pure thought of religion and philosophy above art, which is limited to specific content. Content and form were most adequate to each other in ancient Greece; the Christian era is less ‘friendly to sense’; today religion and reason are no longer best expressed by art, as we no longer venerate artworks.

Art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone, a satisfaction that, at least on the part of religion, was most intimately linked with art. The beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden age of the later Middle Ages, are gone.

Art is now a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]. Today our greater need is a philosophy of art, i.e. aesthetics.

2) Philosophy is compatible with scientific study. Fine art has its origin ‘in the heart and unregulated imagination’ and its form (as matter) is opposed to thought – but art is a product of spirit, so thought and conceptual thinking are also expressed through it. Art’s task is spiritual, therefore it ‘acquires its real ratification only in philosophy’. Hegel concludes:

that neither is fine art unworthy of philosophical treatment, nor is philosophical treatment incapable of descrying the essence of fine art.

4. Scientific ways of treating beauty and art

Hegel discusses two kinds of scientific treatment: empirical and theoretical.

Empirical

This approach starts from particular and existent works. It deals with

actual works of art from the outside, arranging them into a history of art, setting up discussions about existing works or outlining theories which are to yield general considerations for both criticising and producing works of art.

This suits scholars of art, who because of art’s diversity need an immense range of factual, historical knowledge. Historical treatments produce theories of art such as those of Aristotle, Horace and Longinus, who abstract general characteristics into rules for art production. These draw however from a small range of works thought beautiful at the time, and their lack of particularity can lead to vapid statements.

These theories help to develop principles of taste, i.e. skill in judging artworks. But:

the development of taste only touched on what was external and meagre, and besides took its prescriptions likewise from only a narrow range of works of art and a limited training of the intellect and the feelings, its scope was unsatisfactory and incapable of grasping the inner [meaning] and truth [of art] and sharpening the eye for detecting these things.

Hegel goes on to consider the theories of his contemporaries Hirt and Meyer. But such theories are out of date; in Germany, genius prevails against ‘legalisms and the watery wastes of theories’. Only scholarship of art history retains some value: its

task and vocation consists in the aesthetic appreciation of individual works of art and in a knowledge of the historical circumstances which condition the work of art externally ; it is only an appreciation, made with sense and spirit, and supported by the historical facts, which can penetrate into the entire individuality of a work of art.

Hegel notes with approval that we are now willing to look at art from other ages (e.g. the Middle Ages) and cultures (e.g. India), which reveal a content ‘common to all mankind’.³

Theoretical 

This approach concerns purely theoretical reflection:

Reflections on the beautiful and producing only something universal, irrelevant to the work of art in its peculiarity, in short, an abstract philosophy of the beautiful.

Like Plato, it tries to understand beauty itself, in its essence. This can only be done through conceptual thinking whereby the Idea enters conscious reflection. But this can turn into abstract metaphysics at the expense of the concrete. The Platonic Idea ‘no longer satisfies the richer philosophical needs of our spirit today’.

Hegel’s view

For Hegel neither approach is satisfactory. The empirical is too limited and can’t grasp the truth of art; the theoretical is concerned only with universality and is too abstract. He proposes we must reconcile both extremes:

The philosophical Concept of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least in a preliminary way, must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes which have been mentioned, because it unites metaphysical universality with the precision of real particularity. Only so is it grasped absolutely in its truth. (p22)

This is how to grasp the totality of works of fine art.

5. Concept of the beauty of art

Hegel says that to treat philosophy of art scientifically, we need to establish the Concept of artistic beauty. We can’t just assume it: we need to consider 1) whether there is such an thing, and 2) what it is. For the first, we need to prove its necessity, and this proof would also answer the second. To prove the necessity of artistic beauty, we would have to prove an antecedent that led necessarily to a Concept of fine art. But Hegel wants to discuss art itself, and thinks this ‘presupposition’ lies outside that topic, so he will proceed as if it has been demonstrated.

Philosophy is one organic totality, so to understand artistic beauty we would have to expound an entire system of philosophy: to derive the Idea of the beautiful from its presuppositions would require an entire encyclopedia. So we do not yet have a scientific concept of the beautiful. What we currently know of artistic beauty is

only elements and aspects of it as they occur already in the different ideas of the beautiful and art held by ordinary people, or have formerly been accepted by them.

6. Common ideas of art

To get a general idea of his subject, Hegel considers these ‘elements and aspects’ through three common ideas of art:

1) It is a product of human activity, not nature
2) It is made to be apprehended by our senses, and is thus drawn from the sensuous sphere 
3) It has an end and aim in itself

Art as a product of human activity

The first (classical) view Hegel expounds is that we can teach each other the rules for making and imitating art. But this aspect, he says, is merely external and mechanical = an ‘empty exercise of will and dexterity’. We cannot provide such rules for the spiritual content:

Artistic production is not a formal activity in accordance with given specifications. On the contrary, as spiritual activity it is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the mind’s eye a quite other and richer content and more comprehensive individual creations [than formulae can provide].

Hegel observes that this view has been superseded by the popular (Romantic) view that art is the work of a gifted genius who must not reflect consciously on his/her productive activity. He insists that this element needs

reflection on the mode of its productivity, and practice and skill in producing. For, apart from anything else, a main feature of artistic production is external workmanship, since the work of art has a purely technical side.

Here Hegel concurs with Kant’s view of fine art and genius: we need both inspiration and technique. Technique requires ‘reflection, industry, and practice’.

He then considers the human art product in relation to nature. The work of art stands higher than any natural product because it contains spiritual value and ‘everything spiritual is better than any product of nature’. A further common idea asserts that nature and its products are works of God whereas art is merely finite and human – Hegel retorts that God does not limit his activity to nature alone but also works through human beings. In fact,

God is more honoured by what the spirit makes than by the productions and formations of nature.

Whereas nature is not conscious, humans create as a ‘conscious and actively self-productive’ medium for spirit, which is more appropriate to God. ‘The work of art is made by man as the creation of his spirit.’

What is human beings’ need for art? We might say 1) art is mere play or fancy or 2) there are better ways of achieving art’s aims. On the other hand, however,

art seems to proceed from a higher impulse and to satisfy higher needs, – at times the highest and absolute needs since it is bound up with the most universal views of life and the religious interests of whole epochs and peoples.

We have a universal and absolute need for art because we are a thinking, self-aware consciousness that puts ourself before ourself, acquiring consciousness of ourselves in two ways:

Theoretically: he [sic] ‘must see himself, represent himself to himself, fix before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognise himself alone alike in what is summoned out of himself.’
Practically: he ‘has the impulse’ to alter external nature and impress his inner being on it ‘to produce himself’ and recognise himself in his objects. We even do this to our own bodies, e.g. in dressing up.

The universal need for art, that is to say, is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognises again his own self. (p31)

Art as a product for sensuous apprehension

A work of art is made by humans in order to be apprehended by our senses, therefore it is derived from ‘the sensuous sphere’.

Hegel begins with a few observations. Art is not merely to arouse feeling, for reflecting on feeling is just an empty subjectivity, and other things (e.g. oratory, history, religion) also arouse feeling. We have tried to educate ourselves to find a sense of beauty, i.e. taste, but taste alone is external and one-sided and cannot penetrate to the depths of an artwork. Connoisseurship too, though it has a thorough knowledge of a work, sticks to external aspects, even favouring the technical and historical over deeper aspects.

The work of art does of course present itself for sensuous apprehension, but:

the work of art, as a sensuous object, is not merely for sensuous apprehension; its standing is of such a kind that, though sensuous, it is essentially at the same time for spiritual apprehension; the spirit is meant to be affected by it and to find some satisfaction in it. (p35)

The work of art, then, is both sensuous and spiritual. Sensuous apprehension is the least adequate to spirit. Spirit does not just look and listen to the world, it wants to realise itself in things and relates itself to them as desire. Humans do not stand in a relation of desire to works of art: we do not seek to use, eat, consume or destroy the object but to leave it ‘free as an object to exist on its own account’, as an object for contemplation alone [this sounds like disinterestedness]. On the other hand, the theoretical study of things seeks their universality, not their sensuous individuality, and makes an abstraction out of something concrete. Artistic interest doesn’t do this. A work of art proclaims itself in its sensuous individuality of colour, shape, sound etc.

It cherishes an interest in the object in its individual existence and does not struggle to change it into its universal thought and concept.

The sensuous therefore must be present in a work of art but serves only as its surface appearance. The spirit wants a sensuous presence but liberated from matter:

The work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought, but, despite its sensuousness, is no longer a purely material existent either.

The shadow-world of sensuous shapes, sounds and sights exists to satisfy higher spiritual interests. The sensuous is made spiritual, the spirit is made sensuous. Hegel asks how this relates to the artist him- or herself, and remarks that spiritual and sensuous must be as one in art production, i.e. composition should proceed as an active and organic unity.

The productive fancy of an artist is the fancy of a great spirit and heart, the apprehension and creation of ideas and shapes, and indeed the exhibition of the profoundest and most universal human interests in pictorial and completely definite sensuous form.

Art is not like science; it requires productive imagination, and art creation must be present in the artist as a natural gift and impulse. Culture and training can only take an artist to a certain point: where art proper begins, an ‘inborn, higher talent for art is indispensable’.

The aim of art

What is the aim of humans when they make art? Hegel looks at three common views.

1) Art is the imitation of nature. 

The problem is, imitation would be superfluous labour, as we have nature already, and it would fall far short of nature, as the one-sided appearances of art can’t match the real thing. The ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, who was famed for his realism, fooled doves into pecking at his painted grapes, but this by itself is a ‘miserable’ achievement. We are left with taking pleasure in a conjuring trick, and rating the correctness of the representation over the content. Without the content and thus without objective criteria, we are left with mere subjective taste. And anyway, even if painting and sculpture can be seen as imitations of nature, what about poetry and architecture, which are less descriptive?

The aim of art must therefore lie in something still other than the purely mechanical imitation of what is there, which in every case can bring to birth only technical tricks, not works, of art.

We learn a lot by attempting naturalism, and it can act as a guarantee of quality in the face of arbitrary artistic conventions. But it’s not the primary basis of art.

2) It awakens and vivifies our feelings.

On the next view, the aim of art lies

in forcing the human being, educated or not, to go through the whole gamut of feelings which the human heart in its inmost and secret recesses can bear, experience, and produce.

Art acquaints us with the full range of human passions: nobility, misery, shock, pleasure, and so on. We embrace ourselves more intensely as living beings and become more receptive to life experiences. We are not responding to actual experience, only to appearances of it: but this doesn’t matter because we can imagine the unreal as if it were real.

This arousing of feeling cannot be the proper aim of art, Hegel claims, because it gives art ‘a purely formal task’. Art brings before us a ‘jumbled diversity’ of feelings.

Confronted by such a multiple variety of content, we are at once forced to notice that the different feelings and ideas, which art is supposed to arouse or confirm, counteract one another, contradict and reciprocally cancel one another.

Rationality demands a higher and more universal end than this. Into what unity is this jumble to be brought? To what single aim?

3) Art mitigates the ferocity of our desires and improves our morality.

If we want a more substantial aim for art, perhaps it is ‘to bridle and educate impulses, inclinations, and passions’. Rudeness and desire make us selfish; we fixate on the object of our desire and we lose our universality. Art can mitigate this by making us aware of ourselves.

For then the man contemplates his impulses and inclinations, and while previously they carried him reflectionless away, he now sees them outside himself and already begins to be free from them because they confront him as something objective. (p48-9)

We mitigate the intensity of our feeling by representing it in art. This can, for example, alleviate grief, releasing us from ‘imprisonment in a feeling’. It even raises us out of sensuousness and thus from imprisonment in nature. This education of the passions has the aim of

the purification of the passions, instruction, and moral improvement.

The idea that art should instruct goes back to the Roman poet Horace [author of the Ars Poetica or Art of Poetry]. This can work if the instruction is organically woven into the artwork; when it becomes ‘abstract proposition, prosaic reflection, or general doctrine’ the work’s sensuous form becomes superfluous, which breaks up its nature as art. If the aim is instruction, sensuousness and feeling become inessential; the work no longer carries its aim in itself but acts as a means for something else external to it.

Some say art is for moral betterment. But morality is not so straightforward. ‘All depends on interpretation and on who draws the moral.’ Again, this need for a moral to shine out from the work detracts from the artwork’s autonomy.

Hegel’s own view

Hegel then describes modern morality as an ‘opposition between the will in its spiritual universality and the will in its sensuous natural particularity.’ This leaves people having to live in two contradictory worlds, unable to find satisfaction in either. It is philosophy’s task to show that truth lies in neither one nor the other, but in a reconciliation of the two.

Having considered three views and found each problematic, Hegel ends this section by proposing his own view of the aim of art. Art should not be the means to an external end.

We must maintain that art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration, to set forth the reconciled opposition [of spiritual and sensuous], and so to have its end and aim in itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling. For other ends, like instruction, purification, bettering, financial gain, struggling for fame and honour, have nothing to do with the work of art as such, and do not determine its nature.

7. Historical deduction of the true concept of art

In this section Hegel wants to trace what he calls the ‘reawakening’ of philosophy and philosophy of art by summarising the history of recent (German) aesthetics. This is the foundation on which he will build further.

This foundation in its most general character consists in recognising that the beauty of art is one of the means which dissolve and reduce to unity the above-mentioned opposition and contradiction between the abstractly self-concentrated spirit and nature – both the nature of external phenomena and that of inner subjective feeling and emotion.

In varying levels of detail, he describes the philosophies of:

Kant: ‘philosophy’s turning point in modern times’.
Schiller: breaks through Kantian subjectivity and abstraction; seeks the unity of universal and particular through art and aesthetic education.
Schelling: recognises the Idea alone as true and actual, thereby helping the discovery of the Idea as philosophy’s ‘absolute standpoint’.
Winckelmann: encouraged the discovery of the Idea of art in both artworks and art history. Discovered new modes of thinking about art [he was the inventor of art history as a discipline].
A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel: critical rather than philosophical, and sometimes admired the mediocre, but approached the ‘standpoint of the Idea’ and polemicised against their predecessors.

Hegel then attacks irony, with reference to Fichte, Solger and Tieck. The translator Knox comments in a footnote:

The term ‘Romantic Irony’ seems to be derived from F. von Schlegel and it is generally understood to mean that the writer, while still creative and emotional, should remain aloof and self-critical. (p69)

Hegel is critical of Romantic irony, as its intense subjectivity conflicts with his own scientific, objective approach and belief in the absolute. In irony, objective interests become relative to the ironic subject and thus a mere show. Irony encourages artists to see themselves as egotistical geniuses who look down on the mediocrities for whom law and morals are still important.

[The artist’s] relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null. (p66)

From the ironical standpoint, everything factual, moral and worthy becomes mere vanity (Eitelkeit), and this lack of seriousness extends into the ironists’ art, too.

8. Division of the subject

In the final section of the Introduction, Hegel sketches his theory of art as it unfolds in history. Art proceeds from the absolute Idea, and its end is the sensuous presentation of the Absolute. Its content is the Idea, its form is its particular configuration of sensuous material. Art reconciles these into a totality. The content should be suitable for artistic representation, and should be both single and concrete, i.e. a reconciliation of particularity and universality.

In becoming conscious of itself, ‘the spirit has to go through a course of stages’ (p72) which correspond to different ‘configurations of art’ or art styles: a sequence of definite conceptions of the world given artistic shape.

i) The Idea of the beauty of art or the Ideal

The absolute is the Idea as such, but the Idea as the beauty of art needs to be objectified into individual works. In artworks, truth should not be confused with technical correctness: defects in art can flow from content as well as from form. Hegel criticises the art of ‘the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians’:

They could not master true beauty because their mythological ideas, the content and thought of their works of art, were still indeterminate, or determined badly, and so did not consist of the content which is absolute in itself.

In the best art, the Idea (content) and its presentation (form) are in conformity – are ‘adequate to one another’ (p74).

ii) Development of the Ideal into the particular forms of the beauty of art

The forms art takes through history are ‘the different relations of meaning and shape’ for grasping the Idea, and art history is created by the ‘unfolding’ and ‘reconciliation’ of particular works. Hegel outlines three stages for the development of fine art:

1) Symbolic  
2) Classical  
3) Romantic

These stages are three relations of the Idea (content) to its configuration (form). Each is a higher form than its predecessor. Hegel later calls them ‘the universal moments of the Idea of beauty’ (p90). This staged approach led Gombrich to consider Hegel, rather than Winckelmann, the ‘father’ of art history.⁴

Symbolic art

Art begins when people start making the Idea the content of artistic form. This is the first, fermenting, mysterious form of art. The Idea is still obscure, abstract and indeterminate:

[Art] does not yet possess in itself that individuality which the Ideal demands; its abstraction and one-sidedness leave its shape externally defective and arbitrary.

Art in this stage is still struggling to find a form. The Idea is imposed on objects when a correspondence is not yet possible – it staggers around in the form, distorting and exaggerating it, because it is as yet unshapeable and persists sublimely above all these inadequate representations. Such art, says Hegel, is typical of the ‘early artistic pantheism of the East’, which

on the one hand ascribes absolute meaning to even the most worthless objects, and, on the other, violently coerces the phenomena to express its view of the world whereby it becomes bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom of the substance [i.e. the one Lord] disdainfully against all phenomena as being null and evanescent. (p77)

Hegel’s objection is that these mysterious conceptions of the divine cannot be clearly manifested in concrete, individual forms.

So, for example, the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, in their artistic shapes, images of gods, and idols, never get beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form. They could not master true beauty because their mythological ideas, the content and thought of their works of art, were still indeterminate, or determined badly, and so did not consist of the content which is absolute in itself. (p74)

With such means, the Idea and its configuration remain incompatible.

2) Classical art

Classical art corrects the failings of symbolic art.

It is the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate to the Idea itself in its essential nature. With this shape, therefore, the Idea is able to come into free and complete harmony.

Classical art at last actualises the Idea: concept and reality successfully conform to one another. Hegel says that the original Concept (which probably means God) invented the shape for concrete spirit (human beings, through whom spirit is expressed), which the spirit of art finds as the most appropriate form for free, individual spirituality. Thus classical art takes the human body for its subject. But it is not the human body as merely sensuous, contingent and finite; it is purified to be adequate for the spirit.

The weakness in classical art is that spirituality has to be of a sort that can be expressed in the human form. ‘The spirit is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and eternal’. Spirit is therefore not represented according to its true nature. This brings about the dissolution of classical art and its replacement with the third, higher form.

3) Romantic art

The Romantic form of art goes beyond and above classical art. In classical art the concrete content of the artwork is implicitly the unity of divine and human, and is expressed in an immediate, sensuous way. A higher state is when the unity of divine and human is known, not implicit. This difference is significant: humankind becomes conscious of itself as an animal and attains knowledge of itself as spirit. This goes hand in hand with Christian religion, as opposed to the Greek religion ‘most appropriate’ to classical art. Unlike with the Greek gods,

Christianity brings God before our imagination as spirit, not as an individual, particular spirit, but as absolute in spirit and in truth.

The known unity of divine and human nature is realised in spirit, i.e. it is not tied to sensuous presentation but is freed from immediacy. Thus Romantic art is ‘the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself.’ The subject matter of art is now ‘free concrete spirituality’. Art must work for subjective, inward depth, and therefore can no longer have an adequate union with the external medium of the artwork.

The sensuous externality of shape is... accepted and represented, as in symbolic art, as something inessential and transient... The aspect of external existence is consigned to contingency and abandoned to the adventures devised by an imagination whose caprice can mirror what is present to it... just as readily as it can jumble the shapes of the external world and distort them grotesquely. For this external medium has its essence and meaning no longer, as in classical art, in itself and its own sphere, but in the heart which finds its manifestation in itself instead of in the external world and its form of reality.

As in symbolic art, Idea/content and shape/form are inadequate to each other, but in Romantic art the Idea is perfected in itself ‘as spirit and heart’, in a higher perfection.

Thus the symbolic, classical and Romantic art forms consist respectively in the striving for, the attainment of, and the transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty.

iii) The system of the individual arts

The final section of the Introduction discusses types of art which correspond to the forms or stages of fine art explained above. Hegel thinks:

the general forms of art must... be the fundamental principle for the articulation and determination of the individual arts; in other words, the kinds of art have the same essential distinctions in themselves which we came to recognise in the general forms of art.

Each form of art (Symbolic, Classical, Romantic) corresponds to a kind of art (sculpture, painting, etc) most adequate to it. Helpfully, Knox adds in a footnote:

No form of art is wholly actualised in one kind of art alone; it requires the others, even if they take a subordinate place. Thus while one kind of art may belong par excellence to one form of art, it also appears to some extent in the other forms and may be said to present them all. (p82)

Symbolic art: Corresponds to architecture. ‘The inorganic external world has been purified, set in order symmetrically, and made akin to spirit.’ But in the heavy, immediately external matter of buildings, the Idea cannot be realised.
Classical art: Corresponds to sculpture. Through sculpture, spiritual individuality is made to stand before us. The material is organised as an ideal, three-dimensional human figure.
Romantic art: Corresponds to painting, music and poetry. Spirit is dispersed into the community; art shows itself ‘particularised in itself and appropriate to subjective inwardness’.

Form/stage of art	Relation to the Idea	Art form
Symbolic	Striving	Architecture
Classical	Attaining	Sculpture
Romantic	Transcending	Painting, poetry, music

The external material the works are made of becomes progressively less important across the stages of art. Poetry emerges as the most universal art:

poetry is adequate to all forms of the beautiful and extends over all of them, because its proper element is beautiful imagination, and imagination is indispensable for every beautiful production, no matter to what form of art it belongs.

However, at this highest stage, art now transcends itself and passes from the poetry of the imagination to the prose of thought. Hegel concludes the Introduction grandly:

Now, therefore, what the particular arts realise in individual works of art is, according to the Concept of art, only the universal forms of the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. It is as the external actualisation of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is rising. Its architect and builder is the self-comprehending spirit of beauty, but to complete it will need the history of the world in its development through thousands of years. (p90)

Conclusion

To the modern reader, a lot of this stuff sounds abstract and weird. Welcome to Hegel. As an attempt to explain how the world works, I find Hegel’s idealism deeply implausible. But he shows a great deal of insight along the way.

Of course, this is only the Introduction. If you are really interested in Hegel you need to read the rest of the Lectures on Fine Art as well, though be warned, they add up to about 1300 pages, and speaking for myself I have yet to complete the task. 

Notes

You can read more about Hegel’s philosophy of art on the SEP:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-aesthetics/

1. If you are reading Hegel in translation, that is a further layer of separation.
2. Just as an aside, there is a difference between sensuousness, which simply means to do with the senses, and sensuality, which includes erotic connotations. But not every writer makes this distinction.
3. The gendered language of ‘mankind’ (‘humankind’ would have been better) is absent in Hegel’s German. He refers to alle Menschen (all people). 
4. E.H. Gombrich, ‘“The Father of Art History”: A Reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)’; in Tributes: Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition (1984). Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) predates Hegel, but a historical view of art didn’t come of age until the early 19th century.