Lectures on AestheticsG.W.F. Hegel

Hegel delivered his lectures on aesthetics at Berlin in the 1820s; the published text was assembled posthumously from student notes. The work is the most ambitious philosophical treatment of art in the tradition, covering architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry as expressions of Spirit's progressive self-understanding.

Art, for Hegel, is one of three modes by which absolute Spirit apprehends itself, the other two being religion and philosophy. Art presents truth in sensuous form: it makes the Idea visible. This gives art its dignity but also its limitation. Because it binds the infinite to a material medium, art eventually reaches a point where the content outstrips what sensuous form can express. Art, in Hegel's famous phrase, is "a thing of the past" in the sense that it is no longer the highest mode of truth. Philosophy surpasses it.

The lectures organize the history of art into three phases. Symbolic art (the ancient East) struggles to match form and content; classical art (Greece) achieves their perfect unity in the human figure; romantic art (the Christian world) fractures that unity as inwardness exceeds any external shape. Within romantic art, Hegel gives his most sustained attention to poetry, which he considers the highest art form because it most nearly escapes the limits of the material.