Introduction: The Beauty of Art

These lectures are devoted to aesthetics. Their subject is the wide realm of the beautiful; more precisely, their province is art — fine art. The name "aesthetics," which means the science of sensation and feeling, is not quite apt; but it has passed into common speech, and we may keep it. The proper expression, however, for our science is the philosophy of art, or, more definitely, the philosophy of fine art.

By this expression we at once exclude the beauty of nature. The beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature. For the beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again; and as spirit and its products stand higher than nature and its appearances, so too the beauty of art stands higher than the beauty of nature. Even a bad idea, such as may come into a man's head, is higher than any product of nature; for in such an idea spirit and freedom are always present.

Why does man make works of art? The universal and absolute need from which art springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness: that he draws out of himself, and makes explicit for himself, what he is. Things in nature are only immediate and single; but man, as spirit, duplicates himself. He wants to see himself in what is outside him. Even a child's first impulse involves this practical alteration of external things. A boy throws stones into the river, and then stands admiring the circles drawn in the water, as an effect in which he sees something of his own doing. This need runs through the most manifold phenomena, up to the mode of self-production in the outer world which we find in the work of art.

The boy throwing stones into the water is one of Hegel's best-known images: art arises from the human need to recognise oneself in the world one has shaped.

The aim of art is not the mere imitation of nature — for imitation can only ever lag behind its model, like a worm crawling after an elephant — nor the arousal of feeling, nor moral instruction. Its aim is to reveal the truth in sensuous form.

Art shares its content with religion and philosophy: the absolute, the divine. But it shows it to the senses, in a shape — in stone, colour, sound or word. The beautiful is therefore the sensuous shining of the idea.

"Das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee" — the most quoted definition from these lectures. "Scheinen" means both "to shine" and "to seem."

And here Hegel says the sentence that has been argued over ever since:

In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. 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. What is now aroused in us by works of art is not only immediate enjoyment, but also our judgement. The science of art is therefore in our time much more necessary than in times in which art by itself as art gave full satisfaction. Art invites us to contemplation of it by thought — not in order to create art again, but to know philosophically what art is.

Hegel does not say that art will no longer be made, or that it will be worse; he expected art to go on and even to improve. He means that art is no longer the highest way in which we grasp the truth: we no longer kneel before statues. This is often called the "end of art" thesis, though the phrase is not Hegel's.

We may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection; but the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit. No matter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father, Christ and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help; we bow the knee no longer.