## 1. Hegel's Knowledge of Art




Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* (1807) contains
chapters on the ancient Greek "religion of art"
(*Kunstreligion*) and on the world-view presented in
Sophocles' *Antigone* and *Oedipus the King*. His
philosophy of art proper, however, forms part of his
*philosophy* (rather than phenomenology) of spirit. The
*Phenomenology* can be regarded as the introduction to
Hegel's philosophical system. The system itself comprises three
parts: logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit, and is
set out (in numbered paragraphs) in Hegel's *Encyclopaedia of
the philosophical Sciences* (1817, 1827, 1830). The philosophy of
spirit is in turn divided into three sections: on subjective, objective
and absolute spirit. Hegel's philosophy of art or
"aesthetics" constitutes the first sub-section of his
philosophy of absolute spirit, and is followed by his philosophy of
religion and his account of the history of philosophy.




Hegel's philosophy of art provides an a priori derivation--from
the very concept of beauty itself--of various forms of beauty and
various individual arts. In marked contrast to Kant, however, Hegel
weaves into his philosophical study of beauty numerous references to
and analyses of individual works of art--to such an extent,
indeed, that his aesthetics constitutes, in Kai Hammermeister's words,
"a veritable world history of art" (Hammermeister,
24).




Hegel read both Greek and Latin (indeed, he wrote his diary partly in
Latin from the age of fourteen); he also read English and French. He
was thus able to study the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, Virgil, Shakespeare and Moliere in the original
languages. He never travelled to Greece or Italy, but he did undertake
several long journeys from Berlin (where he was appointed Professor in
1818) to Dresden (1820, 1821, 1824), the Low Countries (1822, 1827),
Vienna (1824) and Paris (1827). On these journeys he saw
Raphael's *Sistine Madonna* and several paintings by
Correggio (in Dresden), Rembrandt's *Night Watch* (in
Amsterdam), the central section of the van Eyck brothers'
*Adoration of the Lamb* (in Ghent)--the wing panels were
at that time in Berlin--and "famous items by the noblest
masters one has seen a hundred times in copper engravings: Raphael,
Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian" (in Paris) (*Hegel: The
Letters*, 654). He liked to visit the theatre and opera, both
on his travels and in Berlin, and he was acquainted with leading
singers, such as Anna Milder-Hauptmann (who sang in the first
production of Beethoven's *Fidelio* in 1814), as well as the
composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (whose revival of
J.S. Bach's *St Matthew Passion* Hegel attended in March
1829). Hegel was also on close personal terms with Goethe and knew his
drama and poetry especially well (as he did those of Friedrich
Schiller).




Adorno complains that "Hegel and Kant [ ... ] were able to
write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art"
(Adorno, 334). This may or may not be true of Kant, but it is clearly
quite untrue of Hegel: he had an extensive knowledge and a good
understanding of many of the great works of art in the Western
tradition. Nor was Hegel's knowledge and interest restricted to
Western art: he read (in translation) works of Indian and Persian
poetry, and he saw at first hand works of Egyptian art in Berlin
(Poggeler 1981, 206-8). Hegel's philosophy of art is
thus an a priori derivation of the various forms of beauty that,
*pace* Adorno, is informed and mediated by a thorough knowledge
and understanding of individual works of art from around the world.


## 2. Hegel's Texts and Lectures on Aesthetics




Hegel's published thoughts on aesthetics are to be found in
pars. 556-63 of the 1830 *Encyclopaedia*. Hegel also held
lectures on aesthetics in Heidelberg in 1818 and in Berlin in 1820/21
(winter semester), 1823 and 1826 (summer semesters), and 1828/29
(winter semester). Transcripts of Hegel's lectures made by his
students in 1820/21, 1823, 1826 and 1828/29 have now been published (though so
far only the 1823 lectures have been translated into English) (see
Bibliography). In 1835 (and then again in 1842) one of Hegel's
students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, published an edition of Hegel's
lectures on aesthetics based on a manuscript of Hegel's (now lost) and
a series of lecture transcripts. This is available in English as:
G.W.F. Hegel,
*Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art*, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Most of the secondary literature on
Hegel's aesthetics (in English and German) makes reference to
Hotho's edition. Yet according to one of the leading specialists
on Hegel's aesthetics, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Hotho
distorted Hegel's thought in various ways: he gave Hegel's
account of art a much stricter systematic structure than Hegel himself
had given it, and he supplemented Hegel's account with material
of his own (*PKA*, xiii-xv). Gethmann-Siefert argues,
therefore, that we should not rely on Hotho's edition for our
understanding of Hegel's aesthetics, but should instead base our
interpretation on the available lecture transcripts.




Since Hegel's manuscript, on which Hotho based much of his
edition, has been lost, it is no longer possible to determine with
certainty to what extent (if at all) Hotho did in fact distort
Hegel's account of art. It should also be noted that
Gethmann-Siefert's own interpretation of Hegel's aesthetics
has been called into question (see Houlgate 1986a).
Nevertheless Gethmann-Siefert is right to encourage readers with a
knowledge of German to consult the published transcripts, since they
contain a wealth of important material, and in some cases material that
is missing from the Hotho edition (such as the brief reference to
Caspar David Friedrich in the 1820/21 lectures [*VA*, 
192]).




Hegel's philosophy of art has provoked considerable debate since his
death in 1831. Does he believe that only Greek art is beautiful? Does
he hold that art comes to an end in the modern age? The answers one
gives to such questions should, however, be offered with a degree of
caution, for, sadly, there is no fully worked out philosophy of art by
Hegel that was officially endorsed by Hegel himself. The paragraphs in
the *Encyclopaedia* are written by Hegel, but they are very
brief and condensed and were intended to be supplemented by his
lectures; the transcripts of the lectures are written by students of
Hegel (some taken down in class, some compiled afterwards from notes
taken in class); and the "standard" edition of Hegel's
lectures is a work put together by his student, Hotho (albeit using a
manuscript by Hegel himself). There is, therefore, no definitive
edition of Hegel's fully developed aesthetic theory that would trump
all others and settle all debate.


## 3. Art, Religion and Philosophy in Hegel's System




Hegel's philosophy of art forms part of his overall philosophical
system. In order to understand his philosophy of art, therefore, one
must understand the main claims of his philosophy as a whole. Hegel
argues in his speculative logic that *being* is to be
understood as self-determining reason or "Idea"
(*Idee*). In the philosophy of nature, however, he goes on to
show that logic tells only half the story: for such reason is not
something abstract--is not a disembodied *logos*--but
takes the form of rationally organized *matter*. What there is,
according to Hegel, is thus not just pure reason but physical,
chemical and living matter that obeys rational principles.




Life is more explicitly rational than mere physical matter because it
is more explicitly self-determining. Life itself becomes more
explicitly rational and self-determining when it becomes conscious and
self-conscious--that is, life that can imagine, use language,
think and exercise freedom. Such self-conscious life Hegel calls
"spirit" (*Geist*). Reason, or the Idea, comes to
be fully self-determining and rational, therefore, when it takes the
form of self-conscious spirit. This occurs, in Hegel's view, with the
emergence of *human* existence. Human beings, for Hegel, are
thus not just accidents of nature; they are reason itself--the
reason inherent in nature--that has come to life and come to
consciousness of itself. Beyond human beings (or other finite rational
beings that might exist on other planets), there is no self-conscious
reason in Hegel's universe.




In his philosophy of objective spirit Hegel analyses the institutional
structures that are required if spirit--that is,
humanity--is to be properly free and self-determining. These
include the institutions of right, the family, civil society and the
state. In the philosophy of absolute spirit Hegel then analyses the
different ways in which spirit articulates its ultimate,
"absolute" understanding of itself. The highest, most
developed and most adequate understanding of spirit is attained by
philosophy (the bare bones of whose understanding of the world have
just been sketched). Philosophy provides an explicitly
rational, *conceptual* understanding of the nature of reason or
the Idea. It explains precisely *why* reason must take the form
of space, time, matter, life and self-conscious spirit.




In religion--above all in Christianity--spirit gives
expression to the same understanding of reason and of itself as
philosophy. In religion, however, the process whereby the Idea becomes
self-conscious spirit is *represented*--in images and
metaphors--as the process whereby "God" becomes the
"Holy Spirit" dwelling in humanity. Furthermore, this
process is one in which we put our *faith* and *trust*:
it is the object of feeling and belief, rather than conceptual
understanding.




In Hegel's view, philosophy and religion--which is to say,
Hegel's own speculative philosophy and Christianity--both
understand the *same* truth. Religion, however, believes in a
representation of the truth, whereas philosophy understands that truth
with complete conceptual clarity. It may seem strange that we would
need religion, if we have philosophy: surely the latter makes the
former redundant. For Hegel, however, humanity cannot live by concepts
alone, but also needs to picture, imagine, and have faith in the
truth. Indeed, Hegel claims that it is in *religion* above all
that "a nation defines what it considers to be true"
(*Lectures on the Philosophy of World History*, 105).




Art, for Hegel, also gives expression to spirit's understanding of
itself. It differs from philosophy and religion, however, by
expressing spirit's self-understanding not in pure concepts, or in the
images of faith, but in and through objects that have been
specifically *made* for this purpose by human beings. Such
objects--conjured out of stone, wood, color, sound or
words--render the freedom of spirit visible or audible to an
audience. In Hegel's view, this *sensuous* expression of free
spirit constitutes *beauty*. The purpose of art, for Hegel, is
thus the creation of beautiful objects in which the true character of
freedom is given sensuous expression.




The principal aim of art is not, therefore, 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.


## 4. Kant, Schiller and Hegel on Beauty and Freedom




Hegel's close association of art with beauty and freedom shows
his clear indebtedness to Kant and Schiller. Kant also maintained that
our experience of beauty is an experience of freedom. He argued,
however, that beauty is not itself an objective property of things.
When we judge that a natural object or a work of art is beautiful, on
Kant's view, we are indeed making a judgment about an object, but
we are asserting that the object has a certain *effect* on us
(and that it should have the same effect on all who view it). The
effect produced by the "beautiful" object is to set our
understanding and imagination in "free play" with one
another, and it is the pleasure generated by this free play that leads
us to judge the object to be beautiful (Kant, 98, 102-3).




In contrast to Kant, Schiller understands beauty to be a property of
the object itself. It is the property, possessed by both living beings
and works of art, of appearing to be free when in fact they are not. As
Schiller puts it in the "Kallias" letters, beauty is
"freedom in appearance, autonomy in appearance" (Schiller,
151). Schiller insists that freedom itself is something
"noumenal" (to use Kant's terminology) and so can
never actually manifest itself in the realm of the senses. We can never
see freedom at work in, or embodied in, the world of space and time. In
the case of beautiful objects, therefore--whether they are the
products of nature or human imagination--"it is all that
matters [ ... ] that the object *appears* as free, not that
it really is so" (Schiller, 151).




Hegel agrees with Schiller (against Kant) that beauty is an objective
property of things. In his view, however, beauty is the direct sensuous
*manifestation* of freedom, not merely the appearance or
imitation of freedom. It shows us what freedom actually looks like and
sounds like when it gives itself sensuous expression (albeit with
varying degrees of idealization). Since true beauty is the direct
sensuous expression of the *freedom* of spirit, it must be
produced *by* free spirit *for* free spirit, and so
cannot be a mere product of nature. Nature is capable of a formal
beauty, and life is capable of what Hegel calls "sensuous"
beauty (*PK*, 197), but true beauty is found only in works of
*art* that are freely created by human beings to bring before
our minds what it is to be free spirit.




Beauty, for Hegel, has certain formal qualities: it is the unity or
harmony of different elements in which these elements are not just
arranged in a regular, symmetrical pattern but are unified
*organically*. Hegel gives an example of genuinely beautiful
form in his discussion of Greek sculpture: the famous Greek profile is
beautiful, we are told, because the forehead and the nose flow
seamlessly into one another, in contrast to the Roman profile in which
there is a much sharper angle between the forehead and nose
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 727-30).




Beauty, however, is not just a matter of form; it is also a matter of
*content*. This is one of Hegel's most controversial
ideas, and is one that sets him at odds with those modern artists and
art-theorists who insist that art can embrace any content we like and,
indeed, can dispense with content altogether. As we have seen, the
content that Hegel claims is central and indispensable to genuine
beauty (and therefore genuine art) is the freedom and richness of
spirit. To put it another way, that content is the Idea, or absolute
reason, *as* self-knowing spirit. Since the Idea is pictured in
religion as "God," the content of truly beautiful art is in
one respect the *divine*. Yet, as we have seen above, Hegel
argues that the Idea (or "God") comes to consciousness of
itself only in and through finite human beings. The content of
beautiful art must thus be the divine in human form or the divine
within *humanity* itself (as well as purely human freedom).




Hegel recognizes that art can portray animals, plants and inorganic
nature, but he sees it as art's principal task to present divine and
human freedom. In both cases, the focus of attention is on
the *human* *figure* in particular. This is because, in
Hegel's view, the most appropriate sensuous incarnation of reason and
the clearest visible expression of spirit is the human form. Colors
and sounds by themselves can certainly communicate a mood, but only
the human form actually embodies spirit and reason. Truly beautiful
art thus shows us sculpted, painted or poetic images of Greek gods or
of Jesus Christ--that is, the divine in human form--or it
shows us images of free human life itself.


## 5. Art and Idealization




Art, for Hegel, is essentially figurative. This is not because it
seeks to imitate nature, but because its purpose is to express and
embody *free spirit* and this is achieved most adequately
through images of human beings. (We will consider the exceptions to
this--architecture and music--below.) More specifically,
art's role is to bring to mind truths about ourselves and our
freedom that we often lose sight of in our everyday activity. Its role
is to show us (or remind us of) the *true* character of freedom.
Art fulfills this role by showing us the freedom of spirit in its
purest form *without* the contingencies of everyday life. That
is to say, art at its best presents us not with the all too familiar
dependencies and drudgery of daily existence, but with the
*ideal* of freedom (see *Aesthetics*, 1: 155-6). This
ideal of human (and divine) freedom constitutes true beauty and is
found above all, Hegel claims, in ancient Greek sculptures of gods and
heroes.




Note that the work of idealization is undertaken not (like modern
fashion photography) to provide an escape from life into a world of
fantasy, but to enable us to see our freedom more
clearly. Idealization is undertaken, therefore, in the interests of a
clearer revelation of the true character of humanity (and of the
divine). The paradox is that art communicates *truth*
through *idealized* images of human beings (and indeed--in
painting--through the
*illusion* of external reality).




It is worth noting at this stage that Hegel's account of art is
meant to be both descriptive and normative. Hegel thinks that the
account he gives describes the principal features of the greatest works
of art in the Western tradition, such as the sculptures of Phidias or
Praxiteles or the dramas of Aeschylus or Sophocles. At the same time,
his account is normative in so far as it tells us what *true*
art is. There are many things that we call "art": cave
paintings, a child's drawing, Greek sculpture,
Shakespeare's plays, adolescent love poetry, and (in the
twentieth century) Carl Andre's bricks. Not everything
called "art" deserves the name, however, because not
everything so called does what *true* art is meant to do:
namely, give sensuous expression to free spirit and thereby create
works of beauty. Hegel does not prescribe strict rules for the
production of beauty; but he does set out broad criteria that
*truly* beautiful art must meet, and he is critical of work
that claims to be "art" but that fails to meet these
criteria. Hegel's critique of certain developments in
post-Reformation art--such as the aspiration to do no more than
imitate nature--is thus based, not on contingent personal
preferences, but on his philosophical understanding of the true nature
and purpose of art.


## 6. Hegel's Systematic Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art




Hegel's philosophical account of art and beauty has three
parts: 1) ideal beauty as such, or beauty proper, 2) the different
forms that beauty takes in history, and 3) the different arts in which
beauty is encountered. We will look first at Hegel's account of
ideal beauty as such.


### 6.1 Ideal Beauty as such




Hegel is well aware that art can perform various functions: it can
teach, edify, provoke, adorn, and so on. His concern, however, is to
identify art's proper and most distinctive function. This, he claims,
is to give intuitive, sensuous expression to the freedom of
spirit. The point of art, therefore, is not to be
"realistic"--to imitate or mirror the contingencies
of everyday life--but to show us what divine and
human *freedom* look like. Such sensuous expression of
spiritual freedom is what Hegel calls the "Ideal," or true
beauty.




The realm of the sensuous is the realm of individual things in space
and time. Freedom is given sensuous expression, therefore, when it is
embodied in an *individual* who stands alone in his or her
"self-enjoyment, repose, and bliss [*Seligkeit*]"
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 179). Such an individual must not be abstract
and formal (as, for example, in the early Greek Geometric style), nor
should he be static and rigid (as in much ancient Egyptian sculpture),
but his body and posture should be visibly animated by freedom and
life, without, however, sacrificing the stillness and serenity that
belongs to ideal self-containment. Such ideal beauty, Hegel claims, is
found above all in fifth- and fourth-century Greek sculptures of the
gods, such as the *Dresden Zeus* (a cast of which Hegel saw in the early
1820s) or Praxiteles' *Cnidian Aphrodite* (see
*PKA*, 143 and Houlgate 2007, 58).




Ancient Greek sculpture, which Hegel would have known almost
exclusively from Roman copies or from plaster casts, presents what he
calls pure or "absolute" beauty (*PKA*, 
124). It does not, however, exhaust the idea of beauty, for it does not
give us beauty in its most *concrete* and developed form. This
we find in ancient Greek drama--especially tragedy--in
which free individuals proceed to action that leads to conflict and,
finally, to resolution (sometimes violently, as in Sophocles'
*Antigone*, sometimes peacefully, as in Aeschylus'
*Oresteian* trilogy). The gods represented in Greek sculpture
are beautiful because their physical shape perfectly embodies their
spiritual freedom and is not marred by marks of physical frailty or
dependence. The principal heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy are
beautiful because their free activity is informed and animated by an
ethical interest or "pathos" (such as care for the family,
as in the case of Antigone, or concern for the welfare of the state,
as in the case of Creon), rather than by petty human foibles or
passions. These heroes are not allegorical representations of
abstract virtues, but are living human beings with imagination,
character and free will; but what moves them is a passion for an
aspect of our *ethical life*, an aspect that is supported and
promoted by a god.




This distinction between *pure* beauty, found in Greek
sculpture, and the more *concrete* beauty found in Greek drama
means that ideal beauty actually takes two subtly different forms.
Beauty takes these different forms because pure sculptural
beauty--though it is the pinnacle of art's achievement--has
a certain *abstractness* about it. Beauty is the sensuous
expression of freedom and so must exhibit the concreteness, animation
and humanity that are missing, for example, in Egyptian sculpture. Yet
since pure beauty, as exemplified by Greek sculpture, is spiritual
freedom immersed in *spatial*, bodily shape, it lacks the more
concrete dynamism of action *in time*, action that is animated
by imagination and language. This is what lends a certain
"abstractness" (and, indeed, coldness) to pure beauty
(*PKA*, 57, 125). If art's role is to give sensuous
expression to true *freedom*, however, it must move beyond
abstraction towards concreteness. This means that it must move beyond
pure beauty to the more concrete and genuinely *human* beauty
of drama. These two kinds of ideal beauty thus constitute the most
appropriate objects of art and, taken together, form what Hegel calls
the "centre" (*Mittelpunkt*) of art itself
(*PKA*, 126).


### 6.2 The Particular Forms of Art




Hegel also acknowledges that art can, indeed must, both fall short of
and go beyond such ideal beauty. It falls short of ideal beauty when
it takes the form of *symbolic* art, and it goes beyond such
beauty when it takes the form of *romantic* art. The form of
art that is characterized by works of ideal beauty itself is
*classical* art. These are the three forms of art
(*Kunstformen*), or "forms of the beautiful"
(*PKA*, 68), that Hegel believes are made necessary by
the very idea of art itself. The development of art from one form to
another generates what Hegel regards as the distinctive
*history* of art.




What produces these three art-forms is the changing relation between
the *content* of art--the Idea as spirit--and its
mode of presentation. The changes in this relation are in turn
determined by the way in which the content of art is itself conceived.
In symbolic art the content is conceived abstractly, such that it is
not able to manifest itself adequately in a sensuous, visible form. In
classical art, by contrast, the content is conceived in such a way
that it is able to find perfect expression in sensuous, visible
form. In romantic art, the content is conceived in such a way that it
is able to find adequate expression in sensuous, visible form and yet
also ultimately transcends the realm of the sensuous and visible.




Classical art is the home of ideal beauty proper, whereas romantic art
is the home of what Hegel calls the "beauty of inwardness"
(*Schonheit der Innigkeit*) or, as Knox translates it,
"beauty of deep feeling" (*Aesthetics*, 1: 531).
Symbolic art, by contrast, falls short of genuine beauty altogether.
This does not mean that it is simply bad art: Hegel recognizes that
symbolic art is often the product of the highest level of artistry.
Symbolic art falls short of beauty because it does not yet have a rich
enough understanding of the nature of divine and human spirit. The
artistic shapes it produces are deficient, therefore, because the
conceptions of spirit that underlie it--conceptions that are
contained above all in religion--are deficient
(*PKA*, 68).


#### 6.2.1 Symbolic Art




Hegel's account of symbolic art encompasses the art of many
different civilizations and shows his considerable understanding of,
and appreciation for, non-Western art. Not all of the types of symbolic
art Hegel discusses, however, are fully and properly *symbolic*.
So what connects them all? The fact that they all belong to the sphere
of what Hegel calls "pre-art" (*Vorkunst*)
(*PKA*, 73). Art proper, for Hegel, is the sensuous
expression or manifestation of free spirit in a medium (such as metal,
stone or color) that has been deliberately *shaped* or
*worked* by human beings into the expression of freedom. The
sphere of "pre-art" comprises art that falls short of art
proper in some way. This is either because it is the product of a
spirit that does not yet understand itself to be truly *free*,
or because it is the product of a spirit that does have a sense of its
own freedom but does not yet understand such freedom to involve the
manifestation of itself in a sensuous medium that has been specifically
shaped to that end. In either case, compared to genuine art,
"pre-art" rests on a relatively *abstract*
conception of spirit.




Hegel's intention in his account of symbolic art is not to
comment exhaustively on every kind of "pre-art" there is.
He says nothing, for example, about prehistoric art (such as cave
painting), nor does he discuss Chinese art or Buddhist art (even though
he discusses both Chinese religion and Buddhism in his lectures on the
philosophy of religion). Hegel's aim in his account of symbolic
art is to examine the various kinds of art that are made necessary by
the very concept of art itself, the stages through which art has to
pass on its journey from pre-art to art proper.




The first stage is that in which spirit is conceived as being in an
immediate *unity* with nature. This stage is encountered in the
ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrians, Hegel
claims, believe in a *divine* power--the Good--but
they identify this divinity with an aspect of nature itself, namely
with light. Light does not symbolize or point to a separate God or
Good; rather, in Zoroastrianism (as Hegel understands it) light
*is* the Good, *is* God (*Aesthetics*, 1: 325).
Light is thus the substance in all things and that which gives life to
all plants and animals. This light, Hegel tells us, is personified as
Ormuzd (or Ahura Mazda). Unlike the God of the Jews, however, Ormuzd is
not a free, self-conscious subject. He (or it) is the Good in the form
of light itself, and so is present in all sources of light, such as the
sun, stars and fire.




The question we have to ask, Hegel remarks, is whether seeing the Good
as light (or giving utterance to such an intuition) counts as art
(*PKA*, 76). In Hegel's view, it does not do so for two
reasons: on the one hand, the Good is not understood to be free spirit
that is distinct from, but manifests itself in, the light; on the
other hand, the sensuous element in which the Good is
present--the light itself--is understood not to be something
shaped or produced by free spirit for the purpose of its
self-expression, but simply to be a given feature of nature with which
the Good is immediately identical.




In the Zoroastrian vision of the Good as light, we encounter the
"sensuous presentation [*Darstellung*] of the
divine" (*PKA*, 76). This vision, however, does
not constitute a *work of art*, even though it finds expression
in well-crafted prayers and utterances.




The second stage in the development of pre-art is that in which there
is an immediate *difference* between spirit and nature. This is
found, in Hegel's view, in Hindu art. The difference between the
spiritual and the natural means that the spiritual--i.e., the
divine--cannot be understood (as in Persia) to be simply
identical with some immediately given aspect of nature. On the other
hand, Hegel claims, the divine in Hinduism is conceived in such an
abstract and *indeterminate* way that it acquires determinate
form only in and through something immediately sensuous, external and
natural. The divine is thus understood to be present *in* the
very form of something sensuous and natural. As Hegel puts it in his
1826 lectures on aesthetics: "natural objects--the human
being, animals--are revered as divine" (*PKA*,
79).




Hindu art marks the difference between the spiritual (or divine) and
the merely natural by extending, exaggerating and distorting the
natural forms in which the divine is imagined to be present. The divine
is portrayed not in the purely natural form of an animal or human
being, therefore, but in the *unnaturally* *distorted*
form of an animal or human being. (Shiva is portrayed with many arms,
for example, and Brahma with four faces.)




Hegel notes that such portrayal involves the work of
"shaping" or "forming" the medium of
expression (*PKA*, 78). In that sense, one can speak of
Hindu "art." He claims, however, that Hindu art does not
fulfill the true purpose of art because it does not give appropriate
and adequate shape to free spirit and thereby create images of beauty.
Rather, it simply distorts the natural shape of animals and human
beings--to the point at which they become "ugly"
(*unschon*), "monstrous,"
"grotesque" or "bizarre" (*PKA*,
78, 84)--in order to show that the divine or spiritual, which
cannot be understood except in terms of the natural and sensuous, is
at the same time different from, and finds no adequate expression in,
the realm of the natural and sensuous. Hindu divinity is inseparable
from natural forms, but it indicates its distinctive presence by the
unnaturalness of the natural forms it adopts.




Hegel's judgment on Hindu art does not mean, by the way, that he
finds no merit at all in such art. He remarks on the splendor of Hindu
art and on the "most tender feeling" and the
"wealth of the finest sensuous naturalness" that such art
can display. He insists, however, that Hindu art fails to reach the
height of art, in which spirit is shown to be free in itself and is
given appropriate natural, visible shape (*PKA*, 
84).




The third stage in the development of "pre-art" is that of
genuinely *symbolic* art in which shapes and images are
deliberately designed and created to point to a determinate and quite
*separate* sphere of "interiority"
(*Innerlichkeit*) (*PKA*, 86). This is the
province of ancient Egyptian art. The Egyptians, Hegel tells us, were
the first people to "fix" (*fixieren*) the idea of
spirit as something inward that is separate and independent in itself
(*PKA*, 85). (In this context he refers to Herodotus,
who maintained that the Egyptians were "the first people to put
forward the doctrine of the immortality of the soul" [Herodotus,
145 [2: 123]].) Spirit, as Hegel understands it (in his philosophy of
subjective and objective spirit), is the activity of externalizing and
expressing itself in images, words, actions and institutions. With the
idea of spirit as "interiority," therefore, there
necessarily comes the drive to give an external shape to this inner
spirit, that is, to *produce* a shape for spirit from out of
spirit itself. The drive to create shapes and images--works of
art--through which the inner realm can make itself known is thus
an "instinct" in the Egyptians that is deeply rooted in the
way they understand spirit. In this sense, in Hegel's view,
Egyptian civilization is a more profoundly artistic civilization than
that of the Hindus (*Aesthetics*, 1: 354; *PKA*, 
86).




Egyptian art, however, is only symbolic art, not art in its full sense.
This is because the created shapes and images of Egyptian art do not
give direct, adequate expression to spirit, but merely *point
to*, or symbolize, an interiority that remains hidden from view.
Furthermore, the inner spirit, though fixed in the Egyptian
understanding as a "separate, independent inwardness"
(*PKA*, 86), is not itself understood as fully
*free* spirit. Indeed, the realm of spirit is understood by the
Egyptians to a large degree as the simple *negation* of the
realm of nature and life. That is to say, it is understood above all as the realm
of the *dead*.




The fact that death is the principal realm in which the independence of the soul
is preserved explains why the doctrine of the immortality of the soul
is so important to the Egyptians. It also explains why Hegel sees the
*pyramid* as the image that epitomizes Egyptian symbolic art.
The pyramid is a created shape that hides within it something separate
from it, namely a dead body. It thus serves as the perfect image of
Egyptian *symbols* which point to, but do not themselves reveal
and express, a realm of interiority that is independent but still lacks
the freedom and life of genuine spirit (*Aesthetics*, 1:
356).




For Hegel, Greek art contains symbolic elements (such as the eagle to
symbolize the power of Zeus), but the core of Greek art is not the
symbol. Egyptian art, by contrast, is symbolic through and through.
Indeed, Egyptian consciousness as a whole, in Hegel's view, is
essentially symbolic. Animals, for example, are regarded as symbols or
masks of something deeper, and so animal faces are often used as masks
(by amongst others, embalmers). Symbolism can also be multi-layered:
the image of the phoenix, Hegel claims, symbolizes natural (especially,
celestial) processes of disappearance and reemergence, but those
processes are themselves viewed as symbols of spiritual rebirth
(*PKA*, 87).




As noted above, the pyramid epitomizes the symbolic art of the
Egyptians. Such art, however, does not just point symbolically to the
realm of the dead; it also bears witness to an incipient but still
undeveloped awareness that true inwardness is found in the living human
spirit. It does so, Hegel maintains, by showing the human spirit
struggling to emerge from the animal. The image that best depicts this
emergence is, of course, that of the sphinx (which has the body of a
lion and the head of a human being). The human form is also mixed with
that of animals in images of gods, such as Horus (who has a human body
and a falcon's head). Such images, however, do not constitute art
in the full sense because they fail to give adequate expression to free
spirit in the form of the fully *human* being. They are mere
symbols that partially disclose an interiority whose true character
remains hidden from view (and mysterious even to the Egyptians
themselves).




Even when the human form is depicted in Egyptian art without
adulteration, it is still not animated by a genuinely free and living
spirit and so does not become the shape of freedom itself. Figures,
such as the Memnon Colossi of Amenhotep III in Western Thebes, display
no "freedom of movement" (*PKA*, 89), in
Hegel's view, and other smaller figures, which stand with their arms
pressed to their sides and their feet firmly planted on the ground,
lack "grace [*Grazie*] of movement." Egyptian
sculpture is praised by Hegel as "worthy of admiration";
indeed, he claims that under the Ptolemies (305-30 B.C.)
Egyptian sculpture exhibited great "delicacy" (or
"elegance") (*Zierlichkeit*). Nonetheless, for all
its merits, Egyptian art does not give shape to real freedom and life
and so fails to fulfill the true purpose of art.




The fourth stage of pre-art is that in which spirit gains such a degree
of freedom and independence that spirit and nature "fall
apart" (*PKA*, 89). This stage is in turn
sub-divided into three. The first sub-division comprises
*sublime* art: the poetic art of the Jewish people.




In Judaism, Hegel maintains, spirit is understood to be fully free and
independent. This freedom and independence is, however, attributed to
the divine rather than the human spirit. God is thus conceived as a
"free spiritual subject" (*PKA*, 75), who is
the creator of the world and the power over everything natural and
finite. That which is natural and finite is, by contrast, regarded as
something "negative" in relation to God, that is, as
something that does not exist for its own sake but that has been
created to *serve* God (*PKA*, 90).




Judaic spirituality, in Hegel's view, is not capable of producing
works of true beauty because the Jewish God transcends the world of
nature and finitude and cannot *manifest itself* in that world
and be given visible shape in it. Jewish poetry (the Psalms) gives
expression, rather, to the sublimity of God by praising and exalting
Him as the source of all things. At the same time, such poetry gives
"brilliant" (*glanzend*) expression to the pain
and fear felt by the sinful in relation to their Lord
(*PKA*, 91).




The second sub-division of this fourth stage of pre-art comprises what
Hegel calls "oriental pantheism" and is found in the poetry
of Islamic "Arabs, Persians, and Turks" (*PKA*,
93), such as the Persian lyric poet Hafez (German: Hafis) (c.
1310-1389). In such pantheism, God is also understood to stand
sublimely above and apart from the realm of the finite and natural, but
his relation to that realm is held to be *affirmative*, rather
than negative. The divine raises things to their own magnificence,
fills them with spirit, gives them life and in this sense is actually
*immanent* in things (*Aesthetics*, 1: 368;
*PKA*, 93).




This in turn determines the relation that the poet has to objects. For
the poet, too, is free and independent of things, but also has an
affirmative relation to them. That is to say, he feels an identity
with things and sees his own untroubled freedom reflected in
them. Such pantheism thus comes close to genuine art, for it uses
natural objects, such as a rose, as poetic "images"
(*Bilder*) of its own feeling of "cheerful, blessed
inwardness" (*PKA*, 94-5). The pantheistic spirit remains, however, free within itself in distinction from and in
relation to natural objects; it does not create shapes of its
own--such as the idealized figures of the Greek gods--in
which its freedom comes directly into view. (Note, by the way, that in the Hotho edition of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics pantheistic Islamic poetry is placed before, rather than after, the poetry of Judaism; see *Aesthetics*, 1: 364-77.)




The third sub-division of the fourth stage of pre-art is that in which
there is the clearest break between spirit and the realm of the
natural or sensuous. At this stage, the spiritual aspect--that
which is inner and, as it were, invisible--takes the form of
something quite separate and distinct. It is also something finite and
limited: an idea or *meaning* entertained by human beings. The
sensuous element is in turn something separate and distinct from the
meaning. It has no intrinsic connection to the meaning, but is, as
Hegel puts it, "external" to that meaning. The sensuous
element--the pictorial or poetic image--is thus connected
with the meaning by nothing but the subjective "wit" or
imagination of the poet (*PKA*, 95). This occurs, Hegel
maintains, in fables, parables, allegories, metaphors and similes.




This third sub-division is not associated with any particular
civilization, but is a form of expression that is found in many
different ones. Hegel contends, however, that allegory, metaphor and
simile do not constitute the core of truly beautiful art, because they
do not present us with the very freedom of spirit itself, but *point
to* (and so symbolize) a meaning that is separate and independent.
A metaphor, such as "Achilles is a lion," does not embody
the spirit of the individual hero in the way that a Greek sculpture
does, but is a metaphor *for* something that is distinct from
the metaphor itself (see *Aesthetics*, 1: 402-8;
*PKA*, 104).




Hegel's account of symbolic art (or "pre-art") draws
widely on the work of other writers, such as his former colleague at
Heidelberg, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, the author of *Symbolism and
Mythology of Ancient Peoples, especially the Greeks* (1810-12).
Hegel's account is not meant to be strictly historical, but
rather to place the various forms of pre-art discussed in a
*logical* relation to one another. This relation is determined
by the degree to which, in each form of pre-art, spirit and nature (or
the sensuous) are *differentiated* from one another.




To recapitulate: in Zoroastrianism, spirit and nature are in immediate
*identity* with one another (as the Light). In Hindu art, there
is an immediate *difference* between the spiritual (the divine)
and nature, but the spiritual remains abstract and indeterminate in
itself and so can be brought to mind only through images of natural
things (unnaturally distorted). In Egyptian art, the spiritual is again
*different* from the realm of the merely natural and sensuous.
In contrast to the indeterminate divinity of the Hindus, however,
Egyptian spirituality (in the form of the gods and of the human soul)
is fixed, separate and determinate in itself. The images of Egyptian
art thus point *symbolically* to a realm of spirit that remains
hidden from direct view. The spirit to which such symbolic images
point, however, lacks genuine freedom and life and is often identified
with the realm of the dead.




In the sublime poetry of the Jews, God is represented as transcendent
and as a "*free* spiritual subject." Finite human
beings, however, are portrayed in a *negative* relation to God
in that they are created to serve and praise God and are pained by
their own sinfulness. In the sublime poetry of "oriental
pantheism" God is once again portrayed as transcendent, but, in
contrast to Judaism, God and finite things are shown to stand in an
*affirmative* relation to one another: things are infused with
spirit and life by God. The poet's relation to things is,
accordingly, one in which his own *free spirit* finds itself
reflected in the natural things around him.




In the last stage of pre-art, the difference between the spiritual and
the natural (or sensuous) is taken to its limit: the spiritual element
(the "meaning") and the sensuous element (the
"shape" or "image") are now completely
independent of, and *external* to, one another. Furthermore,
each is finite and limited. This is the realm of allegory and metaphor.


#### 6.2.2 Classical Art




Hegel does not deny the magnificence or elegance of pre-art, but he
maintains that it falls short of art proper. The latter is found in
*classical* art, or the art of the ancient Greeks.




Classical art, Hegel contends, fulfills the concept of art in that it
is the perfect sensuous expression of the freedom of spirit. It is in
classical art, therefore--above all in ancient Greek sculpture
(and drama)--that true beauty is to be found. Indeed, Hegel
maintains, the gods of ancient Greece exhibit "absolute beauty
as such": "there can be nothing more beautiful than the
classical; there is the ideal" (*PKA*, 124, 135;
see also *Aesthetics*, 1: 427).




Such beauty consists in the perfect fusion of the spiritual and the
sensuous (or natural). In true beauty the visible shape before us does
not merely intimate the presence of the divine through the unnatural
distortion of its form, nor does it point beyond itself to a hidden
spirituality or to divine transcendence. Rather, the shape manifests
and embodies free spirituality in its very contours. In true beauty,
therefore, the visible shape is not a symbol of, or metaphor for, a
meaning that lies beyond the shape, but is the *expression* of
spirit's freedom that brings that freedom directly into view.
Beauty is sensuous, visible shape so transformed that it stands as the
visible embodiment of freedom itself.




Hegel does not deny that Greek art and mythology contain many symbolic
elements: the story, for example, that Cronus, the father of Zeus,
consumed his own children symbolizes the destructive power of time
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 492; *PKA*, 120). In
Hegel's view, however, the distinctive core of Greek art consists
in works of ideal beauty in which the freedom of spirit is made visible
for the first time in history. Three conditions had to be met for such
beautiful art to be produced.




First, the divine had to be understood to be freely self-determining
spirit, to be divine *subjectivity* (not just an abstract power
such as the Light). Second, the divine had to be understood to take the
form of *individuals* who could be portrayed in sculpture and
drama. The divine had to be conceived, in other words, not as sublimely
transcendent, but as spirituality that is *embodied* in many
different ways. The beauty of Greek art thus presupposed Greek
polytheism. Third, the proper shape of free spirit had to be recognized
to be the human body, not that of an animal. Hindu and Egyptian gods
were often portrayed as a fusion of human and animal forms; by
contrast, the principal Greek gods were depicted in ideal human form.
Hegel notes that Zeus would sometimes take on animal form, for example
when he was engaged in seduction; but he sees Zeus'
transformation of himself into a bull for the purpose of seduction as a
lingering echo of Egyptian mythology in the Greek world (see
*PKA*, 119-20, in which Hegel confuses Io, who in another story was
herself changed into a white cow by Zeus to protect her from the jealous Hera, with Europa,
who was the object of Zeus' love in the story Hegel has in
mind).




Not only do Greek art and beauty presuppose Greek religion and
mythology, but Greek religion itself *requires* art in order to
give a determinate identity to the gods. As Hegel notes (following
Herodotus), it was the poets Homer and Hesiod who gave the Greeks their
gods, and Greek understanding of the gods was developed and expressed
above all in their sculpture and drama (rather than in distinctively
theological writings) (*PKA*, 123-4). Greek religion
thus took the form of what Hegel in the *Phenomenology* called a
"religion of art." Moreover, Greek art achieved the highest
degree of beauty, in Hegel's view, precisely *because* it
was the highest expression of the freedom of spirit enshrined in Greek
religion.




Although Greek sculpture and drama achieved unsurpassed heights of
beauty, such art did not give expression to the *deepest*
freedom of the spirit. This is because of a deficiency in the Greek
conception of divine and human freedom. Greek religion was so well
suited to aesthetic expression because the gods were conceived as free
individuals who were wholly at one with their bodies and their sensuous
life. In other words, they were free spirits still immersed in nature
(*PKA*, 132-3). In Hegel's view, however, a
deeper freedom is attained when the spirit withdraws into itself out of
nature and becomes pure self-knowing interiority. Such an understanding
of spirit is expressed, according to Hegel, in Christianity. The
Christian God is thus pure self-knowing spirit and love who created
human beings so that they, too, may become such pure spirit and love.
With the emergence of Christianity comes a new form of art:
*romantic* art. Hegel uses the term "romantic" to
refer not to the art of the late 18th- and early 19th-century German
Romantics (many of whom he knew personally), but to the whole tradition
of art that emerged in Western Christendom.


#### 6.2.3 Romantic Art




Romantic art, like classical art, is the sensuous expression or
manifestation of the freedom of spirit. It is thus capable of genuine
beauty. The freedom it manifests, however, is a profoundly
*inward* freedom that finds its highest expression and
articulation not in art itself but in religious faith and philosophy.
Unlike classical art, therefore, romantic art gives expression to a
freedom of the spirit whose true home lies *beyond* art. If
classical art can be compared to the human body which is thoroughly
suffused with spirit and life, romantic art can be compared to the
human face which discloses the spirit and personality *within*.
Since romantic art actually *discloses* the inner spirit,
however, rather than merely pointing to it, it differs from symbolic
art which it otherwise resembles.




Romantic art, for Hegel, takes three basic forms. The first is that of
explicitly *religious* art. It is in Christianity, Hegel
contends, that the true nature of spirit is revealed. What is
represented in the story of Christ's life, death and resurrection
is the idea that a truly *divine* life of freedom and love is at
the same time a fully *human* life in which we are willing to
"die" to ourselves and let go of what is most precious to
us. Much religious romantic art, therefore, focuses on the suffering
and death of Christ.




Hegel notes that it is not appropriate in romantic art to depict Christ
with the idealized body of a Greek god or hero, because what is central
to Christ is his irreducible humanity and mortality. Romantic art,
therefore, breaks with the classical ideal of beauty and incorporates
real human frailty, pain and suffering into its images of Christ (and
also of religious martyrs). Indeed, such art can even go to the point
of being "ugly" (*unschon*) in its depiction of
suffering (*PKA*, 136).




If, however, romantic art is to fulfill the purpose of art and present
true freedom of spirit in the form of beauty, it must show the
suffering Christ or suffering martyrs to be imbued with a profound
*inwardness* (*Innigkeit*) of feeling and a genuine sense
of *reconciliation* (*Versohnung*)
(*PKA*, 136-7): for such an inward sense of
reconciliation, in Hegel's view, is the deepest spiritual
freedom. The sensuous expression (in color or words) of this inner
sense of reconciliation constitutes what Hegel calls the "beauty
of inwardness" or "spiritual beauty" (*geistige
Schonheit*) (*PKA*, 137). Strictly speaking,
such spiritual beauty is not as consummately *beautiful* as
classical beauty, in which the spirit and the body are perfectly fused
with one another. Spiritual beauty, however, is the product of, and
reveals, a much more profound *inner* freedom of spirit than
classical beauty and so moves and engages us much more readily than do
the relatively cold statues of Greek gods.




The most profound spiritual beauty in the visual arts is found, in
Hegel's view, in painted images of the Madonna and Child, for in these
what is expressed is the feeling of boundless *love*. Hegel
had a special affection for the paintings of the Flemish Primitives,
Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling, whose work he saw on his visits to
Ghent and Bruges in 1827 (*Hegel: The Letters*, 661-2),
but he also held Raphael in high regard and was particularly moved by
the expression of "pious, modest mother-love" in
Raphael's *Sistine Madonna* which he saw in Dresden in 1820
(*PKA*, 39; Poggeler *et al* 1981, 142). Greek
sculptors portrayed Niobe as simply "petrified in her
pain" at the loss of her children. By contrast, the painted
images of the Virgin Mary are imbued by van Eyck and Raphael with an
"eternal love" and a "soulfulness" that Greek
statues can never match (*PKA*, 142, 184).




The second fundamental form of romantic art identified by Hegel depicts
what he calls the secular "virtues" of the free spirit
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 553; *PKA*, 135). These are not
the *ethical* virtues displayed by the heroes and heroines of
Greek tragedy: they do not involve a commitment to the necessary
institutions of freedom, such as the family or the state. Rather, they
are the *formal* virtues of the romantic hero: that is to say,
they involve a commitment by the free individual, often grounded in contingent choice or passion, to an object or another person.




Such virtues include that of romantic love (which concentrates on a
particular, contingent person), loyalty towards an individual (that can
change if it is to one's advantage), and courage (which
is often displayed in the pursuit of personal ends, such as rescuing a
damsel in distress, but can also be displayed in the pursuit of
quasi-religious ends, such as the hunt for the Holy Grail)
(*PKA*, 143-4).




Such virtues are found primarily in the world of mediaeval chivalry
(and are subjected to ridicule, Hegel points out, in Cervantes'
*Don Quixote*) (*Aesthetics*, 1: 591-2;
*PKA*, 150). They can, however, also crop up in more
modern works and, indeed, are precisely the virtues displayed in an
art-form of which Hegel could know nothing, namely the American
Western.




The third fundamental form of romantic art depicts the formal freedom
and independence of character. Such freedom is not associated with any
ethical principles or (at least not principally) with the formal virtues just
mentioned, but consists simply in the "firmness"
(*Festigkeit*) of character (*Aesthetics*, 1: 577;
*PKA*, 145-6). This is freedom in its modern, secular
form. It is displayed most magnificently, Hegel believes, by
characters, such as Richard III, Othello and Macbeth, in the plays of
Shakespeare. Note that what interests us about such individuals is not
any moral purpose (which they invariably lack anyway), but simply the energy and
self-determination (and often ruthlessness) that they exhibit. Such
characters must have an internal richness (revealed through imagination
and language) and not just be one-dimensional, but their main appeal is
their formal freedom to commit themselves to a course of action, even
at the cost of their own lives. These characters do not constitute
moral or political ideals, but they are the appropriate objects of
modern, romantic art whose task is to depict freedom even in its most
secular and amoral forms.




Hegel also sees romantic beauty in more inwardly sensitive characters,
such as Shakespeare's Juliet. After meeting Romeo, Hegel remarks,
Juliet suddenly opens up with love like a rosebud, full of childlike
naivety. Her beauty thus lies in being the embodiment of love. Hamlet
is a somewhat similar character: far from being simply weak (as Goethe
thought), Hamlet, in Hegel's view, displays the inner beauty of a
profoundly noble soul (*Aesthetics*, 1: 583; *PKA*,
147-8).


#### 6.2.4 The "End" of Art




One should note that the development of romantic art, as Hegel
describes it, involves the increasing secularization and humanization
of art. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (as in ancient Greece)
art was closely tied to religion: art's function was to a large
degree to make the divine visible. With the Reformation, however,
religion turned inward and found God to be present in *faith
alone*, not in the icons and images of art. As a result, Hegel
points out, we who live after the Reformation "no longer venerate
works of art" (*VPK*, 6). Furthermore, art itself was
released from its close ties to religion and allowed to become fully
secular. "To Protestantism alone," Hegel states, "the
important thing is to get a sure footing in the prose of life, to make
it absolutely valid in itself independently of religious associations,
and to let it develop in unrestricted freedom"
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 598).




It is for this reason, in Hegel's view, that art in the modern
age no longer meets our highest needs and no longer affords us the
satisfaction that it gave to earlier cultures and civilizations. Art
satisfied our *highest* needs when it formed an integral part of
our *religious* life and revealed to us the nature of the divine
(and, as in Greece, the true character of our fundamental ethical
obligations). In the modern, post-Reformation world, however, art has
been released (or has emancipated itself) from subservience to
religion. As a result, "art, considered in its highest vocation,
is and remains for us a thing of the past" (*Aesthetics*,
1: 11).




This does not mean that art now has no role to play and that it
provides no satisfaction at all. Art is no longer the highest and most
adequate way of expressing the truth (as it was, according to Hegel, in
fifth-century Athens); we moderns now seek ultimate or
"absolute" truth in religious faith or in philosophy,
rather than in art. (Indeed, the considerable importance we assign to
philosophy is evident, in Hegel's view, in the prominence of the
philosophical study of art itself in modernity [*Aesthetics*, 1:
11; *VPK*, 6].) Yet art in modernity continues to perform the
significant function of giving visible and audible expression to our
distinctively human freedom and to our understanding of ourselves in
all our finite humanity.




Hegel does not claim, therefore, that art as a whole simply comes to an
end or "dies" in the modern age. His view is, rather, that
art plays (or at least should play) a more *limited* role now
than it did in ancient Greece or in the Middle Ages. Yet Hegel does
think that art in modernity comes to an end *in a certain
respect*. To understand why he thinks this, we need to consider his
claim that art in modernity "falls apart"
(*zerfallt*) into the exploration of everyday
contingencies, on the one hand, and the celebration of witty,
"humorous" subjectivity, on the other (*PKA*,
151).




In Hegel's view, much painting and poetry after the Reformation
focuses its attention on the prosaic details of ordinary daily life,
rather than on the intimacy of religious love or the magnificent
resolve and energy of tragic heroes. To the extent that such works of
art no longer aim to give expression to divine or human freedom but
seek (apparently at least) to do no more than "imitate
nature," they prompt Hegel to consider whether they still count
as "art works" in the strictly philosophical (as opposed to
the more generally accepted) sense of the term. In the twentieth
century it is the abstract creations of, for example, Jackson Pollock
or Carl Andre that usually provoke the question: "is this
art?". In Hegel's mind, however, it is works that appear to
be purely naturalistic and "representational" that raise
this question. His view is that such works count as genuine works of
art only when they do more than merely *imitate* nature. The
naturalistic and prosaic works that best meet this criterion, he
maintains, are the paintings of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Dutch masters.




In such works, Hegel claims, the painter does not aim simply to show us
what grapes, flowers or trees look like: we know *that* already
from nature. The painter aims, rather, to capture the--often
fleeting--"life" (*Lebendigkeit*) of things:
"the lustre of metal, the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by
candlelight, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun, a smile, the
expression of a swiftly passing emotion" (*Aesthetics*, 1:
599). Often, indeed, the painter seeks to delight us specifically with
the animated play of the colors of gold, silver, velvet or fur. In such
works, Hegel notes, we encounter not just the depiction of things, but
"as it were, an objective music, a peal in colour [*ein
Tonen in Farben*]" (*Aesthetics*, 1:
598-600).




 A
genuine work of art is the sensuous expression of divine or human
freedom and life. Paintings that are no more than prosaic, naturalistic
depictions of everyday objects or human activity would thus appear to
fall short of genuine art. Dutch artists, however, turn such depictions
into true works of art precisely by imbuing objects with "the
fullness of life." In so doing, Hegel claims, they give expression
to their own sense of freedom, "comfort" and
"contentment" and their own exuberant subjective skill
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 599; *PKA*, 152). The paintings
of such artists may lack the classical beauty of Greek art, but they
exhibit magnificently the subtle beauties and delights of everyday
modern life. 




A much more overt expression of subjectivity is found by Hegel in
works of modern *humor*. Such witty, ironic, humorous
subjectivity--one we might now describe as
"anarchic"--manifests itself in playing or
"sporting" with objects, "deranging" and
"perverting" material and "rambling to and
fro," and in the "criss-cross movement of subjective
expressions, views, and attitudes whereby the author sacrifices
himself and his topics alike" (*Aesthetics*, 1:
601). Hegel claims that works of "*true* humour,"
such as Laurence Sterne's
*Tristram Shandy* (1759), succeed in making "what is
substantial emerge out of contingency." Their "triviality
[thus] affords precisely the supreme idea of depth"
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 602). In other works, by contrast--such
as those of Hegel's contemporary, Jean Paul Richter--all
we encounter is the "baroque mustering of things objectively
furthest removed from one another" and "the most confused
disorderly jumbling of topics related only in his own subjective
imagination" (*Aesthetics*, 1: 601). In such works, we do
not see human freedom giving itself objective expression, but rather
witness subjectivity "destroying and dissolving everything that
proposes to make itself objective and win a firm shape for itself in
reality" (*Aesthetics*, 1: 601).




To the extent that works of humor do *not* give body to true
self-determining freedom and life--or afford "the supreme
idea of depth"--but merely manifest the power of
arbitrary, subjective wit to subvert the settled order, such works, in
Hegel's view, *no longer count as genuine works of art*.
Consequently, "when the subject lets itself go in this way, art
thereby comes to an end [*so hort damit die Kunst
auf*]" (*PKA*, 153). In this respect, Hegel
does after all proclaim that art comes to an end in modernity. This is
not because art no longer performs a religious function and so no
longer fulfills the highest vocation of art; it is because there emerge
in modernity certain "art works" that are no longer the
expressions of true human freedom and life and so no longer genuine
*art works* at all.




As was noted above, however, this does not mean that art *as a
whole* comes to an end in the early nineteenth century. Art, in
Hegel's view, still has a future: "we may well hope," he
says, "that art will always rise higher and come to
perfection" (*Aesthetics*, 1: 103). For Hegel, the
distinctive character of *genuine* *art* in contemporary
(and future) modernity--and thus of genuinely modern art--is
twofold. On the one hand, it remains bound to give expression to
concrete human life and freedom; on the other hand, it is no longer
restricted to any of the three art-forms. That is to say, it does not
have to observe the proprieties of classical art or explore the
intense emotional inwardness or heroic freedom or comfortable
ordinariness that we find in romantic art. Modern art, for Hegel, can
draw on features of any of the art-forms (including symbolic art) in
its presentation of human life. Indeed, it can also present human life
and freedom indirectly through the depiction of nature.




The focus of modern art, therefore, does not have to be on one
particular conception of human freedom rather than another. The new
"holy of holies" in art is *humanity* itself--
"*Humanus*"--that is, "the depths and
heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows,
its strivings, deeds, and fates" (*Aesthetics*, 1: 607).
Modern art, in Hegel's view, thus enjoys an unprecedented freedom to
explore "the infinity of the human heart" in manifold ways
(*VA*, 181). For this reason, there is little that Hegel
can say about the path that art should take in the future; that is for
artists to decide.




Hegel's judgment that modern artists are--and are quite
rightly--free to adopt whatever style they please has surely
been confirmed by the history of art since Hegel's death in 1831.
There is reason to suspect, however, that Hegel might not have welcomed
many of the developments in post-Hegelian art. This is due to the fact
that, although he does not lay down any rules that are to govern modern
art, he does identify certain conditions that should be met if modern
art is to be genuine art. Hegel notes, for example, that such art
should "not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful
and capable of artistic treatment" (*Aesthetics*, 1: 605;
*VPK*, 204). He insists that modern artists should draw their
content from their own human spirit and that "nothing that can be
*living* [*lebendig*] in the human breast is alien to
that spirit." He also remarks that modern art may represent
"everything in which the human being as such is capable of being
*at home* [*heimisch*]" (*Aesthetics*, 1:
607). These may appear to be fairly innocuous conditions, but they
suggest that certain post-Hegelian art works would not count in
Hegel's eyes as genuine works of art. These might include works
that by no stretch of the imagination can be called
"beautiful" (such as some of the paintings of Willem De
Kooning or Francis Bacon), or works in which it is evidently hard to
feel very much "at home" (such as the writings of Franz
Kafka). Hegel's account of the different arts (such as sculpture
and painting) also suggests that he would not have regarded the move
from figurative to abstract visual art as appropriate: Netherlandish
and Dutch painters excelled in the creating of "objective
music" through the play of colors, yet they did so not in the
abstract but in the very depiction of concrete, identifiable objects.
(Robert Pippin takes a different view on this last point; see Pippin
2007.)




From a twentieth- or twenty-first-century point of view, Hegel's
stance may well look conservative. From his point of view, however, he
was trying to understand what conditions would have to be met for works
of art to be genuine works of art *and* genuinely modern. The
conditions that Hegel identified--namely that art should present
the richness of human freedom and life and should allow us to feel at
home in its depictions--are ones that many modern artists (for
example, Impressionists such as Monet, Sisley and Pissarro) have felt
no trouble in meeting. For others, these conditions are simply too
restrictive. They have thus taken modern art in a direction in which,
from a Hegelian perspective, it has ceased to be *art* in the
true sense any longer.


### 6.3 The System of the Individual Arts




Art, in Hegel's account, not only undergoes a historical
development (from symbolic art through classical art to romantic and
then modern art), but also differentiates itself into different arts.
Each art has a distinctive character and exhibits a certain affinity
with one or more of the art-forms. Hegel does not provide an exhaustive
account of all recognized arts (he says little, for example, about
dance and nothing, obviously, about cinema), but he examines the five
arts that he thinks are made necessary by the very concept of art
itself.


#### 6.3.1 Architecture




Art, we recall, is the sensuous expression of divine and human
freedom. If it is to demonstrate that spirit is indeed free, it must
show that spirit is free in relation to that which is itself unfree,
spiritless and lifeless--that is, three-dimensional, inorganic
matter, weighed down by gravity. Art must, therefore, be the
transformation of such brute, heavy matter into the expression of
spiritual freedom, or what Hegel calls "the forming of the
inorganic" (*VPK*, 209). The art that gives heavy
matter the explicit form of spiritual freedom--and so works
stone and metal into the shape of a human being or a god--is
sculpture. Architecture, by contrast, gives matter an abstract,
*inorganic* form created by human understanding. It does not
animate matter in the manner of sculpture but invests matter with
strict regularity, symmetry and harmony (*PKA*, 155,
166). In so doing architecture turns matter not into the direct
sensuous expression of spiritual freedom, but into an artificially and
artfully shaped *surrounding* for the direct expression of
spiritual freedom in sculpture. The art of architecture fulfills its
purpose, therefore, when it creates classical temples to house statues
of the gods (*VPK*, 221).




Hegel points out, however, that prior to the emergence of classical
architecture in ancient Greece, architecture took the more primitive
form of "independent" (*selbstandig*) or
"symbolic" architecture (*Aesthetics*, 2: 635;
*PKA*, 159). The constructions that fall into this
category do not house or surround individual sculptures, like classical
Greek temples, but are themselves partly sculptural and partly
architectural. They are works of architectural sculpture or sculptural
architecture. Such constructions are sculptural in so far as they are
built for their own sake and do not serve to shelter or enclose
something else. They are works of architecture, however, in so far as
they are overtly heavy and massive and lack the animation of sculpture.
They are also sometimes arranged in rows, like columns, with no
distinctive individuality.




Some of these works of independent architecture have regular inorganic,
geometrical shapes (such as the temple of Bel described by Herodotus)
(see Herodotus, 79-80 [1: 181]); some are clearly embodiments of
the organic "force of life in nature" (such as the phallus
and the lingam) (*Aesthetics*, 2: 641); and some even have a
human form, albeit one that is abstract and colossal (such as the
Egyptian Memnons of Amenhotep III). In Hegel's view, however, all
such constructions have a symbolic significance for those who built
them. They were not built simply to provide shelter or security for
people (like a house or a castle), but are works of symbolic art.




These "independent" constructions are meaningful in
themselves: their meaning lies, for example, in their shape or in the
number of their parts. By contrast, the Egyptian pyramids contain a
"meaning" that is *separate* from the construction
itself. That "meaning," of course, is the body of the dead
pharaoh. Since they house within themselves something other than
themselves, pyramids, in Hegel's view, are, as it were, on the
way to being properly architectural. They fall short of proper
classical architecture, however, because what they shelter within
themselves is death, not the embodiment of the living god: they are, as
Hegel puts it, "crystals that shelter within them a departed
spirit" (*VPK*, 218). Furthermore, the
"meaning" that they contain is completely hidden within
them, invisible to all. Pyramids thus remain works of *symbolic*
art that point to a hidden meaning buried within them. Indeed, as was
noted above, Hegel claims that the pyramid is the image or symbol of
symbolic art itself (*Aesthetics*, 1: 356).




The epitome of symbolic art is symbolic architecture (specifically, the
pyramids). Architecture itself, however, comes into its own only with
the emergence of classical art: for it is only in the classical period
that architecture provides the surrounding for, and so becomes the
servant of, a sculpture that is itself the embodiment of free
spirit.




Hegel has much to say about the proper form of such a surrounding. The
main point is this: spiritual freedom is embodied in the sculpture of
the god; the house of the god--the temple--is something
quite distinct from, and subordinate to, the sculpture it surrounds;
the form of that temple should thus also be quite distinct from that of
the sculpture. The temple, therefore, should not mimic the flowing
contours of the human body, but should be governed by the abstract
principles of regularity, symmetry and harmony.




Hegel also insists that the form of the temple should be determined by
the *purpose* it serves: namely to provide an enclosure and
protection for the god (*VPK*, 221). This means that the
basic shape of the temple should contain only those features that are
needed to fulfill its purpose. Furthermore, it means (in Hegel's
view) that each part of the temple should perform a *specific*
function within the economy of the whole building and that different
functions should not be confused with one another. It is this latter
requirement that makes *columns* necessary. There is a
difference, for Hegel, between the task of bearing the roof and that of
enclosing the statue within a given space. The second task--that
of enclosure--is performed by a wall. If the first task is to be
clearly distinguished from the second, therefore, it must be performed
not by a wall but by a separate feature of the temple. Columns are
necessary in a classical temple, according to Hegel, because they
perform the distinct task of bearing the roof *without* forming
a wall. The classical temple is thus the most *intelligible* of
buildings because different functions are carried out in this way by
different architectural features and yet are harmonized with one
another. Herein, indeed, lies the beauty of such a temple
(*VPK*, 221, 224).




In contrast to classical architecture, romantic or "Gothic"
architecture is based on the idea of a closed house in which Christian
inwardness can find refuge from the outside world. In the Gothic
cathedral columns are located within, rather than around the outside
of, the enclosed space, and their overt function is no longer merely to
bear weight but to draw the soul up into the heavens. Consequently, the
columns or pillars do not come to a definite end (in a capital on which
rests the architrave of the classical temple), but continue up until
they meet to form a pointed arch or a vaulted roof. In this way, the
Gothic cathedral not only shelters the spirit of the religious
community, but also symbolizes the upward movement of that spirit in
its very structure (*PKA*, 170-1).




Hegel considers a relatively small range of buildings: he says almost
nothing, for example, about secular buildings. One should bear in mind,
however, that he is interested in architecture only in so far as it is
an art, not in so far as it provides us with protection and security in
our everyday lives. Yet it should also be noted that architecture, as
Hegel describes it, falls short of genuine art, as he defines it, since
it is never the direct sensuous expression of spiritual freedom itself
(in the manner of sculpture) (see *Aesthetics*, 2: 888). This is
a fundamental limitation of architecture: the structures of
"independent architecture" symbolize meanings that are more
or less indeterminate; the pyramids indicate the presence of a hidden
meaning, namely death; and even in its classical and romantic forms
architecture remains a "symbolic" art, in so far as the
structures it creates remain separate from the spirit they house
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 888). In no case is architecture the explicit
manifestation or embodiment of free spirituality itself. This does not,
however, make architecture any less necessary as a part of our
aesthetic and religious life. Nor does it prevent Hegel from seeking to
understand what distinguishes the "art" of architecture (as
opposed to the more everyday practice or business of architecture) in
both the classical and romantic eras.


#### 6.3.2 Sculpture




In contrast to architecture, sculpture works heavy matter into the
concrete expression of spiritual freedom by giving it the shape of the
*human being*. The high point of sculpture, for Hegel, was
achieved in classical Greece. In Egyptian sculpture the figures often
stand firm with one foot placed before the other and the arms held
tightly by the side of the body, giving the figures a rather rigid,
lifeless appearance. By contrast, the idealized statues of the gods
created by Greek sculptors, such as Phidias and Praxiteles, are clearly
alive and animated, even when the gods are depicted at rest. This
animation is apparent in the posture of the figure, in the nuanced
contours of the body and also in the free fall of the figure's
garments. Hegel greatly admired the sculpture of Michelangelo--a
cast of whose *Pieta* he saw in Berlin
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 790)--but it was the Greeks, in his
view, who set the standard for "ideal" sculptural beauty.
Indeed, Greek sculpture, according to Hegel, embodies the *purest
beauty* of which art itself is capable. (For a more detailed study
of Hegel's account of sculpture, see Houlgate 2007, 
56-89).


#### 6.3.3 Painting




Hegel was well aware that Greek statues were often painted in quite
a gaudy manner. He claims, however, that sculpture expresses spiritual
freedom and vitality in the three-dimensional *shape* of the
figure, rather than in the color that has been applied to it. In
painting, by contrast, it is color above all that is the medium of
expression. The point of painting, for Hegel, is not to show us what it
is for free spirit to be fully *embodied*. It is to show us only
what free spirit *looks like*, how it *manifests itself*
to the eye. The images of painting thus lack the three-dimensionality
of sculpture, but they add the detail and specificity provided by
color.




Hegel acknowledges that painting reached a degree of perfection in the
classical world, but he maintains that it is best suited to the
expression of romantic, Christian spirituality (and the secular freedom
of post-Reformation modernity) (*PKA*, 181). This is
because the absence of bodily solidity and the presence of color allow
the more *inward* spirituality of the Christian world to
manifest itself as such. If sculpture is the material embodiment of
spirit, painting gives us, as it were, the face of spirit in which the
soul within manifests itself *as* the soul *within*
(*PKA*, 183).




Painting, however, is also able--unlike sculpture--to set
divine and human spirit in relation to its external environment: it is
able to include within the painted image itself the natural landscape
and the architecture by which Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints or
secular figures are surrounded (*Aesthetics*, 2: 854). Indeed,
Hegel argues that painting--in contrast to sculpture, which
excels in presenting independent, free-standing individuals--is
altogether more suited to showing human beings in their
*relations* both to their environment and to one another: hence
the prominence in painting of, for example, depictions of the love
between the Virgin Mary and the Christ child.




Hegel's account of painting is extraordinarily rich and
wide-ranging. He has particular praise for Raphael, Titian and the
Dutch masters and, as noted earlier, is especially interested in the
ways in which painters can combine colors to create what he calls
"objective music" (*Aesthetics*, 1: 599-600). It
should be noted, however, that Hegel sees the abstract play of colors
as an integral part of the depiction of free human beings and does not
suggest that painting should ever become purely abstract and
"musical" (as it did in the twentieth century).


#### 6.3.4 Music




The next art in Hegel's "system of the individual
arts" is music itself. It, too, comes into its own in the period
of romantic art. Like sculpture and painting, but unlike architecture,
music gives direct expression to free subjectivity. Yet music goes even
further in the direction of expressing the *inwardness* of
subjectivity by dropping the dimensions of space altogether. It thus
gives no enduring *visual* expression to such subjectivity, but
expresses the latter in the organized succession of vanishing sounds.
Music, for Hegel, originates in the immediate uttering of feeling or
what he calls "interjection"--"the Ah
and Oh of the heart" (*Aesthetics*, 2: 903). Yet music is
more than just a cry of pain or a sigh; it is an organized, developed,
"cadenced" interjection. Music is thus not just a sequence
of sounds for its own sake, but is the structured expression in sounds
of inner subjectivity. Through rhythm, harmony and melody music allows
the soul to hear its own inner movement and to be moved in turn by what
it hears. It is "spirit, soul which resounds immediately for
itself and feels satisfied in hearing itself [*in ihrem
Sichvernehmen*]" (*Aesthetics*, 2: 939, translation
altered).




Music expresses, and allows us to hear and enjoy, the movement of the
soul in time through difference and dissonance back into its unity with
itself. It also expresses, and moves us to, various different
*feelings*, such as love, longing and joy (*Aesthetics*,
2: 940). In Hegel's view, however, the purpose of music is not
only to arouse feelings in us, but--as in all genuine art
--to enable us to enjoy a sense of reconciliation and
satisfaction in what we encounter. This, Hegel contends, is the secret
of truly "ideal" music, the music of Palestrina, Gluck,
Haydn and Mozart: even in the deepest grief "tranquillity of soul
is never missing [ ... ]; grief is expressed there, too, but it is
assuaged at once; [ ...] everything is kept firmly together in a
restrained form so that jubilation does not degenerate into a repulsive
uproar, and even a lament gives us the most blissful
tranquillity" (*Aesthetics*, 2: 939).




 Hegel notes that music is able to express feelings with especial
clarity when it is accompanied by a poetic text, and he had a
particular love of both church music and opera. Interestingly, however,
he argues that in such cases it is really the text that serves the
music, rather than the other way around, for it is the music above all
that expresses the profound movements of the soul (*Aesthetics*,
2: 934). Yet music does not have to be accompanied by a text; it can
also be "independent" instrumental music. Such music also
fulfills the aim of art by expressing the movements of the soul and
moving the soul in turn to "emotions in sympathy with it"
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 894). Over and above this expression, however,
independent music pursues the purely formal development of themes and
harmonies for its own sake. This, in Hegel's view, is a perfectly
appropriate, indeed necessary, thing for music to do. The danger he
sees, however, is that such formal development can become completely
*detached* from the musical expression of inward feeling and subjectivity, and
that, as a result, music can cease being a genuine art and become mere
artistry. Music, as it were, loses its soul and becomes nothing but
"skill and virtuosity in compilation" (*Aesthetics*,
2: 906). At this point, music no longer moves us to *feel*
anything, but simply engages our abstract understanding. It thereby
becomes the province of the "connoisseur" and leaves the
layman--who "likes most in music [ ... ] the
intelligible expression of feelings and ideas"
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 953)--behind.




Hegel admits that he is not as well versed in music as he is in the
other arts he discusses. He has a deep appreciation, however, for the
music of J.S. Bach, Handel and Mozart and his analyses of musical
rhythm, harmony and melody are highly illuminating. He was familiar
with, though critical of, the music of his contemporary Carl Maria von
Weber, and he had a particular affection for Rossini
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 159, 2: 949). Surprisingly, he never makes any
mention of Beethoven.


#### 6.3.5 Poetry




The last art that Hegel considers is also an art of sound, but sound
understood as the sign of ideas and inner representations--sound
as *speech*. This is the art of poetry (*Poesie*) in the
broad sense of the term. Hegel regards poetry as the "most
perfect art" (*PKA*, 197), because it provides the
richest and most *concrete* expression of spiritual freedom (in
contrast to sculpture which, in its classical form, gives us the
*purest* ideal beauty). Poetry is capable of showing spiritual
freedom both as concentrated inwardness *and* as action in space
and time. It is equally at home in symbolic, classical and romantic art
and, in this sense, is the "most unrestricted of the arts"
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 626).




Poetry, for Hegel, is not simply the structured presentation of ideas,
but the articulation of ideas in language, indeed in *spoken*
(rather than just written) language. An important aspect of the art of
poetry--and what clearly marks it off from prose--is thus
the musical ordering of *words* themselves or
"versification." In this respect, Hegel claims, there are
important differences between classical and romantic art: the ancients
place more emphasis on rhythmic structure in their verse, whereas in
Christendom (especially in France and Italy) greater use is made of
rhyme (*PKA*, 201-4).




The three basic forms of poetry identified by Hegel are epic, lyric and
dramatic poetry.


##### 6.3.5.1 Epic and Lyric poetry




Epic poetry presents spiritual freedom--that is, free human
beings--in the context of a world of circumstances and events.
"In the epic," Hegel states, "individuals act and
feel; but their actions are not independent, events [also] have their
right." What is described in such poetry, therefore, is "a
play between actions and events" (*PKA*, 208).
Epic individuals are situated individuals, caught up in a larger
enterprise (such as the Trojan War in Homer's *Iliad*).
What they do is thus determined as much by the situation in which they
find themselves as by their own will, and the consequences of their
actions are to a large degree at the mercy of circumstances. Epic
poetry thus shows us the *worldly* character--and
attendant limitations--of human freedom. (In this respect, Hegel
notes, Alexander the Great would not have made a good subject for epic
poetry, because "his world was his army"--
*his* creation under *his* control--and so was not
truly independent of his will [*PKA*, 213].)




Among the great epic poems Hegel discusses are Homer's
*Odyssey*, Dante's *Divine Comedy* and the
mediaeval Spanish poem *El Cid*. Much of what he has to say
about the epic, however, is based on his reading of Homer's
*Iliad*. In the modern period, Hegel maintains, the epic gives
way to the novel (*PKA*, 207, 217).




In contrast to the epic hero, the subject of lyric poetry does not
undertake tasks, journeys or adventures in the world but simply gives
expression--in hymns, odes or songs--to the self's
ideas and inner feelings. This can be done directly or via the poetic
description of something else, such as a rose, wine, or another person.
As always, Hegel's remarks about lyric poetry bear witness to his
extraordinary erudition and to his critical acumen. He lavishes
particular praise on Goethe's *West-Eastern Divan* (1819)
but criticizes the eighteenth-century poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
for wanting to create a new "poetic mythology"
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 1154-7; *PKA*, 218).


##### 6.3.5.2 Dramatic Poetry




Dramatic poetry combines the principles of epic and lyric poetry. It
shows characters acting in the world--in a given situation
--but their actions issue directly from their *own* inner
will (rather than being co-determined by events beyond the
agent's control). Drama thus presents the--all too often
self-destructive--consequences of free human action
*itself*.




Drama, for Hegel, is the "highest" and most concrete art
(*PKA*, 205)--the art in which human beings
themselves are the medium of aesthetic expression. (Seeing a play
performed by actors, as opposed to hearing it read aloud or reading it
for oneself, is thus central, in Hegel's view, to the experience of
drama [*Aesthetics*, 2: 1182-5; *PKA*,
223-4].) Drama, indeed, is the art in which all the other arts
are contained (virtually or actually): "the human being is the
living statue, architecture is represented by painting or there is
real architecture," and--in particular in Greek
drama--there is "music, dance and pantomime"
(*PKA*, 223). At this point, it is tempting to say that,
for Hegel, drama--to use Richard Wagner's expression--is the
"total work of art" (*Gesamtkunstwerk*). It is
doubtful, however, whether Hegel would have been sympathetic to
Wagner's project. Hegel remarks that drama takes the explicit form of
a "totality" in *opera*, which belongs more to the
sphere of music than to drama proper (*PKA*, 223). (He has
in mind in particular the operas of Gluck and Mozart.) In drama *as
such*, by contrast, language is what predominates and music plays
a subordinate role and may even be present only in the virtual form of
versification. The Wagnerian idea of a "music drama" that
is neither a straightforward opera nor a simple drama would thus
appear, from Hegel's point of view, to confuse two distinct arts.




Drama, for Hegel, does not depict the richness of the epic world or
explore the inner world of lyric feeling. It shows characters acting in
pursuit of their own will and interest and thereby coming into
conflict with other individuals (even if, as in the case of Hamlet,
after some initial hesitation). Hegel distinguishes between tragic and
comic drama and between classical and romantic versions of each. (He
also notes that in some plays, such as Goethe's *Iphigenie auf
Tauris*, tragedy threatens but is averted by acts of trust or
forgiveness [*Aesthetics*, 2: 1204].)




In classical Greek tragedy individuals are moved to act by an
*ethical* interest or "pathos," such as concern for
the family or for the state. The conflict between Antigone and Creon in
Sophocles' *Antigone* is of this kind, as is the conflict
acted out in Aeschylus' *Oresteia*. In Sophocles'
*Oedipus the King* the conflict is not a straightforwardly
ethical one, but it is nonetheless a conflict between two
"rights": the right of consciousness to accept
responsibility only for what it knows it has done, and the right of the
"unconscious"--of what we do not know--to be
accorded respect. The tragedy of Oedipus is that he pursues his right
to uncover the truth about the murder of Laius without ever considering
that he himself might be responsible for the murder or, indeed, that
there might be anything about him of which he is unaware
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 1213-14).




Greek tragic heroes and heroines are moved to act by the ethical (or
otherwise justified) interest with which they identify, but they act
*freely* in pursuit of that interest. Tragedy shows how such
free action leads to conflict and then to the violent (or sometimes
peaceful) resolution of that conflict. At the close of the drama, Hegel
maintains, we are shattered by the fate of the characters (at least
when the resolution is violent). We are also satisfied by the outcome,
because we see that *justice* has been done. Individuals, whose
interests--such as the family and the state--should be in
harmony with one another, set those interests in opposition to one
another; in so doing, however, they destroy themselves and thereby undo
the very opposition they set up. In the self-destruction of such
"one-sidedly" ethical characters, Hegel believes, we, the
audience, see the work of "eternal justice"
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 1198, 1215). This *reconciles* us to
the fate of the characters and so provides the sense of
"reconciliation which art should never lack"
(*Aesthetics*, 2: 1173).




In modern tragedy--by which Hegel means above all Shakespearean
tragedy--characters are moved not by an ethical interest, but by
a subjective passion, such as ambition or jealousy. These characters,
however, still act freely and destroy themselves through the free
pursuit of their passion. Tragic individuals, therefore--whether
ancient or modern--are not brought down by fate but are
ultimately responsible for their own demise. Indeed, Hegel maintains,
"innocent suffering is not the object of high art"
(*PKA*, 231-2). Drama that sees people primarily as
victims of circumstance or oppression (such as Georg
Buchner's *Woyzeck* [1836]) is thus, from a Hegelian point
of view, drama without genuine *tragedy*.




In comedy individuals also undermine their own endeavors in some way,
but the purposes that animate them are either inherently trivial ones
or grand ones which they pursue in a laughably inappropriate way. In
contrast to tragic characters, truly comic figures do not identify
themselves seriously with their laughable ends or means. They can thus
survive the frustration of their purposes, and often come to laugh at
themselves, in a way that tragic figures cannot. In this respect, Hegel
claims, characters in many modern comedies, such as those by
Moliere, are frequently ridiculous, but not genuinely
*comic*, characters: we laugh *at* Moliere's
miser or Shakespeare's Malvolio, but they do not laugh
*with* us at their own foibles. Truly comic figures are found
by Hegel in the plays of the ancient Greek dramatist
Aristophanes. What we encounter in such plays, Hegel maintains, is
"an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone
raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or
miserable in it at all: this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being
sure of himself, can bear the frustration of his aims and
achievements" (*Aesthetics*, 2: 1200). Modern equivalents
of such Aristophanic light-heartedness may be found in
Verdi's *Falstaff* (1893) and in the unrivalled comic genius of
Homer Simpson, both of which, of course, were unknown to Hegel. 




Comedy, in Hegel's view, marks the "dissolution of
art" (*Aesthetics*, 2: 1236). Yet the way in which comedy
"dissolves" art differs from the way in which modern ironic
humor does so. Ironic humor--at least of the kind found in the
work of Jean Paul Richter--is the expression of the "power
of subjective notions, flashes of thought" to "destroy and
dissolve everything that proposes to make itself objective"
(*Aesthetics*, 1: 601). It is the expression of the unchallenged
mastery of wit. Since Hegel does not regard such arbitrary mastery as
genuine freedom, he argues that works of ironic humor in which this
mastery is exhibited no longer count as genuine works of art. True
comedy, by contrast, is the expression of a sense of wholeness,
self-confidence and well-being--of subjective freedom and life
--that survives the *loss* of mastery and control over
one's life. Plays that express such freedom count as genuine
works of art. Yet they are works that show freedom to reside precisely
not in the *works* we undertake but within *subjectivity*
itself, within subjectivity that happily endures the frustration of its
laughable aims.




According to Hegel, the idea that true freedom is to be found in inner
spirituality that is prepared to let go of, or to "die to,"
its own selfish purposes lies at the heart of *religion*,
specifically of Christianity. True comedy, therefore, implicitly points
*beyond* art to religion. It is in this way--and not by
ceasing to be art--that comedy "dissolves" art.




Comedy thus takes art to its limit: beyond comedy there is no further
*aesthetic* manifestation of freedom, there is only religion
(and philosophy). Religion, in Hegel's view, does not make the
aesthetic expression of freedom redundant; indeed, it is often the
source of the greatest art. Yet religion provides a more profound
understanding of freedom than art, just as philosophy provides a
clearer and more profound understanding of freedom than religion.


## 7. Conclusion




Hegel's aesthetics has been the focus of--often highly
critical--attention since his death from philosophers such as
Heidegger, Adorno and Gadamer. Much of this attention has been devoted
to his supposed theory of the "end" of art. Perhaps
Hegel's most important legacy, however, lies in the claims that
art's task is the presentation of beauty and that beauty is a
matter of content as well as form. Beauty, for Hegel, is not just a
matter of formal harmony or elegance; it is the sensuous manifestation
in stone, color, sound or words of *spiritual freedom and life*.
Such beauty takes a subtly different form in the classical and romantic
periods and also in the different individual arts. In one form or
another, however, it remains the purpose of art, even in
modernity.




These claims by Hegel are normative, not just descriptive, and impose
certain restrictions on what can count as genuine art in the modern
age. They are not, however, claims made out of simple conservatism.
Hegel is well aware that art can be decorative, can promote moral and
political goals, can explore the depths of human alienation or simply
record the prosaic details of everyday life, and that it can do so with
considerable artistry. His concern, however, is that art that does
these things without giving us beauty fails to afford us the
*aesthetic* experience of freedom. In so doing, it deprives us
of a central dimension of a truly human life.