Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 2

Lectures on Aesthetics #2

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel's Aesthetics presents his seminal art theory. He surveys art history from ancient India, Egypt & Greece to the Romantic movement, criticizes major works & probes their meaning. Examples give scope for his judgment, vividly expositing his theory. His Introduction exposits of his philosophy of art, providing a way into the Aesthetics. Part 1 treats art's general nature: distinguishes art, as a spiritual experience, from religion & philosophy; discusses artistic differentiated from natural beauty & examines artistic genius. Part 2 provides art history divided into three periods: Symbolic (India, Persia, Egypt), Classical (Greece) & Romantic (medieval to 1800). Part 3 deals with architecture, scuplture, painting, music & literature.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, Germany

689 pages, hardback

First published January 1, 1835

About the author

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel formulated an elaborate system of historical development of ethics, government, and religion through the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute. Hegel was one of the most well-known historicist philosopher, and his thought presaged continental philosophy, including postmodernism. His system was inverted into a materialist ideology by Karl Marx, originally a member of the Young Hegelian faction.

Reviews

[Jared]

Hegel is so me coded for only writing a 3 paragraph conclusion for his 1237 page book

[Bruno Dal Molin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read the 4 volume edition by edusp in Portuguese. This was the first work by Hegel I have ever read and I’m certainly going to read more by him. I’m particularly curious about his other lectures, on religion and the history of philosophy.

The scope of this work is truly astounding, and it does seem to be greater than a book should impart - indeed, these are notes from a course, not meant to be published in bookform. How much from this is due to Hegel and how much to Rotho, his student who compiled the text? It is difficult, if not impossible, to know. This mystery is close to what we get when reading Plato mouthing Socrates: is Plato paraphrasing something Socrates said or is Socrates merely a mouthpiece for Plato himself? We do not know.

Whatever the case may be, I think there is a great chance that this is the best, meaning, most thorough, profound and illuminating - although not always clear, work ever written on art from a philosophical point of view. Who, other than Hegel, has come up with a treatise on the nature of art, an exposition of the development of art history according to that foundation and then of 5 different forms of art, including architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry (literature)? All the while including detailed examples of artworks from the most wide-ranging cultures and epochs? How many would be inclined to tackle such a task? And having done so, manage to captivate the reader (or as I imagine, the lecture attendee) with profundity of thought, interesting connections and what was most striking in the work, in my opinion, a great wealth of culture and knowledge presented?

I know of no other contender to be the philosophical master of art. Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Benjamin - no one comes close. This work is nothing less, I think, than THE masterclass on art.

[شمس · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, with the development of the kinds of comedy we have reached the real end of our philosophical inquiry. We began with symbolic art where personality struggles to find itself as form and content and to become objective to itself. We proceeded to the plastic art of Greece where the Divine, now conscious of itself, is presented to us in living individuals. We ended with the romantic art of emotion and deep feeling where absolute subjective personality moves free in itself and in the spiritual world.

Now at the end we have arranged every essential category of the beautiful and every essential form of art into a philosophical garland, and weaving it is one of the worthiest tasks that philosophy is capable of completing. For in art we have to do, not with any agreeable or useful child’s play, but with the liberation of the spirit from the content and forms of finitude, with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in what is apparent and visible, with an unfolding of the truth which is not exhausted in natural history but revealed in world-history. Art itself is the most beautiful side of that history and it is the best compensation for hard work in the world and the bitter labour for knowledge. For this reason my treatment of the subject could not consist in a mere criticism of works of art or an instruction for producing them. My one aim has been to seize in thought and to prove the fundamental nature of the beautiful and art, and to follow it through all the stages it has gone through in the course of its realization.

I hope that in this chief point my exposition has satisfied you. And now when the link forged between us generally and in relation to our common aim has been broken, it is my final wish that the higher and indestructible bond of the Idea of beauty and truth may link us and keep us firmly united now and forever.
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What depth of feeling, what spiritual life, what inner wealth of profound emotion, what sublimity and charm, what a human heart . . .

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If Western Philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, Aesthetics is a series of footnotes to Hegel.

The comprehensive work on Aesthetics. Titanic, expansive, and systematic.
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This may provide a reason right enough for the origin of half-columns, but nevertheless half-columns are simply repugnant, because in them two different opposed purposes stand beside one another without any inner necessity and they are confused with one another.

In general the Greek temples present us with an aspect which is satisfying, and, so to say, more than satisfying.
(α) There is no upward emphasis; the whole stretches out directly in breath and width without rising. Confronted by it the eye scarcely needs to direct its glance upwards; on the contrary it is allured by the breadth, while the medieval German [i.e. Gothic] architecture almost struggles upward immeasurably and lifts itself to the sky. With the Greeks the chief thing remains the breath as a firm and convenient foundation on the ground, and the height is drawn rather from a man’s height, but increased with the increased breadth and width of the building.

An elevation of soul above the restrictions of existence . . .

It is along this road of spirit’s return into itself out of matter and mass that we encounter sculpture.

The sculptured shape is therefore emancipated from the architectural purpose of serving as a mere external nature and environment for the spirit and it exists simply for its own sake. But despite this freedom, a sculpture does nevertheless remain essentially connected with its surroundings. Neither a statue nor a group, still less a relief, can be fashioned without considering the place where the work of art is to be put. A sculptor should not first complete his work and only afterwards look around to see whither it is to be taken: on the contrary, his very conception of the work must be connected with specific external surroundings and their spatial form and their locality. For this reason sculpture retains a permanent relation with spaces formed architecturally.

If we go on to compare sculpture with the other arts, it is especially painting and poetry that come into consideration. Both single statues and groups present us with man as he is, with spirit completely in the shape of the body. Thus sculpture seems to have the mode truest to nature for representing the spirit, while painting and poetry seem to be unnatural because painting uses only flat surfaces instead of the three visible spatial dimensions which the human form and other things in nature actually occupy; and still less does speech express the corporeal, for by its utterance it can communicate only ideas of it.

. . . precisely the fullness and freedom of the inner life, the infinite and eternal, in which we can immerse ourselves for ever.

As a general remark I will here only observe that just as the Greeks were unsurpassed in invention, so too they amaze us by the astounding elaboration and skill of their technical execution.

But on the whole, unless wood is gilded or otherwise overlaid, it seems on account of its own grain, and the way the grain runs, to be unsuited for grand works and more adapted to smaller ones for which it was commonly used in the Middle Ages and is still employed even today.

The most suitable subject for sculpture is the peaceful and substantive immersion of character in itself. The character’s spiritual individuality emerges into and completely masters the body in which it has its real existence, and the sensuous material, in which this incorporation of the spirit is displayed, is made adequate to the spirit only in its external shape as such. A person’s own subjective inwardness, the life of his heart, the soul of his most personal feelings are not revealed in the sightless figure nor can such a figure convey a concentrated expression of the inner life, or of spiritual movement, distinction from the external world or differentiation within. This is the reason why the sculptures of antiquity leave us somewhat cold. We do not linger over them long, or our lingering is rather a scholarly study of the fine shades of difference in their shape and in the forms given to a single individual. We cannot take it amiss if people do not show that profound interest in profound sculptures which they deserve. For we have to study them before we can appreciate them. At a first glance we are either not attracted or the general character of the whole is quickly revealed, and only afterwards have we to examine details and see what further interest the work supplies. But a pleasure that can only be produced after study, reflection, scholarship, and examination often repeated, is not the direct aim of art. And, even in the case of a pleasure gained by this circuitous route, what remains unsatisfied in the sculpture of antiquity is the demand that a character should develop and proceed outwardly to deeds and actions, and inwardly to a deepening of the soul. For this reason we are at once more at home in painting. Painting, that is to say, opens the way for the first time to the principle of finite and inherently infinite subjectivity, the principle of our own life and existence, and in paintings we see what is effective and active in ourselves.

Painting, unlike poetry and music, cannot portray the development of a situation, event, or action in a succession of changes but can only strive to seize on one moment. From this there follows the quite simple reflection that in this one moment the whole of the situation or action must be portrayed in its bloom, and that therefore painting must look for the instant in which what preceded and what followed is concentrated in one point.

Yet in another connection painting is left behind again by poetry and music, namely in respect of what is lyrical. Poetry can develop feelings and ideas not only as such but also in their change, progress, and intensification. In relation to the concentration of the inner life, this is still more the case with music which has to do with the inner movement of the soul. But, for this purpose, painting has nothing but posture and facial expression, and it misconceives the means at its disposal if it launches out exclusively into what is lyrical. For however far it expresses the inner passion and feeling revealed by the play of countenance and movements of the body, this expression must not be the direct expression of feeling as such but the expression of feeling manifested in a specific event or action.

If music is to exercise its full effect, more is required than purely abstract sound in a temporal movement. The second thing to be added is a content, i.e. a spiritual feeling felt by the heart, and the soul of this content expressed in notes.

Music can only count as a support for those powers which in other ways have already filled and captured the mind.

Just as we saw, in the case of the colour of the human skin, that, as an ideal unity, it contains the rest of the colours and therefore is the most perfect colour, so the human voice contains the ideal totality of sound, a totality only spread out amongst the other instruments in their particular differences. Consequently it is the perfection of sound and therefore marries most flexibly and beautifully with the other instruments. At the same time the human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself, as the sound which the inner life has in its own nature for the expression of itself, an expression which it regulates directly.

The poetic element in music, the language of the soul, which pours out into the notes the inner joy and sorrow of the heart, and in this outpouring mitigates and rises above the natural force of feeling by turning the inner life’s present transports into an apprehension of itself, into a free tarrying with itself, and by liberating the heart in this way from the pressure of joys and sorrows – this free sounding of the soul in the field of music – this is alone melody.

What music as an accompaniment is to express is something outside itself and its expression is related not to itself as music but to another art, namely poetry. But if music is to be purely music, then it must spurn this element which is not its own and, now that it has won complete freedom, it must be completely released from the determinate sphere of words.

The executant artist not only need not, but must not, add anything of his own, or otherwise he will spoil the effect. He must submit himself entirely to the character of the work and intend to be only an obedient instrument. Yet, on the other hand, in this obedience he must not, as happens often enough, sink to being merely mechanical, which only barrel-organ players are allowed to be. If, on the contrary, art is still to be in question, the executant has a duty to give life and soul to the work in the same sense as the composer did, and not to give the impression of being a musical automaton who recites a mere lesion and repeats mechanically what has been dictated to him. The virtuosity of such animation, however, is limited to solving correctly the difficult problems of the composition on its technical side and in that process avoiding any appearance of struggling with a difficulty laboriously overcome but moving in this technical element with complete freedom. In the matter not of technique but of the spirit, genius can consist solely in actually reaching in the reproduction the spiritual height of the composer and then bringing to life.

At first, art only seeks its adequate content, then finds it, and finally transcends it.

In the first place, externality as such, i.e. objects in nature, can at once be excluded, relatively at least, from the subject-matter suitable for poetical conception. The proper subject-matter of poetry is spiritual interests, not the sun, mountains, woods, landscapes, or constituents of the human body like nerves, blood muscles, etc. For however far poetry also involves an element of vision and illustration, it still remains even in this respect a spiritual activity and it works for inner intuition to which the spirit is nearer and more appropriate than external objects in their concrete visible and external appearance. Therefore this entire external sphere enters poetry only in so far as the spirit finds in it a stimulus or some material for its activity; in other words it enters as a human environment, as man’s external world which has essential worth only in relation to man’s inner consciousness and which may not claim the dignity of being, purely on its own account, the exclusive subject-matter of poetry. The subject-matter really corresponding to poetry is the infinite wealth of the spirit. For language, this most malleable material, the direct property of the spirit, of all media of expression the one most capable of seizing the interests and movements of the spirit in their inner vivacity, must be used, like stone, colour, and sound in the other arts principally to express what it proves most fitted to express. Accordingly, the chief task of poetry is to bring before our minds the powers governing spiritual life, and, in short, all that surges to and fro in human passion and feeling or passes quietly through our meditations – the all-encompassing realm of human ideas, deeds, actions, and fates, the bustle of life in this world, and the divine rule of the universe. Thus poetry has been and is still the most universal and widespread teacher of the human race. For to teach and to learn is to know and experience what is. Stars, plants, and animals neither know nor experience what their law is; but man exists conformably to the law of his existence only when he knows what he is and what his surroundings are: he must know what the powers are which drive and direct him, and it is such a knowledge that poetry provides in its original and substantive form.

Absorbs into himself the entire world of objects and circumstances, and stamps them with his own inner consciousness . . . discloses his self-concentrated heart, opens his eyes and ears, raises purely dull feeling into vision and ideas, and gives words and language to this enriched inner life so that as inner life it may find expression.

Armed with the might of art alive in him as an individual, the poet may, it is true, come into conflict, in certain circumstances, with the restricted and artistically tasteless ideas of his age and nation, but in that event the blame for this discord is to be imputed not to him but to the public. He himself has no other duty but to follow the truth and his impelling genius which, if only it be of the right sort, cannot fail to be victorious in the last instance, as is always the case when truth is at issue.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 3 out of 5]

A continuation of the systematization of arts.

[Martina]

Bello q se trate de arte

[Alexander Asay · Rating 4 out of 5]

UGA: Early Modern Philosophy