Summary: Lectures on Aesthetics (page 2)

Art is not merely a matter of imagination but of thought—more precisely, of thought embodied in the sensuous. Therefore, thought can take art as its object:

Works of art are not thoughts and concepts but developments of the concept by itself and its alienation in the sensuous.¹

This entire argument thus demonstrates that art can indeed be the object of a science: aesthetics.

The question now is what such a science might look like.

This science must avoid two pitfalls: it must distinguish itself from both the history of art and the abstract philosophy of beauty—two disciplines that take art as their object but treat it in ways that are, for Hegel, inadequate.

The history of art starts from the particular and the existing; it takes the empirical as its point of departure².

This discipline attempts to deduce theories of beauty from the study of existing works of art. However, such an approach can only lead to commonplace and superficial reflections—general precepts that, being too broad, become trivial. One example Hegel gives is Horace's observation: He won all the votes, he who knew how to mix the useful with the pleasant³.

Moreover, since Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, it has been well established that experience alone cannot provide necessary and universal truths.

Thus, the mere fact that we have so far observed the sun rising every morning does not allow us to infer a universal law stating that it always will.

As a result, if we base aesthetics on the experience of works of art, we cannot discover necessary and universal laws; instead, we find ourselves on uncertain ground, open to endless disputes⁴.

Hegel gives two examples of such perpetual debates that have shaped the history of art: those surrounding Hirt's notion of characteristic and Goethe's notion of meaning.

From this, Hegel concludes that aesthetics, as the science of beauty in art, must not be reduced to a mere history of art—though the latter remains valuable as a scholarly discipline.

By contrast, the second approach, which Hegel calls the abstract philosophy of beauty, disregards the experience of individual works and instead seeks to grasp beauty in itself and penetrate its idea⁵.

It is Plato who initiates this ascent to the universal, demonstrating that objects must be understood not in their particularity but in their universality—that the true is not to be found in individual good deeds or in individual beautiful human beings, but rather in the Good, the Beautiful, and the True themselves⁶.

The problem with this approach lies in its abstraction. Even Plato cannot fully satisfy us, given the lack of concrete content that characterises the Platonic Idea⁷, particularly that of the Beautiful, as described in the Symposium.

These two approaches point the way forward: in order to grasp the true nature of the Beautiful and establish aesthetics as a science, we must unite them—reconciling metaphysical universality with the concrete determination of actual particularity⁸.

What would aesthetics, as a discipline, look like? To determine this, we must first grasp the precise nature of its object: the Beautiful. Only once we have defined this concept can we outline the structure and, consequently, the plan of the entire science⁹.

Where do we derive this concept from? Traditionally, in order to establish the legitimacy of a science, we must first prove the existence of its object and then define it. Here, then, we would have to ask: does beauty exist, or is it merely a subjective pleasure? And what does it consist of?

However, Hegel rejects the first question. To prove that the Beautiful exists would require an immense undertaking—one that exceeds the scope of aesthetics alone. Demonstrating the idea of the Beautiful is a task that belongs to an encyclopaedic development of philosophy as a whole¹⁰.

For our purposes here, it is sufficient to accept the existence of the Beautiful as a sort of lemma¹¹—that is, a proposition we take as given.

¹ p.63
² p.65
³ Ars Poetica, 343
⁴ p.68
⁵ p.74
⁶ ibid.
⁷ ibid.
⁸ ibid.
⁹ p.75
¹⁰ p.78
¹¹ p.77