Summary: Lectures on Aesthetics (page 4)

Hegel illustrates this idea with a famous example: a child throwing stones into the water. The ripples that form on the surface represent a part of himself, and thus he contemplates himself—but indirectly—through his action.

Similarly, in the creation of a work of art, the human creator becomes aware of himself:

The universal need for art is therefore man's rational need to raise both the external and internal world to his spiritual consciousness, making it an object in which he recognises his own self.¹

2. Art as a product for human sensory faculty

Hegel examines the second aspect of the traditional definition of art, which holds that art is addressed to our faculty of sensation.

According to this view, art is intended to arouse sentiment—particularly that of pleasure.

This perspective raises specific questions. For example: should a work of art evoke negative feelings such as fear or compassion? And how is it possible for us to derive aesthetic pleasure from paintings depicting corpses, tragedies, and similar scenes?

This approach, exemplified by Mendelssohn, does not, for Hegel, lead very far. Feeling, in its immediacy, remains indeterminate and therefore abstract:

Feeling is the obscure and indeterminate region of the mind; what is felt remains enveloped in the most abstract form of individual subjectivity.²

Thus, fear in itself does not determine any specific content; on the contrary, it can accommodate highly diverse and even opposing elements³.

Any study of art based on the analysis of the feelings a work arouses is therefore bound by this same indeterminacy and remains devoid of true content.

Hegel proposes instead that we delve deeply into the work of art itself, abandoning mere subjectivity and its fluctuating states⁴.

Certainly, we can conceive of an educated sense of beauty: taste. However, this remains an immediate mode of feeling. Admittedly, the aesthete may skilfully discourse on the feelings aroused by the work he contemplates, but where the great passions and emotions of a profound soul are unleashed, there is no longer room for the subtle distinctions of taste and its petty trade in minutiae. In such moments, taste senses the advance of genius, and recoiling before its power, loses all certainty and self-control⁵.

Hegel then examines the opposite approach, which consists in the straightforward study of the work of art as an object. This is the method of the scholar, the connoisseur, who examines the objective characteristics of the work—such as the place and time of its creation, the personality of the artist, and so on.

Certainly, erudition is indispensable for acquiring determinate knowledge, and even for fully appreciating a work of art. However, it does not represent the highest dimension of the relationship the mind can have with art⁶.

Indeed, a scholar may know everything about a work without grasping its true nature—such as the fact that art is the manifestation of the divine.

Both approaches have proved equally unsatisfactory.

Hegel proposes an idea that reconciles them: the work of art presents itself to sensibility, yet it is a sensuous object that is, at the same time, essentially intended for the mind⁷.

In fact, the sensuous can relate to the mind in several ways.

Properly speaking, sentience is the faculty of touching, seeing, hearing, and so on. But it also seeks to realise itself in external things in a sensuous manner—this is desire.

The desiring being sacrifices things for its own satisfaction. Desire destroys the object of its longing—not only the superficial appearance of external things but their very existence in their concrete, sensuous form⁸.

Above all, it is the freedom of the object that the desiring being seeks to annihilate: It cannot allow the object its autonomy, for its impulse drives it to negate this independence and to demonstrate that external things exist only to be consumed and destroyed⁹.

¹ p.86
² p.87
³ ibid.
⁴ ibid.
⁵ p.89
⁶ ibid.
⁷ p.90
⁸ p.91
⁹ ibid.