Summary: Lectures on Aesthetics (page 7)

With Schelling, the Idea, as the unity of the universal and the particular, became the principle of knowledge and existence, [...] that which alone is true and real ¹.

Fichte, taking up this idea, established the self as the absolute principle of all knowledge, reason, and cognition. However, this self remains abstract and formal; it is resolutely simple. All content is negated within it, for any content that holds value for the self does so only insofar as it is posited and recognised by the self ².

Anything that is the work of the self, I can just as easily annihilate again.

This dissolves the value of everything:

Nothing has intrinsic value—everything has value only insofar as it is produced by the subjectivity of the self. In this way, the self remains lord and master over all things, and there is nothing it cannot annihilate.

With Fichte, then, we find no weight or substance in any content. This is what Hegel calls the virtuosity of the ironic-artistic life, which apprehends itself as divine geniality ³.

Since nothing has true value, one can only look with irony upon what others regard with seriousness and conviction: He who reaches such a stage of divine geniality gazes down from his exalted rank upon the rest of mankind and finds them limited and dull, for law and morality still retain a firm, obligatory, and essential value for them ⁴.

This provides Hegel with an opportunity to distinguish the comic (which reveals the absence of value in that which truly lacks it) from the ironic (which denies an existing value, i.e. the self-destruction of the magnificent, the great, and the excellent ⁵).

Hegel thus demonstrated the ultimate purpose of art: The sensuous representation of the Absolute ⁶.

By "Absolute," Hegel means "God," "the Idea," "Spirit," "the reconciled opposition of opposites," "truth"—all of which he treats as synonymous.

To fully grasp the meaning of the Absolute in the Lectures on Aesthetics, one must turn to the Phenomenology of Spirit. In this work, Hegel shows that God—or in other words, Spirit, or the Absolute—gradually reveals itself to itself through History. Philosophy, art, and religion are the modes by which, at a given moment, Spirit attains self-awareness.

In the Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel examines in detail how the Absolute appears to itself in art.

This raises an essential question: Is the Absolute capable of being represented in a sensuous form?

We know that, for Jews and Muslims, for instance, no sensuous image of God can be presented.

For Hegel, however, the Absolute is representable. To deny this would be to reduce God to an abstract entity—whereas truth, as we have seen, lies in the reconciliation of opposites. The true God is at once sensuous and spiritual, universal and singular, abstract and concrete.

An unrepresentable God is, therefore, nothing more than an abstraction of understanding. One of the essential contributions of Christianity is its affirmation that God became incarnate in man. Christ is precisely this union of opposites—the sensuous and the spiritual—embodied in a person:

God is represented in Christianity in his truth, and thus as being in himself fully concrete, as a person, and more precisely, as Spirit ⁷.

Hegel provides an example of something concrete that is merely sensuous, devoid of any spirituality: fruit that spoils without anyone having eaten it. A work of art, by contrast, is fundamentally a question—an apostrophe—addressed to a heart that responds to it, an appeal to the soul and spirit ⁸.

Art, like religion, is thus a mode of divine manifestation, a way in which God reveals himself to us. The different types of art, in turn, correspond to different modes of divine appearance.

Following this principle, we can establish the foundation for a classification of art. In other words, the different forms of art are distinguished according to the modalities by which the Absolute unites with sensuous form.

¹ p.122
² p.124
³ p.125
⁴ ibid.
⁵ p.126
⁶ p.129
⁷ p.130
⁸ p.131