Hegel's Aesthetics

Kant’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’ as a condition of beauty seems to favor the beautiful in the natural world. Hegel, on the other hand, is in decided opposition to the inherent superiority of natural beauty. He explicitly states that, “the beauty of art is higher than nature” (44). Interestingly,  Hegel abandons natural beauty for the same reason Kant praises it, its purposiveness without purpose. Nature is beautiful, but its beauty does not intend to communicate anything, and often goes unseen and un appreciated: “The variegated richly coloured plumage of birds shines even when unseen, their song dies away unheard, the torchthistle, which blooms only for one night withers in the wilds of the southern forests without having been admired…” (48). Where Kant extols nature’s beauty as the ultimate beauty because its seeming purposelessness reflects our morality; the purposiveness without purpose in the natural world parallels the lawfulness without laws that defines our morality. Hegel also recognizes the pointlessness of natural beauty, but he condemns nature to a lower plane for the same reason Kant lauds it.

While Kant sees purposiveness without a purpose as an essential quality for beauty, Hegel that, in the beautiful, “spirituality and freedom are always present” (44). Art, in Hegel’s view, consists of two parts: content and form. The “content of art is the Idea, while its form is the configuration of sensuous material” (47).  Hegel’s opinion of art necessitates an ‘Idea’. Unlike Kant, he believes art should possess a concept prior to its creation. The concept is the content of art and should serve to communicate something of importance. The content that Hegel believes art requires is what sets it above natural beauty. For, “the beauty of nature appears only as a reflection of the beauty that belongs to the spirit,” meaning that the beauty apparent in nature is only a reflection of the spirit within ourselves, and does not have any message our purpose in itself (45). (Interestingly, Kant would agree with all of the above, but dispute the meaning of these conclusions.) Art however, must contain a will to communicate with viewers; “art is not so naively self-centered [as nature]; it is essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and the spirit” (48).

Fine art requires the perfect combination of content and form; “only in the highest art are Idea and presentation truly in conformity with one another” (49). For art to possess true beauty content and form need to be in perfect harmony with each other, but more than that, taken alone each most be concrete. Otherwise, the work of art will lack concreteness and the form will fail to adequately communicate the Idea or the Idea will be too weak and become overshadowed by the form. The concrete nature of an Idea is where we find “essentiality or universality” (47). It is this essentiality, an Idea embodied, that elevates art above nature.

Kant asserted that beauty has no claim to the universal, but we still experience the beautiful as if it was necessary and universal. Kant must deny the universality of beauty in his claim that beauty does not possess purpose.  Hegel, on the other hand necessitates purpose in the highest forms of beauty, thus enabling art function with universality.

Hegel is insistent on his point that the melding of content and form should result in “a free reconciled totality” (47). The potency of both Idea and formal expression should be exactly equal for art to accurately convey its message. With this rule before us, Hegel sets out to describe the three forms of art. The first he calls symbolic. Symbolic art is, as it sounds, representative of something. But symbolic art functions as more of a sign than as art. Symbolic art is defective in that its “Idea is still more or less indeterminate and unshapable, while the natural objects are thoroughly determinate in their shape” (51). The ideas contained within symbolic art are far too powerful for the simplistic representation they employ. The definite nature of the representation is at odds with the transcendent nature of the Idea. This incompatibility between content and form is the failing of symbolic art.

The second form of art Hegel describes is the classical.  Classical art is incredibly powerful in its form and the workmanship of classical sculpture is awe inspiring. Although classical sculpture is flawless in representation, the idea embodied in these sculptures lacks the strength of the workmanship. Just as in nature, the beauty we find in classical art is a reflection of our spirit, not an Idea contained within the artwork. Thus, this art form is not a blend of content and form, but a “correspondence of the two,” for the Idea of the work is not self-contained, but lies within the viewer (52). (For this reason, classical art would likely appeal to Kant’s explanation of aesthetics.) Thus, classical art fails to fulfill Hegel’s terms; it is merely “the pinnacle of what illustration by art could achieve” (52).

The third and final art form Hegel addresses is the romantic. This art form Hegel touts as the most successful. It attains “free concrete spirituality” (53). God was often a subject of romantic art. While the concept of God cannot be adequately illustrated, it is a universal concept. The universality of the Idea and the inexpressible nature of its content is embodied in its representation. The very form of romantic painting acknowledges that the Idea being portrayed is impossible to capture. It is in this acknowledgment that romantic art becomes truly successful. As Hegel puts it, “Because of higher perfection, it is not susceptible of an adequate union with the external” (53). This means that the Idea is self-contained. The form of the representation points back to the ineffability of the work’s concept. This self-containment of universality makes romantic art the most beautiful of all art forms.