(b Stuttgart, 27 Aug 1770; d Berlin, 14 Nov 1831). German philosopher. He was the son of a civil servant and began his education at the Stuttgart Gymnasium, after which he joined the seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788. Having decided not to enter the clergy, he became a private tutor, firstly in Berne (1793) and then in Frankfurt (1797). In 1801 he moved to Jena and entered the university there, eventually becoming a lecturer, but in 1806 he fled in the path of the advancing French forces and took up the editorship of the Bamberger Zeitung. He eventually moved to Nuremberg, where he became headmaster of a Gymnasium and married Marie von Tucher, with whom he had two sons. In 1816, Hegel accepted a professorship at the University of Heidelberg. Two years later, he moved to Berlin University, where he eventually died during a cholera epidemic.
Hegel’s aesthetic thought is a response to Immanuel Kant’s propositions in his Kritik der Urteilskraft that aesthetic facility is merely an inferior activity to reasoning, and in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft that we can never really know reality as it is, since that reality is always constructed by the human mind. Hegel rejects both propositions as solipsistic, and contends that philosophy can apprehend reality in its totality – hence his quest for what he terms Geist (‘spirit’ or ‘mind’), the absolute idea, the principle of generality, the collective consciousness. The aesthetic facility plays a vital role in this quest.
This ‘absolute’ Geist is analysed by Hegel in three ways: in terms of its own internal construction; in its manifestation in human history; and on its trajectory to its telos or final goal. Characteristic of Hegel’s philosophy is the use of dialectical forms of argument, and this is reflected in his tendency to use arguments that fall into three distinct phases. In short, the dialectic constitutes for Hegel a universal form that the human mind brings to reality: every affirmative action has its own negation, and this contradiction always implies some future resolution (often referred to as ‘thesis’, ‘antithesis’ and ‘synthesis’, although he rarely used these terms himself).
In the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (usually translated as ‘Lectures on Fine Art’), first published in 1835, Hegel organizes the arts according to this three-part structure: the symbolic arts, represented by architecture, demonstrate a ‘naive’ unity of Geist in which, ‘it is identity already, and therefore it generates reality out of itself already’. The classical arts are exemplified for Hegel by the external shapes of sculpture, ‘because the external shape, determined as external, is a particular shape, and for complete fusion it can only present itself again in itself as determined and therefore restricted content’. The romantic arts – painting, music and poetry – represent the apex of the arts’ achievements: ‘in romantic art the shape is externally more or less indifferent, so that art introduces, in an opposite way from the symbolic, the separation of content and form’.
Music occupies an important position in Hegel’s system since it ‘mediates the spatial sensuality of painting and the abstract spirituality of poetry’ and its location in time is analogous to that of the thinking subject: ‘tone … places the Ego in movement by means of the motion in Time’. These two roles – mediation [Vermittlung] and the accord [Anklang] with subjectivity – mark music out as important within Hegel’s system. He is nonetheless critical of music as an ‘empty’ form that can represent a content only in its most general terms. In this, Hegel was at odds with much Romantic theory that held music to be a superior (even ‘original’) language.
Hegel has had an enduring impact on aesthetic theory in the 19th and 20th centuries. Moritz Hauptmann, A.B. Marx, Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Theodor Vischer were all self-proclaimed admirers of Hegel, and even his German positivist critics took from him a fascination for historical schemata, teleological master narratives and a desire for comprehensive systems of knowledge. With the recent resurgence of interest in Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School, musicologists are turning again to Hegel and finding new inroads into the problems of how musical forms mediate (and are mediated by) extrinsic historical and cultural discourses.
Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, System der Wissenschaft, i (Bamberg, 1807); ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1952); Eng. trans., ed. J.N. Findlay (Oxford, 1977)
Wissenschaft der Logik (Nuremberg, 1812–16); ed. G. Lasson (Leipzig, 1923, many reprs.); Eng. trans. as Hegel’s Science of Logic (London, 1969)
Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Heidelberg, 1817, 3/1830); ed. F. Nicolin and O. Pöggeler (Hamburg, 1959); Eng. trans. of pt 2 as Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Oxford, 1970)
Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Berlin, 1835, 2/1842; Eng. trans., 1975, as Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art)
J. Kaminsky: Hegel on Art: an Interpretation of Hegel’s Aesthetics (New York, 1962), 118ff
H. Paetzold: Ästhetik der deutschen Idealismus: zur Idee ästhetischer Rationalität bei Baumgarten, Kant, Schelling, Hegel und Schopenhauer (Wiesbaden, 1983)
S. Bungay: Beauty and Truth: a Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford, 1984)
A. Gethmann-Siefert: Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte: Untersuchungen zu Hegel’s Ästhetik (Bonn, 1984)
W. Desmond: Art and the Absolute: a Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany, NY, 1986)
C. Hamlin: ‘Music as Norm for the Poetics of Romantic Art: Hegel and Hölderlin’, The Romantic Tradition: German Literature and Music in the Nineteenth Century, ed. G. Chapple, F. Hall and H. Schulte (Lanham, MD, 1992), 25–41
J. Johnson: ‘Music in Hegel’s Aesthetics: a Re-evaluation’, British Journal of Aesthetics, xxxi (1994), 152–62
IAN BIDDLE