The Introduction offers an overview of the main themes of the book, focusing especially on Hegel’s claim that our sensuous experience of beauty offers a distinctive access to metaphysical truth. The basic nature and parameters of this sensuous aesthetic experience – what Hegel calls “sensuous intuition” – are explored to set the stage for the analysis that follows. In anticipation of the book’s main claim about the distinctive sort of ontological truth that artworks in particular serve to reveal on Hegel’s account – namely, that they put us in touch with the transformative event of spirit’s birth in and through nature – the chapter includes a sketch of the path of the book from the ontology and aesthetics of nature through to the ontology and aesthetics of artworks.

The human body is tied to a distinctive form of natural beauty, for Hegel proposes that there is something about the human body in its given, natural form that makes it uniquely capable of manifesting self-conscious spirit or mind. Since, ontologically speaking, the being of spirit is of a higher order than anything in nonhuman nature, the capacity to give off the distinctive look and sound of a spiritual way of being amounts to the human body’s capacity for a higher, fuller beauty as well. This chapter focuses primarily on the naturally given, predominantly involuntary ways in which the human body allows spirituality to appear. Because Hegel characterizes artworks generally as involving a “spiritualizing” of otherwise natural forms, we are encouraged to think of the human body’s distinctive, spirit-manifesting demeanor as a kind of root aesthetic vocabulary with which all of the more developed “languages” of art are familiar and from which they grow. But it also seems that for Hegel it ultimately takes art, and in particular classical sculpture, to reveal the purportedly natural beauty of the body, and this complicates the sense in which bodily beauty is natural after all.

While we might naturally think that artworks possess sensible and physical properties in the same way that other finite, natural objects do, there is reason to think that on Hegel’s account artworks “work” only insofar as they quite literally suspend their otherwise finite, natural properties, thereby realizing a decidedly infinite and autonomous way of being. This chapter appeals to some of the distinctive insights of Hegel’s idealist metaphysics to develop what is in effect an original, Hegelian-inspired ontology of the artwork. It argues that artworks make an express show of their own suspension of the natural, affirming the birth of their distinctive, autonomous reality in and through a movement that involves the transcending of the otherwise natural terms of their own existence. To experience the beauty of an artwork is to experience this transformative movement, and the chapter argues that what is at issue here is akin to the nature of transformative historical events that on Hegel’s account set the terms of world history.

Akin to Aristotle’s attempt in the Poetics to lay out the various conditions of artistically rendered human action that make for the most gripping treatments, Hegel develops a poetics of action that attempts to articulate what makes for the most beautiful artistic presentations of action. This chapter focuses on this “poetics of action,” and it is argued that the key to understanding Hegel’s aesthetic privileging of heroic action in his poetics lies in the peculiar ontology of the artwork itself: that is, it is argued that the decisive, transformative events that are the focus of scenes of heroic action in effect provide art with that express content that most readily fits with the artwork’s own deeper nature as such a transformative event in its own right. The chapter explores various of Hegel’s specific aesthetic judgments about dramatic settings, characters, narrative structure, and the role of ethics in art, in each case arguing that the basis of these judgments is oriented both in terms of the heroic and in terms of what enables the character of a transformative event to become most manifest.

This chapter treats the aesthetics of human action. It begins by taking up athletic contest in particular, for insofar as the performance of athletic action serves to make conspicuous how an otherwise given, natural body becomes the vehicle for a striking realization of spirit’s freedom and autonomy, its eventful unfolding can serve as a kind of aesthetic standard for assessing the other forms of action as well. However, most of our actions prove to be rather lackluster in comparison, and when Hegel turns to the aesthetic prospects of practical life in the context of modern civil society and the state, he finds only what is prosaic, action here being defined on all sides by contingency, dependence, and exposure to external forces. Hegel would have us see that the aesthetic limitations of practical life are rooted in inherent, ontological limitations of practical life itself – what this chapter calls the tragedy of the practical – implying that there is no question of seeking a higher form of practical life that would be free of such limitation. This limitation is surpassed only by redefining ourselves, not exclusively in practical terms but in the terms of “absolute spirit,” whose first form is art.

This chapter takes up the question of whether the higher-order beauty of art is for Hegel best exemplified in the static, serene repose of classical sculpture or in the dramatic, developmental movement characteristic of the depiction of human action. Both paradigms are prevalent in Hegel’s lectures on art, and in the end the tension between them has not been fully addressed within Hegel’s lectures, nor has it been adequately addressed within existing scholarship. In addition to maintaining that the developmental paradigm fits better with the present book’s account of the ontology of the artwork as featuring the dramatic event of transformation into autonomy, the chapter also brings some textual sources to bear, and attempts to show as well that such a paradigm fits more naturally with Hegel’s claim that art is ultimately rooted in intuition and its direct, eventful encounters with the world.