What is at issue for us in our experience of beauty? What sorts of concerns operative within us does the experience of beauty answer to and address? While this experience is complex, and can involve many components – such as satisfying basic sensuous pleasures, exciting erotic desires, deepening our sympathy with other humans and our understanding of human psychology generally, enlivening our moral sensibilities, providing a sense of national unity, or emboldening our resolve in various practical matters – for Hegel the most essential significance of beauty has to do with the way it engages us in terms of our deepest metaphysical concerns. To experience and be compelled by the beautiful is, on Hegel’s account, ultimately to gain a kind of intuitive access to certain metaphysical truths concerning the kind of being we are, concerning the divine, concerning the ultimate nature of the natural and historical worlds we find ourselves in, and concerning our proper place within and in relation to reality overall.Footnote ¹

In the end, it is only on the condition that we are the sorts of beings who are fundamentally concerned with the nature and meaning of reality in absolute terms that the beautiful can appear, and, indeed, exist, in the first place. When Hegel situates his discussion of beauty in terms of his broader logical and metaphysical philosophy, and makes a point of linking beauty specifically to his technical term “concept” – saying, for instance, that beauty is nothing other than the “self-externalizing concept” (1828/29 38), or that artistic beauty “presents the absolute concept to sensuous intuition through a sensuous material” (1820/21 15) – he is drawing attention to this fundamental link between aesthetics and metaphysics. For, as we will see, “concept” is the name Hegel gives to the fundamental character of reality itself, insofar as reality is on his account to be understood in terms of an ongoing movement of self-externalization and return-to-self from otherness – an animation exemplified by living things and spiritual beings in particular, but which for Hegel provides the ultimate terms for understanding all reality.Footnote ² And so to say that beauty is the appearing of this movement in its own right, in and through the appearing of concrete, sensuous individuals, is in effect to say that beauty is the sensuous intuition of the nature of being itself.

Hegel argues that art in its beauty has the same sort of stature and role in human life as religion and philosophy do: art, religion, and philosophy are, in his thinking, the three basic forms of what he calls “absolute spirit,” implying that art, like religion and philosophy, is fundamentally characterized by a concern with “absolute” matters, such as the ultimate nature and source of reality as a whole, the nature of the divine, and the nature of us as spiritual beings who are related to reality and the divine (PhS 553–77; LFA 101–5; 13: 139–44). For Hegel, the forms of absolute spirit are what define the major historical civilizations that have in effect articulated and actualized the nature of what it is to be human within the broader context of the natural and historical worlds. Thus, for instance, the specific gods and practices of worship of the ancient Greeks, along with the poems and statues and temples by which these gods became a concrete presence in Greek life, are on Hegel’s account indispensable for understanding all facets of the distinctive and epoch-determining civilization of the Greek people. At the core of this and every historically decisive culture, Hegel suggests, is a set of distinctive metaphysical or ontological truths, and what provides us with the ultimate terms for differentiating the distinctive epochs and major transformative events of world history are, in the end, the distinctions between the different ways the absolute has been articulated for a people, which amount to the different developments within the world’s broad artistic, religious, and philosophical cultures.Footnote ³

While all three types of absolute spirit appeal to our distinctive and fundamental capacity to concern ourselves with the ultimate character of things, and so involve the same sorts of absolute, metaphysical contents, they each address these matters in their own distinctive form: whereas philosophy is characterized above all by thinking what is absolute in rational and conceptual terms, and religion is characterized above all by representing and feeling what is absolute, for instance in its myths and practices of prayer and sacrifice, art is characterized above all by its intuition of what is absolute in and through the sensuous presence of artworks. Beauty, as the hallmark of art, is essentially rooted in this capacity of the immediate presence of things to resonate thus with the absolute. As Hegel puts it,

It should be said, however, that these different forms of accessing the absolute do have a bearing on what sorts of metaphysical contents can be accessed by them, and each form may privilege certain metaphysical truths over others. For instance, a divine being that is essentially transcendent with respect to the concrete terms of this world – the sort of God that Kant would have us recognize, for instance – would presumably not offer art, rooted as it is in sensuous intuition and so the sensuous presence of things, much to work with (though, of course, the incarnation of this God in Christ is of intense artistic interest); but such a God is well suited for the cultivation of religious faith as a stance that involves turning away from the outer empirical world, and instead leads the subject to a focus inward, grappling with its own capacity to open itself to God despite the lack of clear, worldly signs.Footnote ⁵ This would suggest that a straightforward form/content distinction is not ultimately adequate for understanding the different types of absolute spirit, for the different forms have some role in determining the metaphysical content, or, we might say, they are part of what is at issue in that content. Thus, for instance, part of philosophy’s content is necessarily going to be the metaphysical status, nature, and implications of thinking itself, the question of how thinking and being are related.Footnote ⁶ And an essential part of art’s concern, we might surmise, is the metaphysical status of sensuous, concrete things and their relation to the spiritual-aesthetic experience that finds meaning in them.

No doubt, philosophy has for Hegel a certain privileged status among the three forms of absolute spirit. For instance, if we want to comprehend the essential character and ontological import of such basic metaphysical notions as independence and dependence, substance and accident, whole and part, freedom and necessity, finitude and infinity, or unity and multiplicity, Hegel would have us see that the final court of appeal is the sort of pure conceptual thinking that he undertakes in his Science of Logic. Here the intelligibility of being is systematically, comprehensively, and definitively investigated as such, and for Hegel it is in the inner workings of such conceptual thought – rather than in intuition, feelings, images, or religious revelation, say – that we find our clearest, most evolved and definitive access to the highest metaphysical truths. And as a result, philosophy is appealed to as setting the standards for judging the other forms of absolute spirit; indeed, it is philosophy itself that articulates and differentiates these three forms in the first place, putting them in their proper places, as it were, and so treating itself as both their spokesperson and judge.

Nevertheless, by treating art as a moment of absolute spirit, Hegel would arguably have us consider that these absolute, metaphysical matters can be at issue for us even in the very immediacy of our intuitive encounter with the world, such that we cannot entirely dismiss the immediate, sensuous presence of things as a potentially valuable, and perhaps indispensable, locus of metaphysical or ontological disclosure in its own right.Footnote ⁷ For it seems that to encounter a moving melody, for instance, is on Hegel’s account quite literally to hear something of the constitutive infinity and freedom of a self-relating way of being, in and through the way the music in its temporal fluidity renders audible a movement of overcoming the limitations of spatial presence and of the otherwise discrete moments of time.Footnote ⁸ Or to be confronted with the rhythmic, graceful movement of a horse’s canter is to see, in a decidedly visual presence, something of the way a spontaneously self-moving, self-relating unity actualizes itself in and through the sustained organization of a multiplicity of organs.Footnote ⁹ In such striking cases, it seems, what appears to us is not just some particular, mundane thing and its local properties, but rather something of the way of being of things generally, something that resonates with an ontological significance that as such gives us perspective on the nature of reality as a whole.

Hegel does of course maintain that, for the most part, the ordinary, empirical appearing of things is not rich and resonant in these ways, and can in many instances even mislead us as to the deeper nature of things. In this way, he aligns himself with the sort of traditional, rationalist critique of the sensuous that we find, for instance, in Plato or Descartes. But for Hegel there are certain sensuous appearances that stand out precisely for the way they disclose deeper, ontological truth: those that constitute the domain of beauty in the broadest sense, but most especially those associated with artworks. I propose that Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy is above all a study of this special class of appearance, and that it is ultimately on the grounds of this “aesthetic ontology” that Hegel is brought to privilege the artwork as a distinctive sort of being whose very being is to appear in such ontologically disclosive ways.

The claim at issue here is not that artworks and other beautiful objects provoke metaphysical thought, thus becoming mere occasions for a decidedly conceptual and philosophical process that can occur autonomously, “within the mind,” and that as such bears no essential and ongoing relation to the concrete presence of the object at hand. Rather, for Hegel it is precisely in the living encounter with artworks – in a sensuous intuition that is thoroughly dependent on the actual presence of its concrete object – that we come to be attuned to such absolute or ontological significance. Here, the intuiting of such objects is itself the locus of the disclosure, and so whatever truth can be said to be revealed here comes in a decidedly intuitive and sensuous-aesthetic form and cannot ultimately be separated from this form. And while philosophical thought might legitimately reflect on and put words in the mouth of this otherwise immediate, aesthetic experience – and Hegel’s rich, phenomenological descriptions of artworks certainly do this – it cannot claim to possess the content of this truth without remainder, for transposing it into its conceptual, discursive form involves a substantial transformation: here, the decidedly sensuous, aesthetic medium is clearly part of the message, and prosaic philosophical discourse, in attempting to articulate in its own, conceptual medium the significance of a play of colors or of a striking gesture appearing in a painting, for instance, must ultimately refer us back to our actual visual engagement with the painting to appreciate the distinctively aesthetic content at issue there. From the point of view of intuition itself such resonant, if somewhat inarticulate, sensuous manifestations are hardly deficient and in need of philosophical supplementation. They are, rather, ends in themselves, cherished and fully satisfying in their own right despite – or, indeed, perhaps because of – their resonant indeterminacy.

Exploring with Hegel the nature of these resonant sensuous things that set themselves apart from the mundane and prosaic world so as to attune us, rather, to the universal and fundamental meaning at play in all things, is the main goal of this book. While the ontological dimension of Hegel’s account – both the claim that beauty is a matter of manifesting ontological truth, as well as his particular ontology of beautiful objects, which will prove to be central to the understanding of beauty – has been expressly downplayed in recent work on Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy (see James Reference Pippin and Beiser2009, Rutter Reference Rutter2010, Peters 2014, Pippin Reference Pippin2014), and has even been construed as what limits its viability (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer and Rendall2000, Gethmann-Siefert Reference Gethmann-Siefert2014), I aim to show, on the contrary, that it is one of the richest and most essential features of his lectures on aesthetics, and that reading these lectures with a view to the ontological dimension of aesthetic significance sheds important light on the core systematic commitments at play in his investigation, while also providing us with the right interpretative context for understanding Hegel’s insightful phenomenological descriptions of various aesthetic phenomena.Footnote ¹⁰

The Nature of Sensuous Intuition

In the context of his lectures on art, Hegel generally presumes some familiarity with the most basic differences between intuition, representation, and thought, which he associates with art, religion, and philosophy, respectively, and so does not offer any extended accounts of these terms in their own right. That, in the Philosophy of Spirit portion of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel divides his account of “Theoretical Spirit” into the moments of intuition, representation, and thinking (PSS3 445–68, 103–230) suggests that he regards this division as fundamental for conceiving of the different modalities of our theoretical (as opposed to practical) way of relating to objects in terms of our pursuit of their truth, and so that his later appeal to this division in the final section of the Philosophy of Spirit – in the differentiation of the forms of absolute spirit – is rooted in that earlier account. However, the rather schematic account he gives there of intuition is focused mainly on the intuition of finite, mundane objects in their immediate, sensuous, spatiotemporal presence, and so would seem to shed little light on what it would mean to intuit beauty, and with it matters of metaphysical significance, in particular. If we are to understand what Hegel means by this broader conception of intuition, it seems there is no other way than to attend to the various descriptions of the experience of beauty and art Hegel gives in the course of his lectures on aesthetics, and derive from what is, at bottom, a phenomenology of aesthetic experience what he must take the “sensuous intuition of beauty” – or, indeed, the “sensuous intuition of the absolute” – to consist in.

Nevertheless, insofar as Hegel makes a point of appealing specifically to intuition as a distinguishing feature of beauty and art, and not to some wholly unique and independent form of “aesthetic experience,” it does seem that the basic features of intuition laid out in the Philosophy of Spirit ought to provide some guide to his use of this term in his lectures on aesthetics.Footnote ¹¹ For instance, the fact that intuition in the Philosophy of Spirit account is essentially an intuition of the immediate, spatiotemporal presence of concrete individuals in their individuality (PSS3 445; 115) clearly carries over into Hegel’s account of beauty and art and of what makes them distinct as a form of absolute spirit. Beauty, Hegel insists, is always the beauty of a concrete individual – the superlatively individuated being, we will see, being the artwork itself, insofar as it singles itself out from all other mundane things – and just as intuition in general takes place only in and through a direct and immediate encounter with the concrete presence of an individual,Footnote ¹² so too with the intuition of beauty in particular. As Hegel puts it at one point, the appreciation of art “cherishes an interest in the object in singular existence and does not struggle to change it into its universal thought and concept” (LFA 38, 13:60).

We can gain insight into this last point by considering the experience of music. It seems the only way to access the compelling power and beauty of a piece of music is to hear it for ourselves in its individual, concrete presence. Whatever we might come to understand about the piece’s genre or tradition, or its peculiar use of harmony, or its overall compositional structure – that is, thinking the music in light of basic musical concepts that, as such, hold in a universal manner, across different musical pieces – will ultimately refer us back to a fresh, intuitive encounter with the individual piece in its immediate, sensuous presence, where the musical significance of these otherwise abstract insights alone lives and shows itself. Similarly, if we memorize a piece of music, we do not thereby possess it in the way we might possess a general idea, or in the way we might understand a universal law, for we must as it were play it back to ourselves in our minds, as though reenacting an immediate encounter with its distinctive and individual presence, if we are to access its distinctive character and distinctively musical power qua artwork. I take it the same applies to poetry, even though poetry is that art form that, on Hegel’s account, is least attached to a particular, sensuously intuitable form, in that its proper “material,” Hegel argues, is not so much words and their sounds but above all the ideas or representations that must be grasped and interpreted at a more straightforwardly intellectual level (see LFA 959–60; 15: 222–4). For, the fact that we must mentally recite a memorized poem in its temporally unfolding form – and perhaps ideally hear it – to experience its full beauty, suggests that there is something about its individual, concrete, temporally extended occurrence, and so its fundamentally intuitable character, that is still crucial here. And akin to our relation to music, we do not seek merely to “figure out” the poem’s meaning, so as to grasp its essence or inner law in a way that would allow us to be done with its individuality and its immediate, concrete presence; rather, after gaining any new insights into the poem, we then want to recite or hear it again, so that we might intuit it in this new light.Footnote ¹³

In contrast, religion for Hegel involves a self-reflective turn inward into the ideality of representations, and as representations exist essentially in the mind (rather than specifically in our immediate encounter with the world), they can be fully accessed in the absence of any concrete encounters. Thus, for Hegel, the Christian who recounts in their mind the stories and teachings of Christ, or who retreats into the solitude of prayer, is at no disadvantage whatsoever, religiously speaking, compared with those who saw and heard Christ firsthand;Footnote ¹⁴ for faith, even the faith that Christ once did appear to sensuous intuition, is here above all an interior, subjective matter, constituted independently of concrete, sensuous encounters on the part of the believer (though, of course, exposure to the imposing beauty of the cathedral, the intense emotion of a religious sculpture, or the rousing sermon of an eloquent pastor can no doubt help to encourage and bolster one’s faith, even if they are not strictly essential to its constitution).Footnote ¹⁵ Philosophy, existing essentially in the conceptual working-through of the intelligible structure of things and its rational implications and presuppositions, is freer of any particular, direct encounters with concrete individuals than even religious representation is; for whereas philosophy thinks only what is purely intelligible, such that there is nothing in its concepts that is empirically given or opaque to it, religion in Hegel’s account tends to put faith in images or representations that are still rooted in particular, empirical, and so intuition-grounded contents (like the father/son relation, for instance; see PhG 771; 410–11) in its representation of even the highest essence of the divine. That Hegel’s account of beauty revolves around the concrete, spatial presence of the individual sculpture or painting or architectural structure, or the inherently temporal character of the individual musical piece or poem, springs from the intimate link between beauty and intuition on his account.

It is also worth noting that in the Philosophy of Spirit account, intuition is initially treated as a complete and compelling form of experience in its own right, not merely as one ingredient in a cognition that must bring into play other distinct faculties of mind. While, for Kant, intuitions unaccompanied by the concepts of the understanding would be blind, for Hegel intuitions seem to have a distinctive sort of sight and meaningfulness all their own, one that is strictly speaking “pre-representational” and “pre-conceptual.” The meaningfulness of intuition does not itself hinge on applying already secured representations or concepts that, in their generality, apply in principle to other comparable intuitions, so as to render the concrete presence it encounters into one instantiation among others of the same universal.Footnote ¹⁶ Rather than stepping back from the singular presence of its concrete object, so as to size it up, name it, understand it, and compare and contrast it with other particulars, intuition finds the singular, concrete presence of this object compelling and resonant in its own right, and remains in and with this immediate, singular presence as something significant in itself. Presumably it is only on the condition that intuition is thus conceived as a distinctive, meaningful, and self-sufficient way of apprehending the concrete world, and so as not essentially dependent on the capacity for representation and full-fledged, conceptual thought, that it could be appealed to in distinguishing art as a distinctive form of absolute spirit in contrast to religion and philosophy.

It seems, then, that for Hegel one can have a meaningful, compelling intuition without being able to articulate the intuition’s import in thought or in a manner that is ultimately separable from the immediacy of the intuiting. In illuminating the sensuous intuition of art in particular, Hegel appeals to the familiar notion of the “experienced person,” who “knows what matters in life’s circumstances, but does not know how to grasp such content himself according to general rules,” and so who always brings to mind singular instances (1823 201; 22). Similarly, in creating art, the genuine artist, says Hegel, does not first grasp a “prosaic” thought, and then seek out some particular, pictorial form to adorn it, but brings about “a content that spirit cannot explain otherwise than pictorially [bildlich],”Footnote ¹⁷ a content whose very coming to consciousness occurs only in and through the specific sensuous portrayal. And it seems that our experience of art is likewise typically of a sort that whatever meaning or import we apprehend is not wholly extricable from the sensuous presence of the work, and does not seem to hinge on a capacity to articulate, in thought, the artwork’s specific content or the underlying principles that would purport to structure or explain it. Consider, for instance, the way we can immediately hear the expressive power and “rightness” of a note in a musical phrase, often without having any ability to say why or how it “worked.” Even in a piece of music we are hearing for the first time, we can hear that the notes belong together in a meaningful, compelling way, and that they come together to form a whole with its own proper closure, though we might have no explicit understanding of the laws of harmony or composition. Similarly, we can become alive to the impressive visual harmony of the way the look of a painted figure’s face fits with the gestures of the hands and the posture of the body (and, indeed, with the colors of clothing and background): we immediately see, with our eyes, the appropriateness of these distinct features to one another, even if, again, we cannot quite say why they must take just this form.

It seems that on Hegel’s account sensuous intuition finds a meaning directly in the immediate, sensuous presence of the things it encounters, that there is for it an inseparability between meaning and concrete, sensuous form. For Hegel, sensuous intuition does not just present us with the bare, meaningless surface of things, as though another mental faculty (the understanding and its judgments) were then needed in order to supply a meaning or intelligible order. Rather, to say that things make sense in an intuitive manner, or that we see intuitively how this part of what appears strikes us as fitting with this other part, is to suggest that there is a distinctive sort of meaning, a distinctive way of apprehending relations of appropriateness or mutual belonging or organization, that is inextricably bound up with the immediacy of things in their sensuous presence. Our capacity to see with our eyes the regularity or symmetry in the layout of a flower’s petals, for instance, and to hear the repeating rhythm of a drumbeat with our ears and feel it with our body, are among the simplest examples of this sort of pre-reflectively evident display of organization or inner meaning in the sensuous form things take. When we consider more complex examples, such as our ability to hear the anger in the very tone and cadence of another’s voice, or to see the dismissiveness in the very look of another’s eyes, we see how far-reaching this penetrating capacity of sensuous intuition can be – and we can anticipate that such audible and visible meanings will be crucial, not only for understanding our immediate experience of other selves (a theme I explore in Chapter 2) but for understanding our relation to artworks. Sensuous intuition finds the very look and sound of things directly to embody and decisively establish the inner meaning or “truth” of things; for it, the sensuous appearance of things “speaks for itself,” as it were, and does not require supplementation.

Indeed, artistic beauty, we will see, is on Hegel’s account partly defined in terms of the interpenetration of meaning and the external, sensible shape in which it is embodied, to the point that this external shape “acquires its meaning in itself and points no longer to the meaning as if that were something separated and different from the corporeal appearance” (LFA 432, 14:19). We will have to see, too, that the meaning to which sensuous intuition is distinctively alive in the specific case of beauty is a decidedly absolute, metaphysical meaning, one that concerns the issue of what it is to be a being in the first place. Here, what is sensed in the way the sensuous “parts” of the object come together concerns not merely the integrity of that particular object, but something of the nature of ontological integrity as such, as it pertains to all things.

Natural Beauty and the Metaphysics of Nature

While Hegel is primarily interested in the sensuous intuition of the absolute in artworks, and makes the case that it is only in artworks that we encounter a reality that is wholly and essentially defined by beauty – whereas in nature beauty is only ever contingent and partial – his various observations about our intuition of beauty in nature are nevertheless quite revealing of his conception of the nature of beauty generally, and in particular of its link to matters of ontological import. For this reason, I offer in the three chapters of Part I an extended reconstruction of and elaboration on the implications of Hegel’s approach to natural beauty in particular. In this context, I take human bodies and human actions to be natural both in that they are spontaneously occurring concrete realities that populate the sensuous world alongside stones, plants, and animals, and in that, unlike artworks, they exist for reasons other than being beautiful, and so whatever beauty they might have is incidental to their being and is typically not sought after in its own right.

While my main goal is to lay out the correlations between aesthetic/intuitional and ontological considerations at work in Hegel’s account here, I also wish to propose, against the grain of most scholarly treatments of Hegel’s aesthetic thought, that Hegel presents us with the basic outlines of a rather rich philosophy of natural beauty.Footnote ¹⁸ There is no denying that Hegel regards artistic beauty as constituting the very ideal of beauty, and that the beauty of naturally occurring beings falls short of this ideal. But this does not mean that nature is on his account devoid of beauty altogether, and a full-fledged account of beauty – which, it should be said, is not Hegel’s goal in his lectures on aesthetics, which are specifically oriented around art as a form of absolute spirit – would seem to require study of the ways naturally occurring reality is positioned in relation to beauty. Moreover, the aesthetic potential of nature itself proves to be crucial for understanding art’s own unavoidable relation to sensuous nature: If art cannot but take up into itself, and so render aesthetically meaningful, such naturally occurring phenomena as regularity, shape, color, sound, and, more specifically, such things as clouds, the sky, a mountain, along with human faces and bodily gestures, is art thereby drawing from and developing aesthetic resources already afforded by nature, or is it in effect negating their “natural” ways of existing altogether as it finds artistic significance in them (or, indeed, is it perhaps somehow doing both of these)? We will see that this question comes to the fore particularly in Hegel’s account of the beauty of the human body, for while he clearly regards certain natural features of the body as beautiful, he also seems to suggest that it is only through art that these features can truly appear in their full-fledged beauty.

What comes out especially clearly in Hegel’s remarks on natural beauty, I argue, is that the beauty of a thing is directly correlated with this thing’s own ontology, with its way of being the sort of being it is. Correspondingly, any ontological limitations that characterize a being – for instance, its dependency on other beings, its susceptibility to determination from without, its inability to realize its own essence – are directly correlated to a compromising of its beauty. This link between beauty and ontology is revealed in the basic hierarchy of natural beings that Hegel proposes, a hierarchy that is at once ontological and aesthetic: we move in Hegel’s account from the barest of aesthetic possibilities offered us by inanimate nature – phenomena such as regularity and symmetry – through to the fuller, more robust aesthetic possibilities peculiar to self-forming, self-determining, living beings (with animals, given their greater capacity for individuation, having a greater share in beauty than plants), and then to the even greater aesthetic possibilities of the human body, human character, and above all of free human action.Footnote ¹⁹ Here, aesthetic possibilities track ontological possibilities, and the claim, generally put, is that the more ontologically sophisticated a being is – for instance, the more self-individuating it is, the more it actively relates to and accounts for itself, the more thoroughly self-determining it is, the more thoroughly it is characterized by the structure of what Hegel calls “the concept” – the more beautiful it is capable of being. For we will see that what beauty ultimately amounts to, in the end, is the concrete, sensuous manifestation of freedom and ontological autonomy in their various forms. Indeed, we might say that what Hegel is out to explore in his aesthetic philosophy is the very look and sound of the movement of self-determination itself, as it realizes itself in various concrete shapes both in nature and in art. And to the extent that, in his view, all reality, whether artistic or natural, participates in the movement of self-determination to some degree, it is thereby able to participate in beauty insofar as it can make this movement manifest in its own way of appearing.Footnote ²⁰ (We will also see, however, that certain forms of spiritual self-determination – those that specifically bring into play the interiority of self-conscious beings as they realize their capacities for rational thought, faith, forming moral intentions, and a range of intellectual pursuits – do not necessarily and spontaneously manifest themselves in any specific, outward, and sensuous form, and so in their inwardness are in effect such as to defy adequate aesthetic expression, despite their ontological sophistication. In the end, this points to a limitation of beauty itself as a form of disclosing the truth of beings, and is relevant for understanding the transition to religion and philosophy as forms of absolute spirit that specifically embrace such spiritual interiority in its own right.)

To give a preliminary illustration of the aesthetic ontology at work in Hegel’s account of natural beauty, one that I hope offers some sense of the basic plausibility of Hegel’s proposed link between beauty and ways of being, let’s take an example from what Hegel would arguably regard as among the least developed aesthetic phenomena (namely, the regularity apparent in nature), and compare it with something utterly prosaic, something with no immediate aesthetic value whatsoever. For the latter, consider, for instance, our experience of objects whose overall form appears completely random or arbitrary, like a heap of dirt, or some scattered junk in a yard, or random noises from a construction site. Such objects immediately present us with something that does not stand on its own as a coherent, integral reality or totality in its own right, and so typically do not of their own accord draw our attention toward them as warranting a prolonged engagement. Arguably it is the very look or sound of such objects – or, we can say, their very presence – that immediately strikes us as contingent and meaningless, and we sense by their appearance that they have no internal, active ordering principle, that they are determined passively from without (as, for instance, by whatever forces piled up the dirt into its current haphazard form, or by the people who threw out the junk without any regard for its appearance or arrangement). And, though all the sounds from the construction site might come to me as a group and as having a certain apparent affinity with one another – they are, for instance, coming from the same general vicinity, are of comparable volume, and perhaps all tend to be sharp, clanging sounds – they do not strike me as having any meaningful coherence, there is no sense of gradual development or of transition into other phases (as there typically is in music or speech, for instance), and no one sound strikes me as particularly necessary or called for by the other sounds; they are all dispensable in themselves and in relation to the others.Footnote ²¹ It sounds like a hodgepodge, and it can be rather irritating and distracting to be exposed to such random sounds for any extended period; indeed, it is as though such scattered sounds have the effect of scattering the mind, frustrating the inner tendency of subjectivity to identify meaning and unity.

In contrast, in discussing the aesthetic character of regularity in nature, Hegel notes that the appearance of such things as crystals strikes us rather differently. Crystals have aesthetic appeal precisely because we see not only that there is a definite order or regularity to their outer shape and its internal articulations – as compared with the heap, for instance – but further that this order is patently not the mere, passive effect of contingent, external pressures, but comes at least to some extent from within, that this order arises spontaneously in virtue of the very nature of the material itself and the forces intrinsic to it in their interaction with the surroundings.Footnote ²² Particularly if the crystal is somewhat transparent, making something of its internal articulations directly apparent to us, we sense that it is strictly organized through and through, and this seems to accentuate further the autonomous, indwelling character of its form. Far from being imposed upon its matter from without, it is as though the crystalline form or principle of organization is here intrinsic to the matter, as though the matter itself of its own accord seeks out the particular formation appropriate to it.

The higher aesthetic appeal of the crystal as compared with the heap or the hodgepodge – or, as Hegel might put, the crystal’s being closer to the ideal of beauty – is rooted in the fact that it makes concretely manifest to us, in an immediate, sensuously intuitable form, something of the movement and reality of self-determination, and so gives us a glimpse of freedom, if only in a primitive, relatively inarticulate, felt way. Having the conspicuous look of something self-organizing also enables the crystal to come across to us as something that has its own ontological standing, like a substance that as such is an organizing center in its own right rather than being a mere derivative of something else; it seems that part of the reason the crystal fascinates us has to do with the way it makes this ontological integrity, this sense of having an “ownness” (or, we might say, a kind of inwardness, even perhaps a proto-selfhood) stand out to us. And further, that its form seems to be indigenous to the concrete material, and so presents us with a kind of basic unity between the ideal and the material, suggests to us something of the inherent rationality and meaning of reality, that rationality and meaning, as associated with ideality, are not merely extrinsic to, and imposed upon the world (say, by subjectivity or by an intelligent artificer), but actually dwell within it.Footnote ²³

I will continue to appeal to such phenomenological descriptions of various natural phenomena in Part I, highlighting thereby the way aesthetic experience hinges on a capacity to be alive to ontological matters, a link that is at the core of Hegel’s hierarchy of natural beauty. I reproduce the basic stages of Hegel’s ontological/aesthetic ordering, beginning with an account of the main types of nonhuman beauty in Chapter 2, followed by an account of human beauty in Chapters 3 and 4. I divide the discussion of human beauty into an account of the beauty of the human body (in Chapter 3) and the beauty specific to human action (in Chapter 4), both because there is good reason to distinguish between the appearing of aspects of human beauty that are not specifically a product of the will, and those that are, but also because it helps to set the stage for a controversy that will be taken up at more length in Part II of the book, in which the distinction between artworks that focus mainly on the repose of the body and artworks that focus on human action becomes central.

Art, Beauty, and the Ontology of Development

Part II of the book is dedicated to an account of the beauty of art, and so concerns the distinctive ontological issues that arise in and for the sensuous intuition of artworks in particular. Building on the account of the link between beauty and ontology developed in the context of Hegel’s reflections on the beauty of nature, I argue that the transition into artistic beauty necessarily leads us to ask about the distinctive ontology of the artwork in its own right: if the beauty of a being is, as was clear in the case of natural beauty, correlated to the ontology of this being itself, and if artworks are, as Hegel argues, not just more beautiful than the contingently beautiful objects of nature, but beautiful in an essential, constitutive, and wholly permeating way, then we might expect that artworks would themselves have to have a peculiar ontology in Hegel’s account, one that was rather different from the ontology of natural beings in their beauty. And whatever beauty artworks have must be grounded specifically in this distinctive ontology, even if (as we will see) there are other aspects (most notably, the content of artworks) that are also relevant in accounting for their beauty. The goal, then, is to determine what this peculiar ontological character is, and I aim to do so based not primarily on Hegel’s independent, philosophical ontology, but largely on the various sorts of aesthetic judgments and phenomenological descriptions of artistic beauty that Hegel gives.

If art is for Hegel one of the three forms of absolute spirit and so one of our foundational ways of accessing the ultimate truth of reality, we have to be open to the possibility that art, and so the particular way of being to which the artwork attunes us just in being an artwork, offers us its own distinctive and irreducible perspective on the nature of reality as a whole, a perspective distinctly suited to the fact that the absolute shows itself in such a sensuous, intuitive form in the first place: that is, the sort of ontological meanings or truths that artworks make us alive to are the truths that the artworks themselves put into play precisely by being the artworks they are.Footnote ²⁴ This is not to suggest that the intuition of artworks, in making us alive to the being of artworks themselves, is occupied narrowly with something that pertains only to artworks at the expense of the rest of reality (though the extent to which artworks show themselves as actively reflecting on their own distinctive being as artworks ought not be downplayed, and has indeed become a prominent theme within art itself and certain art criticism). Rather, the concern at issue can be formulated as follows: Given that artworks are real, and so given that reality is such as to include the particular way of being of artworks, what, if anything, does the existence of artworks tell us about the nature of reality itself, and, in particular, what does it tell us about the being of, and the relation between, nature and spirit, which are clearly both expressly at issue in artworks? We can find in Hegel a comparable approach when it comes to life: that is, the distinctive way of being characteristic of living beings, a way of being that involves a constant process of self-affirmation in and through self-externalization and the negation of the otherness this externalization brings with it, sheds key light both on the relation between nature and spirit and on the nature of being more broadly, which is why the category of “life” appears in the Science of Logic as one of the most basic ways in which we are to conceive of being itself.Footnote ²⁵ I propose we approach art in much the same way: Given that there is this peculiar way of being called “art,” whose very being is to be beautiful, what do this being and this beauty make intuitable to us concerning the nature of reality as a whole? Or, we might also ask, given some of the terms we will develop in the course of our analysis: If artworks realize an uncompromised aesthetic unity between spirit and nature, a unity that is found only in compromised forms elsewhere in reality, what does the fact of art’s being tell us about the respective natures of spirit and nature and their apparent opposition?

Thus in Chapter 4 I offer an extended account of the ontology of artworks, arguing that Hegel’s account of the beauty and aesthetic character of art cannot but come hand in hand with a metaphysical account of the peculiar, non-naturalist ontology of the artwork itself. Note again that this metaphysical perspective takes the phenomenology of aesthetic experience itself as its guide – it is a kind of aesthetic, phenomenological ontology – rather than simply offering an independently developed, philosophical ontology of spirit or of “spiritual products.”Footnote ²⁶ That is, it is precisely in our sensuous intuition of art as art – and, indeed, if artistic beauty is defined in terms of such intuition, then it is only in this intuition – that we find ourselves engaged with the sort of being peculiar to artworks, and it is this “lived metaphysics,” indigenous to our experience of art itself, that is our focus and final court of appeal.Footnote ²⁷

Reflecting on artworks from a perspective external to our lived experience of them, and presuming certain naturalist or realist metaphysical commitments, we would typically proceed on the assumption that artworks such as sculptures or paintings must be physical bodies like all others, governed by the same natural laws. As objects capable of making an impact on our senses, it seems they must necessarily be external to us, and also be such as to be characterized by the external and causal relations characteristic of the spatiotemporal domain generally, and so are, for instance, susceptible to natural deterioration due to external forces. Further, we would naturally conceive of artworks as the effects of the artists who made them, and so may be inclined to liken their ontology to that of all other forms of human artifice. But I argue that Hegel’s account would have us recognize that, insofar as an artwork presents itself to our sensuous intuition specifically as art, and so with a view to its beauty, it must be understood as interrupting and suspending its own natural conditions (including its having been made by a human artificer), so as to give rise to a rather different, autonomous, and ontologically irreducible way of being, one that accounts for it not being straightforwardly present as one natural, physical thing among others. It is the artwork’s realization of itself in and through such a suspension that will be my focus.

I come to argue that Hegel’s multi-sided exploration of the experience of artworks suggests that what is ultimately at the heart of the artwork is precisely an event of ontological emergence, whereby the eloquence of a spiritual way of being strikingly reveals itself arising out of, and so interrupting and transforming, what would otherwise be a meaningless, sensuous particularity of nature. Though Hegel does not straightforwardly declare such emergence as the ontological ground of our experience of artistic beauty, I bring together various lines of thought from within the aesthetics lectures to make a case for seeing it as the main model in terms of which his account is in fact oriented.

I argue that this complex, essentially dialectical movement of spirit’s emergence in and through the transformation of nature must be considered a decidedly historical, rather than a natural, event. And so I appeal to Hegel’s understanding of the distinctively developmental ontology at play in historical reality, in contrast to the largely static ontology that characterizes the realm of natural reality on his account. History is, for Hegel, the most evolved form of the concrete, and in particular of a concretely realized autonomy, in that it generates itself freely and on its own terms, itself defining and redefining the laws that govern it as it develops. In contrast, the ontology of nature is conceived largely in terms of the instantiation of fixed and unchanging laws that are wholly independent of their concrete instantiation: here, whatever concretely happens (even, presumably, in the course of the natural evolution of species) is already determined by preexisting laws that can be uncovered by science, and so these natural events are powerless to generate or transform the laws that govern them; natural events are always a repetition, a copy, and never an original, decisive event that would itself legislate or set the terms for future events.

In this context, I appeal, in particular, to the sort of momentous historical events that Hegel identifies in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of History, among other works, arguing that they are especially illuminating of the sort of eventful emergence of spirit that is disclosed in the heart of the artwork.Footnote ²⁸ Such historical events, though they occur at particular moments in time, stand out from other particular events for the way they put into question existing ways of being and existing standards of truth, and themselves inaugurate new ways of being and new standards, and ultimately new and autonomous historical epochs. In this manner, their otherwise finite, passing, and merely “natural” occurrence in time is transfigured into a decisive, momentous manifestation of the broader historical world that they themselves served to put into play. Thus such events as the development of Greek democracy, the Reformation, and the French Revolution are such as to overcome their own finite particularity as merely local events happening to particular people at a particular time, as they in effect come to redefine the very terms of history and so set the stage for future events, while also transforming our relation to past events. I suggest that artworks for Hegel are themselves such transfigured and transfiguring events, in that they too are otherwise finite objects that, in showing themselves to intuition, inaugurate new perspectives on reality and with them new ways of being in the world. Thus, for instance, Hegel cites with approval Herodotus’ claim that it was Hesiod and Homer who first gave the Greeks their gods (1820/21 96): poetry’s original and powerful way of bringing the gods to presence in their distinctive beauty is itself seen as inaugurating a decidedly new spiritual way of being in the world and, with it, a new way in which nature as a whole shows itself as being alive with spiritual meaning (as, for instance, in the way the sea’s turbulent wind comes to reveal itself as a certain cosmic resistance to the legitimacy of one’s voyage, or the grape shows itself as a gracious gift that, in being fermented and drunk and inspiring revelry, affords us a precious connection with the divine forces that make our lives possibleFootnote ²⁹). Here too, we can say that a particular event – the dawning of a poetry that so thoroughly captures the imagination of a people – becomes not merely one event among others, but the decisive reference point or context in terms of which the rest of life appears. I propose that it is the artwork’s capacity to stage such a transformative event for us, and to do so precisely by being such an event in its own right, that grounds its distinctive beauty on Hegel’s account.

In Chapters 5 and 6 I develop this link between artistic beauty and the ontology of the transformative event by showing how this link informs Hegel’s discussion of the broad ideals governing all artworks. In Chapter 5 I explore a basic contrast Hegel sets up between artworks that make palpable to us a sense of serene repose, which is likened to the ontology of an unchanging, self-satisfied divine being, and artworks that present us instead with a developmental movement, which, like creative human action, involves a transformation and incorporation of what is otherwise opposed to it into something through which it realizes itself. While there are certainly reasons to think that Hegel privileges the former, which would fit with his frequent construal of classical sculpture as the very pinnacle of beauty, I propose that there are compelling reasons to think that the latter is in fact the real exemplar of beauty operative in Hegel’s account, and, further, that this latter model fits better with the ontology of the artwork and its link to historical transformation.

In Chapter 6, I take up the specifics of Hegel’s discussion of the aesthetic merits and limitations of various types of artistic content and various possibilities associated with their artistic handling. We find in this discussion, I argue, a privileging of heroic action, and a case is made that such action is positioned by Hegel as offering art its highest potential for realizing the ideal of beauty. Why this might be the case is not immediately clear, but I argue that we can detect in this privileging of the heroic an attempt to link artistic beauty with the nature of a transformational historical event: that is, what gives the artistic presentation of the heroic its distinctive, and arguably superlative, beauty, in Hegel’s account, is precisely the way it makes us alive to the fundamentally historical character of spirit’s realization of itself in the natural world, and the way that decisive historical events shape the very nature of spirit in an enduring and irreversible way. The heroic is defined, ontologically, in terms of an individuality that does not simply adhere to or exemplify existing laws, but that becomes, through decisive and identity-defining action, a law unto itself.Footnote ³⁰ Appealing to this feature in particular I compare the nature of heroic action and its various aesthetic features with the ontology of the artwork itself, and suggest that they align to form what we can call a poetics of the transformative event.

Textual Sources

Given the peculiar situation with regard to the textual sources related to Hegel’s aesthetic thought, I should offer a note on my approach to them. Hegel never succeeded in publishing a text on aesthetics, and our main access to the content of his various lecture courses dedicated to this topic has been through an edition put together by his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho and published in 1835, after Hegel’s death, and then revised in 1842. This edition was based on Hegel’s own lecture notebooks (which no longer survive), various student transcripts of the lectures (some of which, including Hotho’s own transcripts from 1823, do survive), and no doubt Hotho’s own memories of Hegel’s lecture delivery and conversations with him. But this edition was heavily edited by Hotho, and though there is not much reason to think that Hotho had any intention other than to present Hegel’s aesthetic thought as faithfully as possible, recent scholarship has raised questions about the authoritativeness of certain aspects of this edition, seeing in these aspects the potential signs of Hotho’s own (no doubt Hegel-influenced) views rather than a faithful representation of what Hegel actually said and thought (see Gethmann-Siefert Reference Gethmann-Siefert1992 and Reference Gethmann-Siefert2014).Footnote ³¹ Moreover, given some of the variations between the different lecture courses Hegel gave, one suspects that Hegel’s aesthetic thought was in effect a work in progress that never did reach a final, author-approved shape, and so Hotho’s presentation of it as a fully settled, systematic view might be somewhat misleading.Footnote ³² As a result of these concerns, I have adopted the practice of supplementing my use of the Hotho edition with constant appeals to the best surviving student transcripts of Hegel’s various Berlin lectures on aesthetics, as well as to some of the reflections on art and absolute spirit that Hegel offers us in his other texts. While for ease of reference I continue to appeal to “Hegel’s aesthetic thought” as though its final shape were both settled and available to us, I acknowledge that the situation here is more complicated.

Many of the most central topics I deal with in the book have to do with broad themes and Hegelian distinctions that are fairly consistent across the various versions of the student transcripts, and in my reading I have generally avoided putting excessive weight on specific formulations that seem to be exclusive to the Hotho edition, and that are not directly corroborated by similar discussions in at least some of the student transcripts or by other Hegelian texts. In my view, however, some of the ideas and elaborations that are prominent in Hotho’s edition, but that are less developed or absent altogether in the sometimes terse student transcripts, are particularly insightful and are of independent philosophical worth. As such they warrant serious consideration by any philosopher of art who is sympathetic to Hegel’s philosophical project, regardless of whether we have decisive evidence that Hegel himself produced them in just that form. Indeed, even if the whole of Hotho’s edition were treated merely as a “reading” of Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy, or as a kind of coauthored work, rather than as a faithful recording of what Hegel actually said or intended to say, it is hard to deny that it would be a text worth reckoning with both for the intrinsic philosophical value of its ideas, as well as for the ways it constructively engages with aspects of Hegel’s thought for which we do have clearer textual evidence.Footnote ³³ In the few cases in which I appeal to portions of Hotho’s text that are not well corroborated by student transcripts – as, for instance, in my discussion of the beauty of nature, which in the Hotho edition has been elaborated beyond what can be found in the existing transcripts – I make note of this reliance on Hotho for the reader, but I try to show why such lines of thought are convincing in themselves, and also why it would have made sense for Hegel to have taken up these paths, given his other commitments.