Philosophy of the

Spirit
Lecture #2

The Absolute as Art

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Three perspectives:

• Realism

• Expressivism

• Formalism
Hegel's Theory of Art

Basic Principle of the Absolute Spirit:

• The concept of the Spirit

• has its reality
• in the Spirit
 Subjective Spirit:

• Starts with:
human being as part of nature

• Ends with: Free Spirit

• Difference between knowledge

and subject
 Objective Spirit
• Starts with:
free spirit recognizing itself in
an objective social world

• Ends with:
the State within world history

• Opposition between knowledge

and subject
 Absolute Spirit
• Mode of consciousness

• Object: the whole as developed

• Absolute Spirit

• Idea

• Totality of being
Absolute Spirit (2)

• Immediate consciousness:
Art

• Self-consciousness: Religion

• Self-understanding:
Philosophy
 What is Art?
• Sensuous representation of the
idea

• Aesthetic objectivism: beauty

• Not: mimesis

• Better: Vor-stellung =
presentation
Work of Art=

Sign of the idea

A sensuous representation
that acts like a sign of the idea
and therefore presents it.
Par. 556
The shape of this knowledge is,
in so far it is immediate (the
element of the finite in Art) …

on the one hand a breaking up

into a work of a common
external existence, in the
subject that produces it and the
subject that perceives and
reveres it, …
and on the other hand the
concrete perception and
representation of the absolute
Spirit in itself as the Ideal -

(which is) the concrete shape

that is born out of the
subjective Spirit, in which the
natural immediacy is only a
sign of the idea, …
 when it has been declared to
be this expression by the
imaginative Spirit, because the
shape does not indicate
anything other than this - the
shape of beauty.
Par. 556
Translation: William Wallace

As this consciousness of the

Absolute first takes shape, its
immediacy produces the factor of
finitude in Art.
Par. 556

On the one hand, that is, it breaks

up into a work of external common
existence,

into the subject which produces

that work, and the subject which
contemplates and worships it.
 Par. 556

But, on the other hand, it is the

concrete contemplation and
mental picture of implicitly
absolute spirit as the Ideal.

Representation
In itself
 Par. 556

In this ideal, or the concrete

shape born of the subjective
spirit, its natural immediacy,
which is only a sign of the Idea,
is so transfigured by the
informing spirit in order to
express the Idea, that the
figure shows it and it alone: -
the shape or form of Beauty.
 SUMMARY
• Art is the expression of the
Absolute Spirit as immediate
consciousness

• It uses representational
contents that are signs

• It presents the idea as the ideal

• It falls apart into the work and
the subjective intelligence of
artist and observer.