What is the basic principle of Hegel's aesthetics?

Hegel's aesthetic thought is mainly reflected in his book "Aesthetic Lectures", which is an integral part of his whole philosophical system and a concrete embodiment of his philosophical system in the field of aesthetics and art. The fundamental feature of art is that ideas reveal themselves and know themselves through perceptual images, and "beauty is the perceptual expression of ideas" has become the core of Hegel's aesthetic thought. Hegel made a logical and historical analysis of the essence and characteristics of art, the historical types of art development and various art systems respectively. Logically, he established a huge philosophical system of artistic idealism; In history, he initiated the research of sociology of art and showed a grand view of history. Hegel's aesthetic thought plays an epoch-making role in the history of western aesthetics and becomes a master of classical aesthetics. The lecture on aesthetics is divided into three volumes. The first volume mainly discusses the concept of beauty and the basic principle of artistic beauty; The second volume focuses on the characteristics and historical development of symbolic art, classical art and romantic art; The third volume discusses in detail the aesthetic characteristics and historical development of each art corresponding to the above three art types, focusing on poetry (literature). In this book, Hegel consciously and comprehensively applied dialectics as the only method to aesthetic theory, clarified a series of fundamental problems of beauty and art, and revealed some laws of artistic creation, appreciation and development. The analysis of the essence of beauty, natural beauty and art fully embodies his overall thought and dialectics, and has obvious realistic aesthetic tendency. In aesthetics, Hegel takes "the idea of beauty" as the logical starting point, and demonstrates how the idea is gradually transformed into a perceptual artistic image through many intermediary links to show and know himself, and finally realizes the process of artistic beauty in which the idea and image are perfectly unified. In the first volume, Hegel put forward that "beauty is the perceptual manifestation of ideas", and this definition became the core idea of his aesthetics. Concepts, that is, "absolute spirit" or "cosmic power" and "spirit", actually refer to content, purpose and implication, while "perceptual manifestation" refers to concrete and perceptible external performance. Beauty is the unity of the two. Everything is true only if it exists as an idea, so beauty itself is equal to truth. He distinguishes the grades of beauty according to whether the thought can be perfectly displayed. He believes that ideas cannot be perfectly displayed in nature, and only in the field of art can there be real beauty, and artistic beauty (or ideal) is the only and absolute object of aesthetics. The first volume of Aesthetics focuses on the theory of artistic beauty, focusing on artistic beauty, its definition and artists. In Hegel's view, artistic beauty is an artistic image that can express ideas in perceptual form. Because artistic image is something spiritualized through "washing" and "injecting life". He used a lot of space to elaborate art theory, and his aesthetics is basically an art philosophy. After summarizing the general principles, Hegel's aesthetics focuses on artistic theory. In the second volume, he regards art as a department of human culture, and thinks that its development has roughly gone through three stages: (1) the symbolic art of ancient East. Its basic feature is that the material form overwhelms the spiritual content, and the typical representative works are the buildings of eastern nationalities such as India, Egypt and Persia. (2) the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome. It is characterized by the balance between spiritual content and material form, and its typical representative works are Greek sculptures. (3) Romantic art popular in the western Christian world since the Middle Ages. Its basic feature is that the spiritual content exceeds the material form, and its typical representative works, such as religious paintings, chivalrous novels and many works of art after the Renaissance. He believes that when it comes to romantic art, the development of art will reach its peak, so that art will decline and the spirit will develop from art to religion and philosophy. In the third volume, Hegel deeply studied various specific arts, and thought that art started with architecture and then developed along the clue of sculpture, painting, music and poetry. The highest form of poetry is drama. Art reached its peak when it developed into drama. He believes that music reflects "the innermost self", is "the art of emotion, and is aimed at emotion", while "the unique field of expression is emotion", and the soul of musicians in creation is liberation and freedom. He also studied the aesthetic characteristics of various arts, especially literature (poetry), and thought that tragedy showed the conflict and mediation of two opposing ideals or "ordinary forces". Both sides of the tragic conflict, as far as their respective positions are concerned, are both rational and ethically reasonable, and they must stick to their own positions in the conflict. But as far as the specific situation was concerned, both sides of the conflict were one-sided. To solve the tragic contradiction, one or both sides could only be eliminated at the expense of the other side. Tragedy is realized through the pain or destruction of tragic characters. After the tragedy, the ideal represented by the tragic characters will not be shattered, and the tragic ending is the victory of eternal justice. The effect of tragedy is not only what Aristotle called "compassion of fear", but also pleasure and excitement. Hegel's aesthetics is the combination of western traditional aesthetics and German classical aesthetics, which has developed German classical aesthetics to its peak. It plays an epoch-making role in the history of western aesthetics and is one of the earliest aesthetic monographs with a complete system in the west.