The core content of Hegel's aesthetic thought is "Beauty is the perceptual manifestation of ideas". Idea is an absolute spirit and a concept. Also known as "God", "Almighty" and "Implication", it actually refers to the ideological content of art, with infinite thoughts and limited artistic images. Art is to show infinite universal truth in the perceptual image of limited things, and to achieve the harmonious unity of universality and particularity, generality and individuality, objectivity and subjectivity, and rationality and sensibility. He pointed out that artistic creation is to inject ideological content into life, externalize one's thoughts and feelings into works, become one's own opposite (works), and know oneself from the opposite. He pointed out that artistic beauty is higher than natural beauty, and artistic beauty is the combination of nature and ideal. "Nature" refers to social reality, and "ideal" refers to the thought embodied in the image. Therefore, he proposed that there should be ideals first, and then find nature to embody them, which is called idealism; If we see an ideal from nature and produce an ideal from nature, it is called realism. He asked to turn ordinary subjects into extraordinary subjects. It requires shaping a typical figure, showing universal significance in this typical figure, and realizing the dialectical unity of the individual and the whole. He believes that there are three factors that determine personality: one is "world situation", that is, social background; The second is the "situation", that is, the specific environment; The third is "passion", that is, the ideals, attitudes and feelings of the characters. Personality is produced and expressed in the conflict between situation and passion, which requires shaping a typical personality in a typical environment, so that personality has three characteristics: richness, distinctiveness and consistency. For an artist, he needs imagination, genius and inspiration, as well as unique style and originality.
He divided the development of art into three periods: the oldest is symbolic art, which symbolizes ideas with symbols, and "material factors exceed spiritual factors", followed by classical art, such as sculptures and statues in ancient Greece, which achieved the unity of spiritual and material factors; The third stage is romantic art, which refers to western modern art, which is different from romanticism, but the spiritual factor exceeds the material factor. It is believed that romanticism will be destroyed if it develops to the extreme pursuit of ideals and passions, and finally art will give way to philosophy, so there will be no art for mankind. He believes that the development of art is the result of spiritual and material struggle.
He also distinguished the types of art according to the different functions of the concept of expression. It is considered that architecture is the lowest art and represents symbolic art; Sculpture goes further than architecture and represents classical art; Painting, music and poetry are all advanced arts, representing romantic art. He believes that poetry is the highest art, and poetry is the perceptual manifestation of real ideas. When he said poetry, he meant poems, novels and essays, which were called "beautiful literature". The opposite of "beautiful literature" is "hard literature", including science, philosophy and history. It's called prose. He distinguished poetry and prose from three aspects: cognitive method, thinking form and language application, that is, the difference between art and philosophy and science. He also divided poetry into three types: epic, lyric and dramatic poetry, and discussed their respective characteristics. He thinks that epic is objective, its style is cold, while lyricism is subjective and its style is hot. Only when the drama achieves the combination of subjective and objective, cold and hot, is the peak of poetry. Then he divided drama into tragedy, comedy and drama.
Hegel's aesthetic thought accords with realism. He refuted all kinds of formalism, decadence and pure art theory, and applied dialectics and historical viewpoint to the aesthetic field, which greatly broadened the aesthetic world. Based on his absolute spirit, later generations developed aesthetics.