Hegel wrote it. It was originally the author's 19 class notes at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. After Hegel's death, it was edited by his student, Gustad Hottor, according to the lecture notes. It was first published in 1835- 1838, so it was also called "aesthetic lecture notes".
This book is a collection and summary of Hegel's late mature aesthetic thoughts. It combines western traditional aesthetic thoughts with German classical aesthetics, and develops German classical aesthetics to its peak. It is also one of the earliest aesthetic monographs with a complete system in the West, and it even "played an epoch-making role". Engels spoke highly of this.
Aesthetics is an important part of Hegel's whole philosophy system, which has a relatively independent and complete system. Its appearance marks that aesthetics has truly become a historical science. This book 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 characteristics and historical development of various arts corresponding to the above three arts, with emphasis on poetry (literature), making it one of the most important and wonderful parts of the book.
Hegel's aesthetics is based on the objective idealism philosophy system, which determines that its fundamental nature is idealism. However, Hegel can consciously and comprehensively apply dialectics to aesthetic theory, clarify a series of fundamental problems of beauty and art, and reveal some laws of artistic creation, appreciation and development. On the analysis of beauty's essence, natural beauty and artistic beauty, it fully embodies its overall thought and dialectics, contains many materialistic factors and practical viewpoints, and has obvious realistic aesthetic tendency. This made him surpass his predecessors and made great historical achievements. On the other hand, because of the basic contradiction between the "reasonable core" of dialectics and the idealistic ideology, aesthetics also has inevitable defects.
Hegel regards aesthetics as "philosophy of art" and thinks that art is the main object of aesthetics. In aesthetics, he took "the concept of beauty" as the logical starting point, and demonstrated how the concept was gradually transformed into a perceptual artistic image through many intermediary links to express and know himself, and finally realized the whole process of artistic beauty in which the concept and image were perfectly unified, thus constructing a complete aesthetic theoretical system. On the concept of beauty, the central issue of aesthetics, Hegel put forward that "beauty is the perceptual manifestation of ideas" in the first volume of Aesthetics, which became the core idea of his aesthetics. The so-called concept is the absolute spirit, which is the unity of the concept and the reality represented by the concept. He also called it "cosmic force" or "God", but it actually refers to content, purpose and meaning. And "perceptual manifestation" refers to the external expression of specific feelings. Beauty is the unity of reason and sensibility, content and form, essence and phenomenon, ideal and reality, universality and particularity, subjectivity and objectivity. He believes that everything is true only when it exists as an idea, so beauty itself is equivalent to truth. "Beauty and truth are the same thing." At the same time, he pointed out that beauty and truth are different from whether perceptual forms are needed or not. He distinguishes the grades of beauty according to whether ideas can be perfectly displayed, and thinks that ideas are not perfectly displayed in nature, so natural beauty should be excluded from the aesthetic field. Based on his definition of beauty, Hegel believes that true beauty only exists in the field of art, and artistic beauty (or ideal) is the only and absolute object of aesthetics. Therefore, the first volume focuses on the theory of artistic beauty, focusing on artistic beauty and its qualitative and artist issues. In Hegel's view, artistic beauty is an artistic image that can express ideas in perceptual form. Because artistic image is something that has been spiritualized through "washing" and "injecting life", it can fully express thoughts or ideals. That is, it can show the infinity and freedom of thought in the perceptual image of limited things, which perfectly embodies the unity of reason and sensibility, content and form, generality and individuality. On the question of how abstract artistic beauty can be transformed into artistic image, Hegel put forward a series of specific categories to realize this transformation: general world situation (social and cultural background of the times), situation (specific environment of characters), emotion, conflict, action and personality. He regards the social and historical background of the times as the basis and expression of artistic image, which embodies his "great sense of history". Especially regarding "personality is the real center of ideal artistic expression", it requires the characters' personality to be rich, distinct and consistent, and puts forward that the four aspects of "general world situation", "situation", "emotion" and "personality" should be unified in opposition, which constitutes the essence of the unity of opposites of typical art. These are the most valuable viewpoints in aesthetics, and also mark the completion of the western art theory from the traditional "plot center" theory to "plot center" The first volume is different from the predecessors in theory. Hegel unifies the logic and history in aesthetics and explores the essence of beauty from the relationship between man and nature, subject and object, intellectual knowledge and will practice. He linked the essence of beauty with the humanization of nature and the historical development of human socialization, and advocated that beauty itself is "infinite and free", "freedom is the essence of ideas and the highest goal pursued by ideas", and artistic beauty is also the product of pursuing and realizing freedom. Accordingly, he said that "aesthetics is liberating". Thus it broke through the metaphysical theory that "beauty is freedom" of Kant, Schiller and Schelling. On the other hand, Hegel thinks that people always "create themselves" in the objective world created by themselves, and then connects art with the objectification practice of realistic people, showing his profound understanding of the essence of human aesthetic activities, seeing that the content of artistic beauty is the essential strength of human beings, and emphasizing the characteristics of purpose, creativity and freedom of artistic beauty. This is groundbreaking in theory.
The second volume of Aesthetics mainly discusses the historical types of artistic development. Hegel divided human art into three historical types-symbolic art, classical art and romantic art on the basis of "the degree to which ideas and images can be integrated". This was put forward by him by absorbing the traditional viewpoint of German classical aesthetics and transforming Schelling's artistic trichotomy. He believes that symbolic art is an early low-level art, because the material expression exceeds the spiritual content and fails to fully display the concept of beauty. Classical art is an ideal art with perfect unity of material expression and spiritual content. Romantic art, on the other hand, lost the tranquility and joy of classical art because the spiritual content exceeded the material expression. The result of its development is its own destruction, even the disintegration of art itself, and finally gives way to philosophy. He used the basic aesthetic categories corresponding to this classification: sublime, beautiful and ugly. He advocates that symbolic art is sublime art, classical art is beautiful art, and romantic art is ugly art. He also links tragedy, comedy and other categories with the historical development of art types, giving them historicity, logicality and transformation. Hegel's classification of this type is unscientific. His pessimistic view on the future of art shows that he saw the social and historical reasons for the decline of art, but it was attributed to the internal logic of ideological development, showing his compromise and weakness.
The third volume of Aesthetics mainly divides art categories and grades according to the different functions of perceptual materials, and tries to explore the logical process of the development of each art. On the basis of demonstrating the characteristics of architecture, painting, music and poetry (including drama), Hegel draws the conclusion that poetry is the highest and architecture is the lowest. Because of his one-sided pursuit of system construction, it has caused many fallacies and contradictions.
Although Hegel's aesthetics has outstanding theoretical achievements and broadened the world of aesthetic theory, the author has reversed the basic relationship between matter and spirit, rationality and sensibility, particularity and universality, resulting in obvious theoretical defects: the rigid and far-fetched pursuit of the three-stage integrity of objective idealism aesthetic system has led to the anti-scientific nature in logic and form; Subjective prejudice; Paying too much attention to rationality dilutes the in-depth exploration of characteristics such as sensibility, personality and aesthetic psychology.