Hegel considered art, and thus aesthetic activity, a lower stage in theoretical knowledge that reaches in philosophy, where the absolute in itself is the most delicate of its degrees. Art is the sensual depiction of the absolute or the soul. This distinction between art and philosophy stems, of course, from philosophical considerations
Let us now ask the question that we have always touched in the previous presentation: Does art meet with religion and philosophy in the content of this question that the most comprehensive realities of the soul are inseparable from the totality of objective human relations in this world and in the first place objective political, social, legal and moral.
The artist is the product of their time and society because art is an aspect of the historical development process. As for the subject or content of art, despite its convergence with the cognitive content of religion and philosophy, it transcends the common signs with them. Hegel has shown that there is a certain degree of truth to human existence that responds to artistic activity and that there is a relative differentiation between the subject of knowledge and the subject of artistic presentation.
Hegel says that art reveals the dominance of public forces in history and that passions are the meat of the historical process. Hence, we can distinguish between the intellectual content of knowledge and the emotional content of art. The special field of art is the emotions and feelings that express the prevailing forces in history.
In many fields, Hegel does not consider art as a lower link of knowledge in relation to science as a higher link. Rather, he considers art and science as two qualitatively different functions in knowledge and two necessary functions that do not represent one another.
We have seen in previous parts that the aesthetic is related to work, it is a human creation and the result of real human activity, and it is the vision of things as an effect of human creativity as an expression of the human being. One of the characteristics of aesthetic awareness, or rather artistic activity, is that it does not consume anything, but rather makes human energy position itself in independence and freedom as an end in itself.
Here, the issue of reconciling art as an end in itself and art as a transitory moment for the manifestation of the soul arises.
In light of the foregoing, how can the truth of art be in religion and philosophy? Attempting to answer this question puts us in front of the dialectical contradiction that permeates Hegel’s analysis and aesthetic views, that the cognitive artistic value is derived for Hegel from the value of the content as a historical meaning and as a realistic force, that is, it is derived from human social relations and their contradictions, but the movement of these relationships and this realistic historical force also transcends the path of the soul that will eventually transcend art.
Apart from this aspect, Hegel's aesthetic analysis is characterized by a pragmatic tendency and historical understanding. His aesthetic ideal is the radiance of the best form of life in this world in the historical reality where the richness of life is as close as possible to realization and unfolding.
This ideal was achieved in the Greek civilization, but the richness of real-life finds in every age a certain possibility to establish the unity of nature and human thought. Hegel formulated some principles of the realist method and asserted that the artist's task is to display the essential forces and energies of the age through the events and aspirations of some individuals and through their passions and whims.
All these results that Hegel reached in his analysis confirm that art is an expression of the richness of real life and the unity between man and nature, and these results do not contradict the fact that art is an expression of the absolute spirit.
However, Hegel, in his analysis of some technical characteristics and in his specific concrete judgments, stopped at the unity of nature and man without paying attention to the fact that art is a lower link in the absolute development of the soul.
In order to understand the aesthetics of Hegel, it is necessary to acknowledge the existence of this living contradiction, which can be presented as follows:
- Hegel makes art in his philosophical system an expression of the soul and adds to this that the current development and transcendence of the soul leads to the demise of art. The prose of bourgeois life finds its truth in the later development of the soul, in philosophy.
- Hegel puts in his detailed analyses, especially in his book Aesthetics, the fact that art is an expression of the unity of nature and man. In this theory, the prose of bourgeois life becomes a destruction of harmony and beauty and a lack of Greek harmony that will never return.
Hegel, with his assertion that art is a stage in the development of the soul and that art will disappear, giving way to a higher transcendence of the soul, did not go to the end with his opinion of the withering away of art.
He also retreated when he began to stress the importance of the conflict between the prose of bourgeois relations and the poetics of the human heart, and the importance of the conflict between the ossified system of things hostile to beauty and the personality rebelling against this system.
These conflicts are a valid subject for contemporary and humanistic art in which the greatness of man, the richness of human relations, and the poeticity of human aspirations are evident.
Hegel clearly identifies the features of Romanticism and did not clarifthe y how art would be resurrected on a new basis, but he spoke of a new stage for Romantic art or a new stage that transcends Romantic art, the stage of free art. Free art is unlimited in its content and makes humanity its focus.
The absolute content of the art of the present era is the human element and the totality of human relations and the novel, because it deals with man as a person in their private life and is concerned with depicting and describing human life, occupies an important place in free art.
The development of humanistic free art contradicts Hegel's idealistic finality, which leads to the definitive statement of the decline of Thet, the art in Hegel’s “Aesthetics” was more than a moment of crossing to a higher stage for the manifestation of the soul. One of the contemporary aesthetic scholars considers the book Aesthetics, Hegel's easiest and most enjoyable book, an air hole in his philosophical system.
Hegel in Aesthetics is more realistic and humane and closer to the earth, reality, and nature than in his philosophical system. Art that unites finite nature and infinite thought or mediates between sensory reality and pure thought, this intermediate moment acquires in its aesthetics a special importance in itself, and to the extent that this intermediate moment becomes a subject of interest, philosophical results move away from interfering with concrete analysis and we forget until the time that art A cycle in the evolution of the soul.
Here, Hegel directs his analysis to reality, natural beauty, and to the richness of human life. Also, art becomes primarily an expression of the natural, sensual, vibrant, and pulsating aspect. Aesthetics represents, for pure logical abstraction, a return to the sensual forms of the concrete world, of nature and man. These forms are represented symbolically in the formula for the development of the categories.
It is a return to Mother Earth, where a supreme unity between man and nature is established.
The absolute idea leads, as Hegel says, to itself in the course of history full of contradictions, through the development of humanity. and nature. The absolute idea, as Hegel says, returns to itself the unity of spirit and nature, or in it is the congruence between nature and history, between the general development of the abstract forms of human civilizations and the concrete subjective activity of the individual.
In these moments, the harmony of the human will with the free play of human energies and the harmony of necessity with freedom is achieved. The task of Hegel's philosophy is summed up in the connection between the abstract absolute idea and the absolute spirit.
Hegel reveals in his treatment of the intermediate link between idea and spirit, which is nature and human life, he reveals a keen realist sense and a keen and intense interest in life. What is important to Hegel here is not the abstract ideal of general forms of thought but the image of life full of meaning or the image in which real life and the real world are realized.
In the philosophy of art, the transition from the logic of the idea to the logic of life takes place at its highest levels, where the organic unity between nature and spirit is established.
In his philosophy, Hegel subordinated art and artistic creation to theoretical knowledge and science, but he did not thus destroy the free course of life and direct feelings. What is beautiful in nature is what reminds us of man and what tells us about life.
As Hegel looks at the beautiful as an expression of life, he weakens - without removing - the abstract contemplative moment that permeates his philosophical system, where beauty lies in the complete openness of the idea. Aesthetics is the logic of the sublime forms of the manifestation of life, and Hegel here emphasizes the actual infinity and the infinite fecundity of nature.
Nature is not as in his finite system, but includes infinite richness. The beautiful, which in the system was a temporary expression of the general unfolding of the idea, becomes in the actual development full of realism and the personalized richness of natural and historical reality.
It is this realistic and historical understanding of the richness personified in natural and historical reality that gives Hegel's aesthetics its present importance and enduring value.