The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~150,000 words · 724 passages
Cite this work
- APAHegel. (n.d.). The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-philosophy-of-fine-art-volume-4-of-4
- MLAHegel. "The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-philosophy-of-fine-art-volume-4-of-4.
- ChicagoHegel. The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/the-philosophy-of-fine-art-volume-4-of-4.
What it is about
The fourth and last volume of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics in Osmaston's English translation: the one devoted to poetry.
Context and history
It should be known that this is not a book Hegel wrote. These are his Berlin lectures of the 1820s, reconstructed by his pupil Hotho from the manuscripts and from students' notes and published after his death; scholars dispute how much Hotho supplied himself. That said, the content is central: here poetry appears as the most spiritual of the arts and at the same time as one that can no longer quite say what would need saying, and it is here that the famous thesis of art's 'pastness' comes out — not that art ends, but that it has ceased to be the highest way in which a people grasps the truth. The three earlier volumes deal with the idea of beauty, and with architecture, sculpture, painting and music.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
ability to display facts in their historical succession or natural process. Far profounder and more extended embrace of world of idea than in music; due to its greater power of definition in speech and its use of tone merely as a subordinate instrument. The content of poetry is the ideal envisagement of imaginative content itself. Everything made intelligible by language may form part of content, subject to the condition that it is poetical. Analysis of what this condition implies. The imagination of artist must be Contributive; distinction from mere prose consciousness and thinking. In its entire independence of the material of sense it may be defined as the universal art. The material is the imagination, and as such conjoint with all the arts. It is, however, not the only art open to philosophical review on this ground. It marks, however, the commencement of the disintegration of Art, its bridge of passage to the notion of religion and philosophical thought] Subdivision of subject-matter I. Poetical composition as distinguished from that of Prose 1. The poetical and prosaic composition (_a_) The world of natural or prosaic fact relatively excluded. Primarily what it deals with is the infinite domain of S