Chapter 12 - §§556–63: Art as a Form of Absolute Spirit

Summary

Both in the 1807 Phenomenology and in the original 1817 Encyclopedia, Hegel did not grant art any special status as one of the basic forms of absolute spirit. Yet, we know that by 1820, two years after his arrival in Berlin, he was lecturing on art along the lines that now are familiar to us, as one of the three essential components of absolute spirit. I will argue that this shows us something crucial in the development of Hegel’s systematic philosophy, which has to do both with his systematic concerns and with the dramatic shift in the world around him after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In a nutshell: the modern world which he had delineated in 1807 had been vindicated by the failure of the Congress to turn the clock back to pre-revolutionary times, and this raised the question of what role art could play in that world which would be different from the religious role it had formerly played. This turn of events required him to rethink his political philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and, of course, his philosophy of art. It also led him to his historical and rather “phenomenological” conception of art that he presented in his Berlin lectures.