Journal of the History of Philosophy

This book provides a systematic exposition of the three volumes of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. It discusses in detail Hegel's conception of art in general, of the particular forms of art (symbolic, classical, romantic), and of individual arts (architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry).

The central argument of the book consists in showing how Hegel's conception of idealism informs his aesthetics, and conversely—this latter point not being usually emphasized in the literature—how Hegel's aesthetics help us better understand his idealism. It goes without saying that the nature of Hegel's idealism is hotly debated, and no general consensus about it is in the offing. For the purpose of this book, Moland pins down what she takes to be two main features of Hegel's idealism. First, idealism is a view that is strongly holistic, and considers human beings and nature as mutually determining each other. Second, and related to the first point, idealism is a view that rejects the idea that sense perception, or feeling, or intellectual intuition can be determinate on its own; which is to say, objectivity does not obtain independently of, or antecedently to, our conceptual activity. Rather, what is objective becomes contentful only in an interrelation between subjects and objects on the one hand, and subjects and subjects on the other. [End Page 694]

Drawing on the implications of Hegel's conception of idealism, Moland argues that Hegel's aesthetics cannot be characterized as a "rationalist" aesthetics. According to the latter, the aim of art should be to track and to intimate the eternal ideals of beauty, perfection, or harmony—or in general, "Truth"—which exist independently of human conceptual activity (305). In contrast to the rationalist aesthetics, for Hegel art has a social and historical dimension, and its vocation primarily consists in helping us realize our own formative role in the constitution of objectivity.

Similarly, taking a cue from the aspirations of Hegel's idealism, Moland elucidates why Hegel is so vehemently against "naturalism" in the then-fashionable works of such playwrights as August von Kotzebue. Those playwrights, while distancing themselves from overly stylized French art, set themselves the task of giving an accurate recitation of daily events. In contrast to this trend, Hegel believes that art must be satisfied with, and indeed take pride in, its artificial character as "seeming" (Schein), since it is exactly the artificial character of art that triggers our understanding of the social or natural world not as simply given, and of the fact that we contribute to determining it (36). And similarly, in painting, Hegel lauds such painters as Albrecht Dürer, who does not aim at producing a strictly accurate copy of his subjects, but, by omitting accidental or irrelevant details of the face, paints a portrait that in fact "hits the mark better as it were, is more like the individual than the actual individual himself" (214).

Moland thus argues that for Hegel the work of art has a double function: making the strange familiar, and making the familiar strange. The latter may strike us to be more Brechtian than Hegelian, but Moland correctly emphasizes that making the familiar strange is an essential part of Hegel's conception of aesthetics. Namely, by disrupting our everyday habit of seeing things in certain ways that we normally take for granted, the work of art reminds us of how those habits are not simply given, and in fact result from our own collective agency. Conversely, and similarly, the work of art dissolves the sheer strangeness of natural scenery (as is the case with landscape painting), or of the divine (as is the case in romantic art), and by doing so suggests how nature or the divine is not alien to our own conceptual activity, but is constituted by it.

Another major theme of Moland's book concerns how to understand Hegel's famous (or infamous) thesis of "the end of art." In the literature on Hegel, this thesis...