Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Abstract
According to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (The Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art, 1886), beauty in art is a higher beauty than that of nature, because beauty in art is a product of the mind, or spirit, the intellectual rather than the sensory. In the Symposium of Plato, when the initiate learns to love all beautiful bodies rather than just one body, to “pursue the beauty of form” (210) rather than the beauty of the body, to turn away from the “low and small-minded slav-ery” of love for the beauty of a body, and turn “towards the great sea of beauty and gazing on it he’ll give birth, through a boundless love of knowledge, to many beautiful and magnificent discourses and ideas,” the initiate ascends to the beauty of mind which is higher than the beauty of nature and which can be represented in art, discourses and ideas. Thus for Hegel in the Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, the beauty of art is “born—born again, that is—of the mind..."
Recommended Citation
Hendrix, J. S. (2019). Philosophy of Perception in Hegel. Retrieved from https://docs.rwu.edu/saahp_fp/42
