Beauty, Aesthetic Experience and Immanent Critique

Abstract

In his essay What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel?, Benedetto Croce praises Hegel for bestowing the highest value on beauty, in particular artistic beauty. He emphasises Hegel's ‘tendency to make art a primary element in human life, a mode of knowledge and of spiritual elevation’, and the ‘constant contact of Hegelian speculation with taste and with works of art, and the dignity which it assigned to the artistic activity’ (Croce 1985: 121). This tendency, Croce writes, is what makes Hegelian speculation congenial to the great aesthetic theories of the Romantic period. In this paper, I shall put forward some considerations which render support to Croce's observation that there is a strand of unreserved and absolute appreciation of beauty, in particular artistic beauty, in Hegelian philosophy. My focus will be in particular on the question of why Hegel thinks that the experience of beauty — which I will be referring to, in short, as aesthetic experience — is of special, even absolute value for human beings. This will involve, in the first part of the paper, an analysis of what Hegel takes to be the content of such experience; hence an analysis of Hegel's notion of beauty.Such emphasis on the absolute value of beauty invites of course the question of how beauty relates, in Hegel's system, to what Hegel regards as the highest value of all: reconciliation. Hegel believes that both philosophical speculation — which culminates in knowledge of the absolute truth — and the achievement of the highest practical good, the participation in civic life, are ways of reconciling the human individual with the world they live in. Does the same apply to beauty, or aesthetic experience? I will briefly touch on the relation between aesthetic experience and reconciliation in the second part of the paper. In this context, we will also consider an objection to the view that Hegel's appreciation of aesthetic experience is unrestricted or absolute, which arises from consideration of Hegel's famous claim that philosophy is higher than art.