Art plays a fundamental role in Hegel's mature systematic philosophy, one of three principal forms of what Hegel terms ‘absolute spirit’, that is, a primary way in which humans cognize their nature and its role in the world (HW 10: 366-67). Notwithstanding this, Hegel's philosophy of art has received less attention than have his philosophy of religion, political philosophy, or philosophy of history, all of which were mainstays in the debates between the rival schools of Hegelianism directly after Hegel's death, and each of which exercised considerable authority in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were no Right or Left Hegelians on questions of art. Of course, this is not to say that Hegel's philosophy of history and conception of dialectical reason did not have decisive impact on the founding of systematic art history and on the philosophy of art in the humanistic Marxism of Lukács, Adorno and Marcuse, but his specific views on aesthetics and the nature and history of the various arts were much less influential. If one were to broaden the scope of influence to include artists, Hegel is hardly worth mentioning next to figures like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Do Hegel's specific views on art have purchase nowadays? One set of doctrines has received a good deal of attention, at least among philosophers of art: Hegel's claim that art has ‘ended’. Much commentary focuses on Hegel's contentions that (A) the art of Attic Greece was the primary way for that culture to experience their form of life as binding, and that (B) art after a point in that culture can never play that role again, at least not progressively.

That Hegel was a significant influence on the young Georg Lukács' Theory of the Novel is a point few would dispute. Lukács himself insisted that the first part of TN represented his own transition from Kantian to Hegelian theory, and most critics have subsequently affirmed the importance of Hegel to Lukács' pre- (or, depending on one's view, proto-) Marxist argument in TN. Yet the two are in some ways strange to take together in the context of novelistic theory. Despite the profusion of novelistic literature in his own time and his own significant appropriation of it for the limning of essential moments of the development of the world-historical spirit, Hegel's official Aesthetics hardly presents what one could claim to be an especially worked-out theory of the novel. The Aesthetics takes up literature in general primarily under the rubric of providing a theory of the genres of poetry — epic, lyric and dramatic — and what relatively few words Hegel actually devotes to the novel and prose literature in the lectures are tucked in corners: at the end of the discussion of the development of the epic, in the discussion of the historical form of the romantic, and in scattered comments elsewhere. As for TN, despite the strong connections some have drawn between Hegel and Lukács — Peter Demetz said that Lukács was ‘in a certain sense … the last Hegelian in the grand style’ (Demetz 1967: 215) — others have questioned whether Lukács' work should be regarded primarily as making a contribution to the philosophy of literature in the tradition from which Hegel writes.

Throughout his work Hegel distinguishes between the notion of an act (Tun) from the standpoint of the agent (behaviour in so far as it relates to one's own foreknowledge, purpose, intention, and knowledge) and that of all other standpoints (e.g. legal, scientific, cultural, etc.). He terms the former Handlung (action) and the latter Tat (deed). This distinction should not be confused with the contemporary one between action and mere bodily movement. For one, both Handlung and Tat are aspects of conduct that results from the will, viz. Tun (LA 1160ff.). Moreover, Hegel's taxonomy is motivated purely by concerns relating to modes of perception. So whereas theorists such as Donald Davidson assert that all actions are events that are intentional under some description, Hegel reserves the term ‘action’ for those aspects of behaviour that are highlighted by a specific (albeit contested) set of agent-related descriptions. This is not an ontological category, since there are no such objects as actions-under-specific-descriptions (see Anscombe 1979).

Sophocles's Theban Trilogy reveals the central role that these notions must play in any Hegelian understanding of tragic drama. Indeed the contrasts that matter most to Hegel's general take on both epic and tragic poetry are more closely related to the study of action than the standard theory attributed to Hegel would seem to allow. It is more fruitful, then, to incorporate Hegel's insights into such tragedies to the model of action employed by him than it is to try to make them fit whatever ‘theory’ of tragedy might appear to be hinted at in his Aesthetics.

Goethe and Friedrich Schiller stand together immortalised in Ernst Rietschel's statue at the centre of Weimar. In their lifetime, Goethe and Schiller shaped the culture of German-speaking lands, not only through their poetry, plays, and novels, but also in their role as editors of journals that helped to set the intellectual tone of the period. Schiller's journal Die Horen (1795-1797) and Goethe's Propyläen (1798-1800), although short-lived, were important literary vehicles of the period and provided a forum that brought scientists, historians, philosophers, and poets into conversation with one another. The late 1700s and early 1800s were years of intense intellectual development in Germanspeaking lands; the arts flourished and aesthetics developed as a serious branch of philosophy.

During the ‘Age of Goethe and Schiller’, philosophy was dominated by Kant's philosophy and its post-Kantian variations. A problem with traditional philosophical histories of this period is the overwhelmingly Hegelian reading of it, a reading that subsumes all of the so-called minor figures under the shadows of the great system builder, Hegel. Richard Kroner's influential Von Kant bis Hegel of 1921 set the tone for this reading. Silenced by such narratives are the voices of the early German Romantics, a group of thinkers whose impudence created problems for them, and whose work posed hermeneutical challenges that continue to plague a proper understanding of the movement and the worth of its contributions. As we shall see, Hegel himself began to prepare the ground for a history of philosophy that would dismiss the contributions of the early German Romantics, a dismissal that is unfair and unfortunate: unfair because it is based on false characterisations of the movement, and unfortunate because such misreadings lead us to overlook the wealth of insights offered by the early German Romantics.

In 1835, a few years after Hegel's death, one of his students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, put together the first printed edition of the lectures on aesthetics, using Hegel's own lecture notes, which have mostly disappeared, and various student transcripts (Mit- and Nachschriften) of the lectures that Hegel gave on the philosophy of art in Berlin in 1820/21, 1823, 1826 and 1828/29. Hotho made some minor revisions to this edition in 1843 and in the following year. The revised edition of the lectures has until recently formed the basis of all subsequent editions of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics and, consequently, of most previous interpretations of his aesthetics. Hotho's edition of the lectures, however, has been shown to be highly problematic. To begin with, there are the various editorial interventions that Hotho made in order to give Hegel's lectures on aesthetics the systematic form he thought they lacked, while other interventions include various evaluative judgements concerning particular works of art and even some of Hotho's own ideas concerning art.

As regards the systematic structure of Hotho's edition of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, this edition divides the lectures into three main parts, whereas the available student transcripts of the lectures show that only the last series of lectures from 1828/29 were given such a three-part structure by Hegel himself.