George Wihelm Fridrich Hegal
For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770—1831), the notion of the symbol played central role in his philosophy of art, which is known particularly from his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts of 1835-38, originally delivered four times between 1820 and 1830 at the University of Berlin.5 Hegel's history of philosophy was constructed by analogy with his ideas regarding the historical development of art.
His notion of art, however, was strikingly less complex or subtle than those which had developed in the aesthetic philosophy of the latter half of the eighteenth century. He regarded art as basically a secondary or surface phenomenon, the presentation of common (inner) ideas in diverse (outer) sensual forms—thus harking back to a pre-Baumgarten and pre-Kantian ideology which privileged the Ideal or Thought by devalourizing visual knowledge, and by relegating it once again to the realm of confused intelligibility or primitive rationality. Art, in Hegel's system, became merely the vehicle or dependent medium of thought; its external form or shape; or, in more recent terminology, the signifier-form of a signified-content..
In contrast to Baumgarten and Kant, Hegel's interest in the aesthetic was confined to works of art, and not to the perception of art or of the beautiful as such, which might be manifest in artefacts as well as in nature. For him, the aesthetic sphere—art—was a form of symbol—ism, whose principal historical function was to represent and articulate the Divine in material form. As the handmaid of religion, art shares with it the same subject-matter. For Kant, the aesthetic and the rational were distinct modes of knowing and producing knowledge; for Hegel, the aesthetic was but a debased reflection of the intelligible.
Hegel's philosophical counter-revolution was a challenge to Kant's attempt to break free of classicism, and was an explicit attempt to return to a pre-Kantian concern (as expressed in the earlier work of Leibniz) with re-establishing a Divine point of view in relationship to the works of Man. This 'theodicy', as Hegel termed his meditations, was an attempt to understand the entirety of history as both a system and a process—a process of the unfolding of the Divine Idea in the (sensory, and hence illusory) temporality of artistic change. The Divine Idea is unchanging and immutable; its changing representations over time are but the confused ways in which mortal beings attempt to grasp the unchanging and singular Divine perfection. Hegel's conceptions of art and of the relationships among various arts are given in summary form (see p. 98) from the Introduction to his Aesthetics. To a certain extent, his ideas resonate with those of Winckelmann, and represent a broadening of the system of Winckelmann's classicism: for Hegel, the visual arts were the means by which a culture's essential ideas were expressed and communicated. But in contrast to Winckelmann, for Hegel those essential ideas concerned divinity as such rather than the nature of what a people might have been in their historical totality and diversity.
It may be readily imagined how a Hegelian perspective on art as the expression or representation of some deeper ideal would have proved remarkably suitable to the formation of a systematic discipline of art history in the decade following Hegel's death. Such an interpretative field of knowledge-production would of course find ready service in contributing to and imagining the histories of both European nation-states and other cultures and peoples—which is precisely what Hegel himself undertook to accomplish in his characterization of the relationships between European Christian cultures and their antecedents both in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in the Near and Far East.