This blog post examines the meaning of ancient Greek sculpture, which Hegel regarded as the consummation of artistic beauty, and explores the philosophical background of how the unity of content and form achieved this pinnacle of beauty.
Hegel’s theory of art belongs to typical philosophical aesthetics, despite containing rich and sophisticated statements on specific works, because it views art history not as the special, self-contained history of style, but as grounded in the universal history of the spirit and its developmental laws on a macro level. He divides art history into three stages called ‘symbolic’, ‘classical’, and ‘romantic’. It is important to note that these terms are used quite differently from their common usage denoting specific artistic schools. That is, these three terms are civilizational concepts carrying regional connotations, primarily corresponding to the ancient Orient, ancient Greece, and post-medieval Europe, respectively. On a deeper level, they correspond to the typological stages of religion: ‘natural religion’, ‘artistic religion’, and ‘revealed religion’. Furthermore, the establishment of these corresponding stages is based on the degree of correspondence between the ‘content’ of the divine and its external manifestation, the ‘form’. Most fundamentally, it is based on the general law of intellectual development, which progressively advances toward pure conceptual thought. Moreover, these three categories are also applied to genres: first, architecture; second, sculpture; and third, painting, music, and poetry correspond sequentially to each stage. Through his theory of art history combined with genre theory, Hegel acknowledges the coexistence of multiple genres at specific stages of history, yet limits the archetypal genre corresponding to each stage to a particular genre.
The ‘symbolic’ stage denotes a state where the human spirit has not yet consciously grasped the Absolute as a concrete entity, possessing only a vague desire for an absolute ‘something’. Represented by Oriental natural religion, this stage involves only ‘wandering in search of the concrete image of the divine’. Massive structures overwhelming the senses are erected, yet they merely serve as spaces for the gods. The actual place where the god should reside is instead occupied by the form of a natural object (e.g., a lion) that can vaguely express a specific divine virtue (e.g., ‘strength’). Architecture, typified by the temple, is the quintessential genre of this stage, where the realization of beauty remains elusive as a weak content is overwhelmed by a massive form.
In the ‘classical’ stage, this dissonance between content and form is overcome. The ancient Greeks clearly perceived the gods as fundamentally human-like beings. Consequently, the absolute being is now presented not as some unfamiliar natural object, but through the direct representation of a three-dimensional human form. The genre representing this stage is sculpture. By achieving the perfect unity of content and form, Greek sculpture is regarded as the pinnacle of beauty, one that can never be replicated. Furthermore, since art itself is the direct embodiment of the divine, the art of this stage is already religion in itself, and is thus called ‘art-religion’.
However, human intellect does not rest content with this aesthetic zenith. That is, intellect moves beyond the stage of believing the Absolute to be an entity possessing a human body, advancing toward revealed religion which regards it as a pure spiritual entity. This ushers in the ‘romantic’ stage where spiritual inwardness overwhelms sensory outwardness. Beginning with painting, which breaks free from sculpture’s three-dimensionality, and followed by music and poetry becoming representative genres, art itself develops in a direction relying on spiritual elements rather than sensory ones. Consequently, a dissonance between content and form arises again, yet this stage is qualitatively distinct from the symbolic stage. Whereas the symbolic stage lacked properly formed spiritual content, the romantic stage is dominated by higher-order content that cannot be contained by sensory forms. Furthermore, since this stage represents the final point of spirit and history where no new, higher stage exists, all subsequent phases can broadly be termed ‘romantic’.
A notable point is that Hegel follows a transitional model proceeding in the order of departure–completion–decline on the purely aesthetic dimension, and a transitional model proceeding in the order of departure–ascent–completion on the fundamental dimension of the history of ideas. That is, the sequential arrangement of the three stages is structured so that the pinnacle of artistic beauty occurs in the second stage on the former dimension, and the pinnacle of intellect occurs in the third stage on the latter dimension. Furthermore, his theory, which exquisitely harmonizes these two seemingly incompatible models, performs a dual function. This theory, structured so that the pinnacle in the intellectual-historical dimension signifies regression in the dimension of artistic beauty, possesses an encompassing power capable of explaining not only the post-20th-century situation where ‘ugliness’ began to be recognized as a new aesthetic value, but also today’s environment where the intellectualization of art has deepened through conceptual art and digital art. On the other hand, it limits the possibility of art fulfilling the task of presenting the absolute to ancient Greece, concluding that this task must be transferred to philosophy, the highest intellectual realm. This is often referred to as the ‘end of art’ proposition and remains a significant problem consciousness in contemporary aesthetic discourse.
