'Fine art... only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy'
No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects - despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating - and ultimately disabling - questions. Christianity, with its code of unworldliness, had compromised the immediacy of man's relationship with reality, and ironic detachment had alienated him from his deepest feelings. Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics were delivered in Berlin in the 1820s and stand today as a passionately argued work that challenged the ability of art to respond to the modern world.
Bernard Bosanquet's superb translation is accompanied by an introduction and commentary by Michael Inwood, which provides the ideal starting point for one of the most rewarding books ever written on the theory of art.
