from Part II - The Being of Art and the Poetics of the Event
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2026
This chapter takes up the question of whether the higher-order beauty of art is for Hegel best exemplified in the static, serene repose of classical sculpture or in the dramatic, developmental movement characteristic of the depiction of human action. Both paradigms are prevalent in Hegel’s lectures on art, and in the end the tension between them has not been fully addressed within Hegel’s lectures, nor has it been adequately addressed within existing scholarship. In addition to maintaining that the developmental paradigm fits better with the present book’s account of the ontology of the artwork as featuring the dramatic event of transformation into autonomy, the chapter also brings some textual sources to bear, and attempts to show as well that such a paradigm fits more naturally with Hegel’s claim that art is ultimately rooted in intuition and its direct, eventful encounters with the world.
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