Perhaps no other of Hegel’s texts is more widely read than that of his Lectures on Aesthetics (henceforth, Aesthetics), most famous for its dialectical history of art, its glorification of Greek beauty, and its thesis concerning the end of great art. Despite its controversial claims, the Aesthetics is not only celebrated to this day as a masterful philosophical achievement, but also studied as a pivotal moment for both critical theory and art history. Indeed, the role it played in the development of the latter was so crucial that E.H. Gombrich has even proclaimed that Hegel is the father of art history. ^{Footnote 1} For this fact alone the English publication of a transcript of one of Hegel’s lecture courses on aesthetics is of utmost scholarly importance. It makes a text—itself only published in German in 1998—available to a wide range of specialists. But the importance of these lectures, and hence their translation, goes much further than supplying previously lost source material for Hegel’s Aesthetics. More drastically, it decisively puts in question the very authenticity of the Aesthetics as it has been handed down by presenting us with a different—a paradoxically new but simultaneously more authentic—view of Hegel’s philosophy of art.

To appreciate how a transcript of a lecture course could accomplish such a feat, we first need to understand the editorial background of Hegel’s first collected works. After his sudden death in 1831, Hegel left his system incomplete: not only was he in the process of re-writing The Science of Logic, but the other books he had intended to write never even saw the preliminary stages of composition. Hegel’s students, concerned to save the Hegelian legacy from competing systems, came together with the noble thought of assembling various transcripts of his lecture courses in order to reconstruct, in a series of monographs, the system that they believed had been de facto complete and orally espoused for years. One of these monographs was the monumental Aesthetics, the first edition of which was published in 1835 and the second in 1842. The task of editing it was given to Henrich Gustav Hotho, himself a self-professed Hegelian art historian.

What makes the authenticity of the Aesthetics suspect is the methodology that Hotho used (which, it must be noted, is also the one employed by the editors of the other monographs based on the transcripts of Hegel’s lecture courses). It does not pass the test of current historical-critical standards. Hotho had access to both a manuscript by Hegel that served as a basis for his lecture courses on aesthetics and multiple exemplars of transcripts from these courses: one in Heidelberg in 1818, and four in Berlin delivered in 1820/21, 1823, 1826, and 1828/29. But in compiling the Aesthetics, Hotho never makes clear which lecture course he draws material from, let alone from which transcript (he had multiple transcripts for each year), or when he used Hegel’s own manuscript. Furthermore, Hotho claims, by his own admission, that Hegel’s manuscript is sketchy at best. Hotho finds the transcripts, particularly those that he himself made in 1823 and 1826, far superior and consequently used them as a foundation when assembling the diverse material spanning more than a decade into a self-standing work. He also concedes that he often relies on his own memory and intimate knowledge of Hegel to guarantee that everything flows together neatly, yet never alerts us to when he is engaged in such creative speculation. (Hotho explains all of this in his preface to the Aesthetics, which unfortunately was not included in the now standard Knox translation of the second edition, preventing it from being well-known information.)

The above evidence is already more than ample to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Aesthetics. Previously, however, Hotho’s source material had been lost to the academic public (much of which still is). This had two effects. First, any doubt concerning its authenticity remained mere speculation. Second, the Aesthetics, even if assumed dubious as a production, was all we had to go on for an understanding of Hegel’s own philosophy of art. But now, with the discovery of transcripts from all of Hegel’s lecture courses, including Hotho’s own, the 1823 version of which is here translated, we can compare them with the published version of the Aesthetics. More drastically, by bypassing Hotho’s untrustworthy editorial decisions, we can also catch, for the first time, a more or less direct glimpse of the content of Hegel’s lectures. Sadly, however, Hegel’s manuscript has not been found, and is it is doubtful that it will be.

One feature of Brown’s translation that adds significantly to its value is its inclusion of a translation of the introduction to the German edition by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, one of the most preeminent German scholars of Hegel’s aesthetics, which is intended as part of a new historical-critical edition of selected lecture transcripts and manuscripts published by Felix Meiner Verlag, to document the textual history of the transcript. It provides, amongst other things, invaluable scholarly information concerning the genesis of the Aesthetics (20-34), the historical sources of Hegel’s aesthetics (35-49), and the content of the transcripts with a synopsis of the minor and major differences between them (49-66). But, her introduction, some 170 pages long, is as long as the Hotho transcript itself and, as one can surmise, deserves scholarly attention of its own. Indeed, to even call it an ‘introduction’ really does not do it justice. For beyond these historical-critical matters, she also provides a compelling interpretation of a new, but simultaneously more authentic, view of Hegel’s philosophy of art that shines through the transcripts (over half the text, 67-168).

As such, Gethmann-Siefert’s introduction is a perfect place to start comparing the transcripts with the Aesthetics and seeing what the transcripts themselves offer. But, as she convincingly shows, the differences that thereby emerge are not just of interest to the Hegel expert concerned with the finer points of the genesis of his thought. They risk destroying many of the established ideas concerning Hegel’s own philosophy of art. We only need to mention one example she draws upon to vividly make this point. If the claim to fame of the Aesthetics is a dialectical systematization of art, early on in the Hotho transcript of 1823, Hegel himself says he will not give such a system. While elsewhere he is indeed concerned with the proof that “[t]he philosophy of art constitutes a necessary component within the circle of philosophy as a whole,” in his lecture course “[o]ur intention cannot be to carry out this proof, to construct its origin within the concept …. This is why we begin directly, and initially we have nothing but the representation that there are works of art” (187; for Gethmann-Siefert’s discussion of the passage, see 86ff.). For Gethmann-Siefert, this entails that Hegel aims to do something more akin to a phenomenology of art that attempts to determine its function from its historical appearance. By placing the stress on system, Hotho is thus deliberately moving beyond Hegel, using the transcripts available to him to do something that Hegel himself never did in any of his lecture courses.

Moreover, she also persuasively argues that seemingly innocent changes that Hotho made to Hegel’s own expressions are responsible for further fundamental misunderstandings of Hegel’s philosophy of art. For instance, in the Aesthetics we find the famous definition of beauty as “the sensuous appearing of the idea.” But this exact expression is not found in any of the available transcripts (92). Instead, we see Hegel linking “sensuous appearing” with “art” (92). While Hotho’s formulation gives the Aesthetics a strict criteria for evaluating art—whereby it must fall short of the idea given that the idea, logical in structure, cannot fully express itself in the physical medium of sensuous appearance—Hegel’s own formulation shows that he is more interested in how art culturally has influenced spirit’s historical self-comprehension of its own truth (99). This investigation does lead him, like in the Aesthetics, to the claim that art’s role has come to an end. But he is not dialectically led to this thesis because of a priori reasoning; he is led to it, on the contrary, phenomenologically, by looking at how art did, and no longer can, play a historical role in the mediation of truth.

Brown’s translation of the Hotho transcript of 1823 is therefore, without doubt, one of the most important Hegel translations of our times. Given that contemporary historical-critical research has decisively shown that the widely read Aesthetics is more of a work of Hegelianism than a work by Hegel, it creates exciting possibilities for a new, but simultaneously more authentic, view of Hegel’s philosophy of art, which until now was impossible. ^{Footnote 2} It must be said, however, that the translation itself has some minor issues (for instance, the overuse of definitive articles for abstract nouns, which are necessary in German, and the re-arrangement of Hegel’s sentence structure), but its sheer importance outweighs these considerations. While this new view of Hegel’s philosophy of art is unlikely to solve any of the big questions of contemporary Hegel scholarship—is Hegel a metaphysician or a Kantian?—it does, nevertheless, present us with a whole new conceptual world to discover, a world with potentially profound implications for how we understand Hegel’s general project and his aesthetics in particular, allowing us to re-evaluate the place he occupies in the history of philosophy, art history, and critical theory. This translation is therefore necessary reading for anyone interested in Hegel, the history of aesthetics, or aesthetic theory broadly construed. It is also worth pointing out that, because the Hotho transcript of 1823 is itself relatively short (some 270 pages, compared to the massive two volume Knox translation of the Aesthetics), it has the additional benefit of being perfect for the classroom. But with the high cost of the hardcover version, we will have to wait for softcover edition for that.