The question of what Hegel means when he says that “art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past” (Hegel 1993: 13) has dominated discussions of Hegel's Aesthetics. It is a virtue of Benjamin Rutter's book that he approaches this work by examining what exactly the arts are that are now supposed to have become a thing of the past. This approach is all the more important since it is clear that Hegel was very interested in the arts, devoting five lecture courses to the topic between 1818 and 1828/29. It is another virtue of Rutter's book that it is sensitive to the differences between the different editions of these lectures and Hotho's editorial interventions in the text through which the Lectures are chiefly known.

Hegel's claim that art is a thing of the past seems to be contradicted by both its continued production and Hegel's own extensive discussion of the matter. In order to explore this claim, Rutter takes on Dieter Henrich and Arthur Danto, who argue that art is a thing of the past in the sense of no longer being valued or relevant as it once was. Henrich argues that art seeks to express what other fields, religion and philosophy, express far better and so is in that sense redundant. In the same spirit, Danto argues that aesthetic theory must now take the place of art and mediate between art's diminished authority and the demands human beings place on its explanatory structures.

Rutter disagrees with the assessment of Henrich and Danto. In his view, we should see art's sublation (its past-ness) as a moving to the side rather than an overcoming, just like, as he says, the family has been moved to the side by civil society. This way of seeing the issue, though Rutter does not put it quite this way, reveals that there is a second inflection in the dialectical unfolding of modernity that did not exist in previous periods, namely, its reflection on itself rather than the passing on of the torch from one culture to the next. For Hegel, that is, modernity has an essentially self-conscious relationship to its own sources. However, this self-conscious relationship threatens to undermine the authority and achievement of modernity, in the sense that the vehement insistence on modernity's freedom from the past seems also to leave nature behind and with it, the whole reason for culture.

Rutter argues that, as moderns, for whom thought has taken a self-conscious turn, art is no longer the expression of our place in the world. For us, knowing what art is depends on other kinds of knowledge, but what is unique in Hegel's account is that these other kinds of knowledge threaten to make art irrelevant. This was not the case in rationalist aesthetics or in Kant. For Rutter, Hegel's two main claims are thus that art did once express our higher aims and no longer does, and that art is now subordinate to philosophy because civilization is now in its philosophical stage. Expanding on this insight, though keeping with Rutter's general argument, one might say that while thought reveals the inadequacy of art to our current needs, art, in its turn, reveals the inadequacy of thought in the sense that it presents itself as undigested nature to thought, daring thought to make sense of it. To rise to this challenge, to explain what is and what is not art, that is, which norms of the past do or do not still have a legitimate claim on us, the discipline of philosophical aesthetics is born. What makes the philosophy of art necessary, according to Hegel, is that, because of its origin in nature, the phenomenon of art will not yield its secrets to thought.

Rutter thus argues that one of Hegel's most important insights is that modern art asks us not only to consider its meaning but also its very legitimacy. Yet to acknowledge modern art's legitimacy appears to run counter to the modern tendency to seek legitimacy in philosophy rather than in art. That is, for art to become legitimate it would have to become philosophy, but for art to become philosophy it would have to give up on precisely what philosophy was brought into the world to overcome, namely nature. Philosophy and art are thus in an uneasy relation in which the philosophical criticism of art and the self-consciously mournful production of art exist side by side.

As Rutter points out, one way to get out of this impasse was romanticism. In Hegel's description, the romantics produced a sort of anti-art in which the freedom that modern culture has achieved is used to irrevocably separate culture from nature. However, Hegel argues, in so doing romantic art failed to be responsive to the need which art is meant to help us satisfy, namely the undigested past of our own natures. Romanticism is thus the disavowal of thought's origin in the struggle to overcome nature. Rather than mourning the loss of nature, as Hegel's friend Hölderlin did, Schlegel celebrated its end by proposing a universal poetry which completely transcends nature. As Rutter observes, for Hegel this transcendence is merely the bad infinity of anti-art, that is, a form of production which has no normative content at all. Romanticism, one might say, is thus the flip-side of the attempt of science to grasp everything in thought, for it too is based on the idea that thought is all-powerful and all-consuming. Both celebrate the self-consciousness as the final stage of humanity's destiny to become a deity.

Rutter is ultimately less critical than Hegel of romanticism, seeing in its concept of longing a place for the continuation of the practice of art. That is, longing might just be what keeps the practice of art-making alive:

The persistence of art thus testifies to our occasional dissatisfaction with philosophy and the world that rationality has created. However, we are quite aware that what we long for is no longer available to us, and we even no longer quite know what to long for. Thus, Rutter concludes, we can coherently long for art to play the role it once did in Greece, whatever that role may have been. While it is the goal of the art connoisseur to make older ideas about art available to us through the study of artifacts, it is only the aesthetician who can give us a philosophical account of why we will never, in fact, know what we have missed, for the very tool with which we seek to excavate the feeling is inadequate to the task. This leaves only the artist and the artwork itself to make the case for its own continued existence, as a practice not as a source of philosophical meaning.

One way of understanding this claim is through Rutter's analysis of the role of art in the modern period in terms of the reflection of inner life, a way of repairing the disappointments of modern life. From the perspective of civil society, one might say, art, of course, is inadequate to the task. It is Rutter's central contention that for Hegel, modern art, in its own imperfect way, manages to make significant that which, judged in terms of modern forms of thought, is deemed insignificant.

For Rutter then, art can endure if it can make itself at home in the relevant medium. Focusing on Hegel's treatment of painting and poetry, Rutter explains that for Hegel the work of the Dutch masters is characterized by the tension between the classical project of imitation and the romantic imperative to remain true to life. This tension gives rise to Schein or semblance. Natural science and art make sense of this semblance in different ways. While science seeks to uncover the source of the semblance in order to discover the hidden normativity of natural law, art revels in the semblance, seeing this tension as a separate source of normativity. As Rutter points out, virtuosity, which essentially characterizes painting in Hegel's account, is a combination of both: the painter knows the secrets of the medium but is able to use it to make sense of nature in a non-scientific way. But the painter's work of art as truth achieves a reconciliation between the spectator and the natural world only if the spectator stands apart from the painting, allowing it to confront her as something material. For only in this way can the truth which is expressed in the work of art draw her in, reconciling her with the material world which is represented in the painting. Painting, however, has its limitations in the sense it is bound to a material form of expression which unduly limits Spirit's self-expression in thought.

These material limitations are overcome in the lyrical genre, which Rutter considers to be best suited to a post-romantic form of art because here the idea is given most freedom from materiality. Like music, which supersedes painting, itself superseded by literature, lyric poetry is even more abstract than the former. Freed from any kind of material constraint, it can express anything and create a home in any era. One might thus say that virtuosity is a mediating concept, a concept that marks a transition between quotidian practice and artistic expression in the sense that it takes control of the material world while maintaining that material as present, as part of the work of art. It is thus only fitting that language, being universal and immaterial, should be the final stage for art, an art that is deeply connected to thought and hence almost completely independent of nature.

Turning to poetry, Rutter contrasts two styles of lyrical poetry, arguing that the difference between the poetry of Novalis and that of Petrarch is that ‘Novalis takes the lover's failure as emblematic of the more general impossibility of satisfaction with his world…. Petrarch, meanwhile, acknowledges the lover's sense of failure but contains it, as it were in the brilliant satisfaction of the verse. [… For Petrarch] the poem is the sex.’ (191). Petrarch's poetry is superior to Novalis’ because Petrarch's poetry is a solution to both the problem of passion (the writing is the sex) and to language's aspiration to express Spirit as universal. Novalis’ poetry of longing, by contrast, only expressed the universality of the medium of language, but remains disengaged from the problem of the human predicament of which love is one of the strongest manifestations. Lyric poetry expresses freedom in the sense that ‘the poet's aim is not to evaporate the life of feeling … but to make that life habitable, to free her [the poet] not from passions but, somehow, in them’. (188)

The advent of an ever more free expression of Spirit in thought, as Rutter points out, means that Hegel's philosophy permits not only an account of contemporary artistic practices such as photography, film, video art, computer art and conceptual art, ‘but [is also] about the shifting tectonics of value within that history’ (177). Rutter's argument is that the increasingly abstract nature of Spirit expressed in art permits an account of continuing artistic practices, many of which are themselves the expression of the abstract aspirations of freedom through media which have less and less to do with material nature (as used in sculpture and painting). Rutter writes of poetry—but the same could be said of other forms of art—that its continued existence is the result of two central German convictions: ‘the felt conviction that the real is the rational, and, on the other hand, a sense that this very conviction is too profound to be expressed, and thus is perhaps not real, wirklich, at all’ (209). Rutter does, in my estimation, a fine job of making a case that both are the case.