L'introduction à la philosophie des beaux-arts de Hegel

The present course of lectures deals with "Æsthetic." Their subject is the wide _realm of the beautiful_, and, more particularly, their province is _Art_--we may restrict it, indeed, to _Fine Art_. The name "Æsthetic" in its natural sense is not quite appropriate to this subject. "Æsthetic" means more precisely the science of sensation or feeling. Thus understood, it arose as a new science, or rather as something that was to become a branch of philosophy for the first time,[12] in the school of Wolff, at the epoch when works of art were being considered in Germany in the light of the feelings which they were supposed to evoke--feelings of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, etc. The name was so inappropriate, or, strictly speaking, so superficial, that for this reason it was attempted to form other names, _e.g._ "Kallistic." But this name, again, is unsatisfactory, for the science to be designated does not treat of beauty in general, but merely of _artistic_ beauty. We shall, therefore, permit the name Æsthetic to stand, because it is nothing but a name, and so is indifferent to us, and, moreover, has up to a certain point passed into common language. As a name, therefore, it may be retained. The proper expression, however, for our science is the "Philosophy of Art," or, more definitely, the "Philosophy of Fine Art." [Greek: a.] By the above expression we at once exclude the _beauty of Nature_. Such a limitation of our subject may appear to be an arbitrary demarcation, resting on the principle that every science has the prerogative of marking out its boundaries at pleasure. But this is not the sense in which we are to understand the limitation of Æsthetic to _the beauty of art_.…