Hegel's Aesthetics and the End of Art Thesis

G.W.F. Hegel delivered lectures on aesthetics at the University of Berlin on several occasions during the 1820s (1820/21, 1823, 1826, and 1828/29); Hegel himself never published a book on aesthetics, and the text now known as the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on Aesthetics, or Lectures on Fine Art) was compiled and published posthumously in 1835 by his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho, working primarily from Hotho's own transcriptions of the 1823 and 1826 lecture courses supplemented by other students' notes — a compiled and edited textual history that modern Hegel scholarship, notably Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert's work from the 1980s onward using newly discovered student transcripts, has shown involved Hotho's own substantial editorial shaping and interpolation, complicating any simple attribution of the received text's precise wording to Hegel himself. Within Hegel's larger philosophical system, art occupies, alongside religion and philosophy, one of the three forms of "Absolute Spirit" (absoluter Geist), the highest stage of Hegel's dialectical system in which Spirit achieves self-knowledge — art achieving this through sensuous form (das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee, "the sensuous shining of the Idea"), religion through representational feeling and imagery (Vorstellung), and philosophy through pure conceptual thought (der Begriff).