Philosophical and aesthetic issues in Hegel: the animal kingdom of the spirit and the art
Hegel; animal kingdom of the spirit; art; Aesthetics
This dissertation seeks to solidify the understanding that the hegelian figure of the “animal kingdom of the spirit”, developed in the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), find its necessary developments in the Lectures of Aesthetics (1835). The work articulates Hegel’s philosophical system with his aesthetic orientations, reinforcing the historical character of both questions. Derived from a passage from Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion (1797), the “animal kingdom of the spirit” is the historical moment in which individual consciousness is faced with the multiplicity of objects and relationships in the capitalist competition of private interests. To the same extent, when analyzing the romantic circle of art, Hegel considers the contradictory relationship between the richness of inner subjectivity and the prosaic contingency of everyday life by showing the romantics’ view of the horror of the prevalence of the mediation of private interest in civil society. The central motivations for the construction of this dissertation are found in the understanding of Hegelian philosophy that Lukács presents in his essay The novel as a bourgeois epic (1935) and in the work The young Hegel (1938).