Hegel and Herder on Art , History , and Reason

The introduction of a historical perspective in aesthetics is usually traced back to Hegel’s 1820 lectures on fine art. Given at the University of Berlin, these lectures were amongst Hegel’s most successful and best attended.1 By then a recognized intellectual figure, Hegel sets out to salvage art from its subjectivization in Kantian and romantic aesthetics, but ends up declaring that art, considered in its highest vocation, is a thing of the past. This judgment on art—that its greatness is a thing of the past—follows from Hegel’s attempt to combine a notion of art’s historicity with a conception of its absolute essence. Hegel, however, was not the first to think systematically about the historicity of art. For this aspect of art—and, indeed, of reason too—was explored philosophically a good sixty years before Hegel’s Berlin lectures by a young and aspiring student of Kant’s, namely Johann Gottfried Herder. In a series of essays and fragments, Herder develops an advanced and elaborate alternative to Hegel’s conception, a fundamentally non-essentialist approach to art, history, and reason. Over the past twenty years or so, Hegel’s attempt to combine an essentialist and an historicist approach to art has been revitalized, with increasing force and sophistication, by Arthur Danto.2 The attempts to rehabilitate Herder’s aesthetics, however, have been few and far between.3 This is the aim of the present essay, which seeks to contrast the young Herder’s non-essentialist understanding of the historicity of art with Hegel’s essentialist views on the artwork’s historicity, pleading for a rehabilitation of the former.4 I approach this task from three different directions. First, I offer a brief account of Herder’s and Hegel’s views on reason, history, and art. Second, I look closer at their conceptions of classical tragedy and sculpture, which, due to Winckelmann’s studies,