Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich - Christoph Menke (essay date fall 1995)

Christoph Menke (essay date fall 1995)

SOURCE: Menke, Christoph. “The Dissolution of the Beautiful: Hegel's Theory of Drama.”¹ L'Esprit Créateur 35, no. 3 (fall 1995): 19-36.

[In the following essay, Menke analyzes Hegel's aesthetics, focusing on his theory of drama and his views about the purpose and ethical dimensions of art.]

1. THE END OF ART IN DRAMA

Hegel's thesis of the end of art says that “art, considered in its highest determination, is a thing of the past for us,” and that, therefore, “it has lost for us genuine truth and life.”² As Paul De Man points out, this “has usually been interpreted or criticized or, in some rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or borne out by history”; hence it has been interpreted as a reference to the historicity of art.³ Accordingly, art belongs in another, a past, historical epoch; only in that epoch...

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