The arts in Hegel’s aesthetics: system, modernity and the case of cinema

Abstract

This article has the goal of offering a contribution with regard to an updated reading of Hegel’s system of arts, considering the invention of cinema in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. For this goal, it is necessary to understand how Hegel structures his system of arts in an articulation that is not based merely on the formal properties that are intrinsic to the arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry, but that is mainly derived from the specific content of each art. This prevalence of content is justified by the broader context of Hegel’s systematic philosophy, in which the logical determinations of the Idea find resonance in the spiritual productions of humankind, not as mere applications of Hegel’s logic, but as developments of the Idea itself in its dialectical movements. As a result, the system of arts, as the individual part of Hegel’s Aesthetics, follows the systematic development of the artforms, which are, in their turn, particularizations of the universal content of art. In this relation between the arts and the artforms, cinema can be comprehended as part of the romantic artform, which is due not only to the period of history in which it was invented, but also to the content itself that cinema conveys. And as the most recent and final art of the system, cinema not only conveys a content that suits the spiritual demands in the context of the dissolution of the romantic artform, but it also works as a kind of completion to the whole system, insofar as it has the possibility of amalgamating all other arts in itself and of becoming one of the most powerful cultural phenomena of modernity.