The aesthetics of the young Hegel : beauty between history and ideal

Hegel’s Early Writings do not contain any kind of proper philosophy of fine art“.1 With these words, Klaus Düsing rules out the issue of aesthetics from Hegel’s early investigations. Provided that ‚aesthetics‘ means a systematic and thereby methodological enquiry on the function of fine art, one should agree with such a strict judgment. Contrary to Düsing, however, I would like to argue that, if we pay attention to the development of the concepts of beauty, art, and sensibility while reading Hegel’s Early Writings, it is possible to discover a proper, full-fledged aesthetic investigation. Notably, I shall advance the following idea: the young Hegel’s conception of aesthetics provides an ambiguous definition of beauty: on the one hand, as an historical and political category, and on the other hand, as an ahistorical (infinite) and metaphysical expression of eternal truth.