Abstract

In his published lectures on aesthetics, and in his Encyclopedia, Hegel goes into a systematic and relatively unambiguous exposition of his philosophy of aesthetics. In the latter part of the Phenomenology, however, Hegel’s exposition of aesthetics is complicated by and somewhat obscured by the following factors: a) the investigation of aesthetics is simultaneous with the investigation of religion; b) the prime concern of the Phenomenology is neither aesthetics nor religion, but aesthetics and religious experience; c) the aforesaid experience is not considered in-itself, but from the vantage point of the “experience of experience,” which is the general vantage point of the Phenomenology; d) this “experience of experience” is presented as derived or deduced from a whole host of historical and cultural antecedents presented in Part II of the Phenomenology; e) the cultural and social context of Part II is itself derived or deduced from the dialectic of progressions in individual experience presented in Part I.