Hegel's Aesthetic Ontology : The Event of Beauty

An original reading of Hegel's ground-breaking Aesthetics which explores the aesthetics of animal movement, human feats of athleticism, and eventually the beauty of eventful actions staged in dramatic poetry, to show that the inner logic of such transformative movements is at the core of Hegel's account of beauty.

Beauty is significant to us in many different registers, but perhaps the least appreciated has to do with its distinctively metaphysical significance. For Hegel, aesthetic experience offers us its own distinctive perspective on the nature of reality, and in this book David Ciavatta shows how in Hegel's ground-breaking Aesthetics, his astute observations on art and on beauty in nature relate to and illuminate wider themes in his metaphysical thought. To experience and be compelled by the beautiful is, on Hegel's account, to have an intuitive access to certain metaphysical truths concerning the kind of being we are, concerning the divine, concerning the ultimate nature of the natural and historical worlds, and concerning our proper place within and relation to reality overall. Ciavatta's study illuminates the close connection between Hegel's aesthetics and his metaphysics, and links Hegel's thought with important themes in post-Kantian continental philosophy.