Hegel's Aesthetic Ontology

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.