Spirit in Hegel's aesthetic

Hegel handled art philosophically for the first time and named his own aesthetic theory as "Fine Arts Philosophy". Hegel who established his aesthetic theory in an idealist direction explained art by idea or spirit concept. Hegel considered the beauty in nature to be superior to art beauty. According to Hegel who named beauty in art as ideal, all pieces of art are ideas gaining solidity and beauty is the reflection of idea in sensory area. Hegel, expressed that subject-object equality should be ensured for the art to give hat is absolute/real. Because, art which appears as a requirement of human is a harmony originated from the reconciliation of spirit and sensory. According to Hegel, aim of spirit is to reach its freedom and own consciousness. Reaching of spirit to its own consciousness requires a dialectic process. In the beginning, while spirit, idea, geist or the absolute is alone , later it became estranged to its origin and found its reality in nature as a solid creature. This contradiction of spirit was removed when spirit refound itself and returned to itself through consciousness and freedom in the third step of its development, world of history and culture. Hegel, separated art to stages as symbolic, classic and romantic as a result of the effort of spirit to ensure the equality among subject and object or among shape and content and accordingly try to find its reality within thousand years of humanity culture and intellectual history and determined the particular art forms which ensures a complete synergy. In these stages of art, he came to terms with the fact whether spirit realized itself completely or not and stated that spirit does not fully express the absolute due to resolution of romantic art and felt the necessity to explain absolute in a non-artistic concept. Key words: art, art philosophy, aesthetic, absolute, idea.