Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, published posthumously by the philosopher's disciples (1832-1838), remain an indispensable work for the study of the subject, above all because of the originality of the approach and the acute perception of basic aesthetic problems. Faced with illustrious ancestors and contemporaries such as Kant, Goethe, Schiller, or Baumgarten himself, the founder of modern aesthetics, it can be said that the Hegelian contribution remains unquestionably interesting. Hegel is known to have given several courses on aesthetics. Two of them in Heidelberg in 1817 and 1819, and four in Berlin in 1820, 1823, 1826 and 1828/1829. His disciple Hotho, who along with other colleagues edited the work, had the notebooks and class notes and also consulted Hegel's own annotations. All this material, which was later unfortunately lost, is included in the three volumes that make up the edition of Hotho, which appeared in Berlin, and includes the "Introduction" -which we offer here in a careful Spanish version-, the idea of ​​the beautiful, symbolic art, classical art, romantic art, architecture and sculpture, painting and music, and poetry are the chapters of the treatise, and the Introduction frames and addresses all of them, with masterly depth but at the same time articulating them in the problematic of the aesthetic phenomenon.

The “Introduction”, which Bonsanquet claimed was by the philosopher himself, is a brilliant theoretical preview that poses aesthetic reflection at the purest speculative level. The beautiful, says Hegel, has nothing to do with nature, because it is the work of the human spirit, which is always superior to the natural. This discovery gives rise to a broad critique of current ideas about the nature of art, such as imitation, its moralizing function, the rules that many claim to set, the variations of taste, etc. Among all of Hegel's work, this "Introduction", due to its conceptual richness and expository clarity, constitutes a true pearl of philosophical literature.