Resonances of Aristotle's Poetics in Hegel's aesthetic thought

In his Berlin Lectures on History of Philosophy Hegel, on the one hand, recognizes great merits to Aristotle, especially as regardes his conception of nature and of the nous. On the other hand, he distances himself from Aristotle and see in Kant the brilliant heir to the Greek philosopher. Particularly in the Critique of judgment (1790) Hegel perceives significant arisotelical traces in Kant’s consideration both of the subjective finality of beauty and of the objective finality of nature in living organisms. This seems to be an unavoidable conclusion because of the marginalization of the value and role of nature in Hegel’s philosophical system. Nevertheless, there are many contact points between Hegel and Aristotle, not only in the practical field, but also in the aesthetic one. Even if Hegel criticizes the mimesis tradition and asserts that art is not just imitation, he introduces in his Philosophy of Art a “mimetical” notion, namely the central concept of Verdopplung that involves a spiritual duplication. Furthermore, there is no doubt that the various arts, including tragedy, are evaluated in a different way: Architecture is, for example, not treated by Aristotle as a fine art, and music is, according to the Greek philosopher, a kind of poetry. An intellectualistic interpretation of the tragedy emerges from the Poetics, while Hegel considers the aesthetic experience of the tragic performance as essential. Nevertheless, Hegel’s conception of tragedy could be called “aristotelian”, but to which extend? The main aim of this paper is to find convincing answers to this interrogation that implies other. In what way is Hegel, particularly in his Lectures on Aesthetics, influenced by the aristotelian thought? Which role does he confer to the Poetics in the history of ancient Aesthetics? And, most important, how much does his conception of tragedy reflect or diverge from aristotelical ideas? Is catarsis still the core of modern tragedy? Try to add another piece to the puzzle of Hegel confrontation with Aristotle is, infact, a changelling and unrealizable task without an accurate analysis of Hegel’s four Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Art (1820/21 - 1828/29), in which he deeply analyses ancient tragedy, the tragic emotions of pity and fear and the tragic characters as anticipatory figures of the modern self. Even if Hegel does not consider himself “aristotelian” enough, his focus on the organic unity of the tragic conflict and his theory of action can not be fully understood without Aristotle’s theory. In conclusion, Aristotle’s Poetics is a central textual point of reference not only to comprehend Hegel’s conception of dramatic poetry, but also to better contextualize his conception of action and subjectivity, since the birth of the subject as pathos in action is to be set in the ancient culture, and, in particular, in the tragic conflict that Aristotle magistrally investigates.