Hegel's Aesthetics is a remarkable work in philosophical aesthetics, partly because of its sheer size – it is more than 1,200 pages long – but mostly because of its richness in the use of example and the elaborate treatment of the general features, history and genres of art. It is a multi-layered text which, with all its examples and inventiveness, seems more alive and colourful than many of its counterparts in philosophical aesthetics. Yet I will claim, for reasons that will become clear below, that the Aesthetics is grey. I will explain how the difference between art and philosophy can be understood both literally and metaphorically as a difference between colour and greyness. I will show how this reveals something important about Hegel's understanding of philosophy in general and aesthetics in particular. I will expand upon Hegel's thought in order to characterise the situation of painting in modernism, after Hegel, as a situation of painting within a grey realm.

My starting point is a passage from the preface to The Philosophy of Right. For anyone interested in the relationship between philosophy and art, it is an exciting passage, although it is neither a statement primarily about art, nor about the colour grey, but about philosophy:

The context of this suggestive passage is that Hegel, in introducing his political philosophy, is arguing against ‘issuing instruction on how the world ought to be’, and to make his point he uses metaphors of painting and greyness. In light of this metaphor, we can infer that the painting that philosophy paints (in this case, when it is reflecting on the political) should hence be neither a colourful utopia nor an imaginative, possible future world. What philosophy instead can and should do is aspire to understand the world, and then ‘reconstruct’ it ‘in the shape of an intellectual realm’.