Hegel's philosophy in general stands at the centre of modern Western thought. Hegel's system integrates major intellectual developments, such as the various streams of Enlightenment and Romanticism, into its own formidable synthesis. Hegel sees human history as a movement of consciousness towards self-conscious freedom and rationality. Hegel's lectures on aesthetics were delivered in Berlin in 1823, 1826 and 1828-9. According to Hegel, art fulfils an important function in giving sensuous form to a concrete spiritual content, but philosophy constitutes a higher mode of representing spirit. Hegel explains that these three general forms of art, symbolic, classical and Romantic, are realized in the specific arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. The collision of actions in modern tragedy does not rest on conflicts extrapolated or introjected from the ethical order but is accidental, though substantive moral ends may be engaged in a contingent manner.

New Persian literature, like that of many other countries, begins with poetry. Phonetically and grammatically, the degree of evolution from Old Persian to Middle Persian is considerable, the differences being comparable with the differences between Latin and French, for example. The emergence of the New Persian language and literature presents considerable historical problems. In an account passed down by the Fihrist, Ibn al-Muqaffac describes the linguistic situation in Iran at the end of the Sāsānian period. The Iranians, he says in effect, have five languages, including pahlavī, darī, pārsī, suryānī, and khūzī. The emergence of Persian literature involved the elevation of a widely distributed oral language, darī, to the rank of a language of general culture. Persian poetry is indebted both to Arabic literature and to the Iranian tradition. Since Persian poetry originated in courts for the glorification of Iranian princes, lyrical poetry was the first genre to appear.