At the heart of Robert C. Pippin’s marvellous, labyrinthine book is G. W. F. Hegel, the early nineteenth-century German Idealist. “Hegel was the decisive figure in shifting modern philosophical attention away from ‘aesthetics’ to the philosophy of art”, writes Pippin, who needs all his expository skills and self-discipline not to lose us in the maze. With this shift, the discipline moved from focusing on subjective responses to art to the exploration of where art – often operating at the limits of intelligibility – fitted in the pattern of knowledge. This book could well form the basis for a postgraduate university course, though it contains many brilliant asides for the private reader’s enjoyment. Philosophers, Pippin contends, make an error in trying to make too much sense of what is essentially unintelligible, and I especially appreciated the suggestion that this might stem from their “avoidance or repression”.

Unintelligibility, Pippin argues, is exactly the challenge that classical tragedy presents to philosophy. We can barely make sense of the idea that Agamemnon had to kill his daughter because he was so instructed by the gods; nor can we grasp the plights of Medea, Creon and Oedipus. Hegel, whose remarks on the arts are mainly to be found in his Aesthetics: Lectures on fine art and The Phenomenology of Spirit, believed, as Pippin puts it, that “if a conflict between right and right emerges, it cannot be permanent”. Hegel argued that history would ultimately reconcile the conflicts that are out of our present understanding. Meanwhile it fell to philosophy to examine the interim, indefinitely ongoing struggle. As The Phenomenology both tells and shows, the always provisional task of philosophy is to grasp process. Process is the struggle we see on the tragic stage, and the struggle we feel as philosophers and artists to grasp something truly living. As Hegel wrote elsewhere: “things breaking in two is the source of the need for philosophy”. Though he avoids the term “dialectic”, Pippin’s third chapter is “On the Lives of Concepts”. Hegelian dialectic was always about the creative interplay of abstraction and experience – where abstraction is the way a philosopher might make rational sense of impossible conflicts and experience is the way a playwright might put them on stage.

As Pippin demonstrates, the philosophy of art has much to learn from Hegel’s concept of “liveliness” (which the dialectic was meant to preserve). For Hegel,...