Robert B. Pippin, one of the world's most renowned researchers in the field of German Idealism, embarks on a journey through time in his book with a philosopher who at first glance seems quite unsuitable: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The starting point of the journey is Hegel's lectures on aesthetics delivered in Berlin in 1820, in which he famously assigns art its place in his philosophical system: as the immediate sensory knowledge of the absolute spirit. With Hegel's theory in hand, Pippin explores the visual arts of classical modernity, which developed only after Hegel's death from the mid-19th century onwards. In particular, he finds key evidence in the works of Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne for his central theses that modern art produces philosophical achievements of its own kind and that it embodies a specific mode of being.