mythological ideas, the content and thought of their works of art, were still
indeterminate, or determined badly, and so did not consist of the content
which is absolute in itself. Works of art are all the more excellent in
expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content and
thought.^27Here Hegel is right, against Kant, that centrally successful works of art–
those that fulfill art’s highest function–may not be about anything whatso-
ever, just as their maker subjectively chooses. Instead, they must have
“content and thought”that are the“inner truth”of a culture. They must
be about or must represent and express attitudes toward what a significant
number of people who share a significant stretch of culture most deeply care
about in common: romantic love, honor, family, the cultivation and expres-
sion of individuality, duty, eschatological vision (and conflicts among all
these), as may be. Artists, and especially distinctively successful ones, typic-
ally do pay close attention to what one might call the inner agenda of their
culture, rather than creating only out of their own whims independently of
any such attention. As Collingwood notes in criticizing pure artistic individu-
alism,“everything that [an artist] does he does in relation to others like
himself...[People] become poets or painters or musicians not by some
process of development from within, as they grow beards; but by living in a
society where these languages are current.”^28
Against Hegel, however, we are likely to be suspicious of the idea that
conceptions of freedom have a fixed logic of progressive development with
which nonwestern cultures fail to engage. Therearesignificant differences
between cultures, and western (post-Hellenic, post-Christian) conceptions of
freedom, right, and justice are important. But to some extent these concep-
tions are shared outside the West more widely than Hegel was aware, and to
some extent where they are not then the countervailing conceptions–for
example, of the importance of stillness and reverence, or of the importance
of familial piety–can be readily understood by us as reasonably contesting
and correcting certain elements of the western heritage. No culture, more-
over, is an altogether coherently organized whole of valuable repertoires and
practices. Within any culture, conflicts among values remain, and the worth
of practices and repertoires remains contested. While it is true that the
(^27) Ibid., p. 74. (^28) Collingwood,Principles of Art, pp. 318–19.
Originality and imagination 121