visible world is the melancholy act of contemplating eternity by making passing images
durable.- Cf. P. Kivy, Music Alone, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 175.
- Of course we find allegories in ancient pictorial art, e.g. pictures of death or of
love, depicted as persons with peculiar attributes. Death is usually depicted as a young
man with a torch turned down, love (amor) as a boy with an arrow and sometimes with
wings, too. The famous nineteenth-century linguist Jacob Grimm even proposed to take
all the ancient gods as allegories of aspects of human nature. Yet allegory and pictorial
abstraction are quite different things. - Hegelian Spirit, at least in Danto’s interpretation, tries to understand its own
nature, and it finally does so when it reaches the level of absolute knowledge. It is this
reading of the Phenomenology of Spiritthat led Danto to tell a parallel story about art,
as he points out himself. It is not the concern of this paper to discuss the virtues and the
shortcomings of this kind of reading. For a different, more mundane interpretation, how-
ever, see T. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, Cambridge
University Press, 1994. - Hegel makes this claim in the preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des
Rechts. - G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst, A. Gethmann-Siefert,
ed., Hamburg, 2003, 311–12; the translation is mine. Much editorial work on Hegel’s
Lectures on Aestheticshas been done during the last decades. Cf. also G.W.F. Hegel,
Vorlesung über Ästhetik. Berlin 1820–21. Eine Nachschrift, H. Schneider, ed., Frankfurt, - Although this work is not finished yet, it has become obvious even by now that
Hegel’s thinking about the arts underwent considerable changes from the first Heidelberg
to the late Berlin lectures on the philosophy of art. Although the role of H.G. Hotho, the
first editor of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of art, is much disputed, there can be lit-
tle doubt that the thesis about the end of art is Hegel’s and not Hotho’s invention. See,
however, A. Gethmann-Siefert, „Einleitung,“ in Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst, xxi–vi. - It is quite misleading to translate Kunstreligionas ‘artistic religion’. The latter
term suggests the idea of a special religion within the arts or for artists only. Nietzsche
sometimes uses expressions like these. However, this is not what is meant by
Kunstreligionor ‘new mythology’. What is meant is rather a new kind of universal reli-
gion inspired and led by the arts. - “Eine mythologische Ansicht der Natur.” F. Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie
(1800), in: Kritische Schriften und Fragmente2 (1798–1801), E. Behler and H. Eichner,
eds., Paderborn, 1988, 203. - Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis both wrote critical reviews of Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister, Schlegel for and Novalis against Goethe. - Schleiermacher even proposed to regard the Bible as a kind of open, ‘romantic’
work of literature avant la lettre. Cf. F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Über Religion: Reden an
die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, Berlin, 1799, Chapter V. - It is worth noting, however, that both thinkers later considerably changed their
minds about this matter. - Schelling thus defends Herder’s project against Kant’s vehement criticism of
Herder’s seminal work on the history of mankind. - Critique of Pure Reason, § 6.
- Anthropocentrism is perhaps a better expression because it does not evoke
solipsism as easily as ‘subjectivism’ does. Schelling rejects any form of solipsism and
206 Notes to Pages 54–62