Danto is fond of saying, these works are, by the same token, artworks
and philosophies of art. According to this idea, Fountainentails a whole
philosophy of art in nucealthough is does not have any proposition as
one of its parts. Danto treats propositionless ready-mades as basically on
the same level of artistic development as those well known conceptual
artworks that consist of nothing but propositions about themselves, that
are nothing but interpretations without an object interpreted. Fountainis
itself some kind of artistic manifesto. For Danto, ready-mades and artis-
tic manifestos are not direct opposites, as they are usually seen, but
rather twins or different plants growing out of one single root. Works
like these are the ultimate achievements, the non plus ultraof art, at least
in Danto’s perspective. It is worth noting, however, that the notion of
philosophy that Danto tacitly presupposes here is more than liberal.
There are virtually no constraints on what can count as a theory of art,
neither formal nor with respect to the theoretical content. Just any the-
ory will do, as long as it is about art and expressible in a piece of art. As
we see, Danto’s own account of artistic progress is less substantial than
the ones he criticizes. This point will become important later.
There are, of course, many ways to approach Danto’s controversial
thesis regarding the end of art. I shall limit my discussion to his reading
of Hegel. For I believe that certain flaws of Danto’s argument can be
shown to rest on some misunderstandings of Hegel’s project. One of
Danto’s decisive moves is the analogy he draws between Hegelian spirit
and art. But there seems to be a striking disanalogy between Hegelian
spirit and Dantonian art that Danto himself simply overlooks: There is no
end of spirit. When spirit finally understands its own position, thereby
reaching the level of absolute knowledge, it does not cease to exist.
Philosophy, in Hegel’s view, is the ultimate form of absolute spirit.
Philosophy strives for absolute knowledge, but, as a rational activity, it
does not stop when it has reached this level of understanding. On the con-
trary, Hegel believed that the task of philosophy could never be finished,
because philosophy is nothing but ‘its own time expressed in thoughts’.^16
This means, roughly, that spirit develops and changes over time, at least
in the sphere of the practical—the sphere of morals, right, politics, and
economy—just to mention the major institutions that constitute the realm
of the so-called ‘objective spirit’. Now, for Hegel, practical philosophy is
the constant effort both to describe large-scale cultural and institutional
developments and to explain them, to find the underlying rationale. Or
rather, to explain large-scale cultural developments philosophically isjust
to describe them in a general way. Anyway, Hegel is quite clear about the
point that reaching the level of absolute knowledge is not to be under-58 Henning Tegtmeyer