here, because the irony is directed against a core idea of Romanticism
itself. Hegel shows thinkers like Schlegel, who see themselves as
prophets of a time to come, to be rather envisioning times that are past
and gone, as ‘prophets turned backward’, to quote a phrase of Schlegel’s
that Hegel must have known.
In its logical or conceptual reading, the argument is directed against
Schelling’s claim that art is the highest form of human knowledge. For
Hegel, this is logically impossible. The reason for this impossibility
claim is quite simple: Knowledge is a species of thought. If this holds
for knowledge in general, it must hold for the highest form of knowl-
edge all the more. But thought is essentially spiritual (geistig), i.e.
immaterial, and many artworks are material objects, albeit bearers of
aesthetic or artistic content. If the premises are correct, then art cannot
be the highest form of knowledge. It is true that we can – and must –
have thoughts about artworks, about how to respond to them or interpret
them. As Hegel writes, “we have to understand” art. And this is so
because art essentially is a manifestation of thought or even knowledge.
But if thought is essentially immaterial, then the highest, i.e. most per-
fect form of thought cannot be material. Thus, no materialised form of
thought can be the highest form of knowledge.
It is true that there are different arts. Hegel even speaks of a ‘system
of the arts’, an order that can be described in a systematic way. It is this
kind of systematic description that he aims at in the final part of his lec-
tures and that he refers to with the phrase ‘the circle of art’ in the above
quotation.^43 One result of his description is that the different arts oper-
ate on different levels of spiritualization. The most spiritual, the most
immaterial, form of art is poetry. Poetry can exist both spatially (as a
written text) and temporally (learnt by heart and performed aloud, e.g.
by bards or rhapsodists in illiterate cultures). Poetry expresses thought
in its natural medium, language. It is therefore the species of art that
comes closest to philosophy. Yet poetry isnot philosophy. It can serve as
a substitute for philosophy only when no developed philosophy is avail-
able. For Hegel, therefore, the classical period of art was over with
Plato’s criticism of Homer in the Politeia.^44 He sees similar moves in the
Jewish tradition.^45
Art and philosophy differ in form. Art and religion, for Hegel, share
the same content. Or, to put it more precisely, art is nothing but one priv-
ileged form of representing religious content. Art does not generate con-
tent on its own. It is just a way of giving form to a content that is already
given.^46 This does not mean that all kinds of artistic content are reli-
gious. The relation between religion and artistic content may be fairly
A Prophecy Come True? Dante and Hegel on the End of Art 67