The characteristic features of human life are the central theme of
art. They are what art is all about. Different arts refer to this theme in
a different mode. Pictures refer to life in a different way than poems
or novels do. Pure, or ‘absolute’, music has content in still another,
rather indirect mode. Architecture, at least in its developed form, does
not refer to anything at all. Yet it is related to the ‘idea’ in a special
way.
But if human life is the central theme of art, the first task of the artist
is to conceive an idea of human life, and this is not just a subjective mat-
ter. This idea can be adequate or not, rather correct or rather incorrect.
A failure to grasp the idea of human life adequately may turn out to be
not just an individual failure but rather a collective mistake. Hegel
believes that whole communities can be wrong about human life, about
its form and its salient features. If they have art nonetheless, their art-
works will betray their lack of understanding what human life amounts
to. Hegel calls such an art ‘symbolic’.^58 The distinction between sym-
bolic and classical art rests on the difference between a grossly inade-
quate and a more adequate understanding of human life. Classical art
represents human ideals, i.e. examples of a good human life, figuring as
gods or half-gods and heroes.^59 But classical art is still deficient, inso-
far as it lacks ‘negativity’, that means an adequate notion of those
aspects of living a human life that have to do with human imperfection,
with mortality, fallibility and suffering. These become central in roman-
tic, or modern art, i.e. the art of the age of Christian and Islamic
monotheism that is still ours. Romantic or modern art is concerned
almost exclusively with aspects of negativity, with human finitude, the
fragility of goodness and the possibility of evil, but also with the quest
for individuality, solidarity and love, and with the possibility of moral
learning and moral progress.
That does not mean, though, that Hegel denies the possibility of
progress in the sphere of artistic craft and technique. On the contrary, he
repeatedly stresses the importance of craft.^60 But perfect craft is some-
thing that artists have always been after anyway, and a merely craft-the-
oretical notion of artistic progress cannot account for fundamental
differences between the works of different art historical periods. For
example, from a Hegelian point of view it would be simply naive to
claim that, with the invention of central perspective in modern painting,
the world could be represented as it really appears to us. It would be
naive because it would take for granted that ancient and early medieval
painting had been looking for something like central perspective but
could not achieve it.
A Prophecy Come True? Dante and Hegel on the End of Art 71