Philosophy of Art

art of an age, people, or individual is determined. Just as freedom prevails in the individual and lawfulness in the whole in history, so does the history of art exhibit the same freedom in the individual and lawfulness in the whole. Thus, the Iliad makes the appearance of the Odyssey necessary. In art, too, the law applies that everything also has its opposite. Thus, ancient poetry necessarily demands the appearance of the modern. Therefore, just as the spirit of art continued to build in gradations of formations, just as nature could not stand still until it had run through the entire choir of formations, the individual person as an organ of the Zeitgeist spirit of the age is in itself always accidental, but it, too, has necessity in the whole, just as it is a law of nature that the number of men only exceeds that of women by a multiple.

As far as the treatment of the philosophy of art is concerned, Plato alone had sublime and spiritual ideas about art. Aristotle darkened Plato’s ideas again. At the time of the revival of the sciences in Italy, [people] gained the