Il passato dell'arte in Hegel e Shakespeare

Moving from the parallel between the Epilogue of Shakespeare’s Tempest and the end of Hegel’s Lectures on Fine art, Kottman analyses a fundamental theme of the Hegelian aesthetic thought: the “past character of art”. In the first part of the paper, the author aims to highlight Shakespeare’s importance for Hegel’s Aesthetics, showing that the former appears to anticipate the conscience of the pastness of art in his dramas. Subsequently, the author discusses Pippin’s central thesis that considers Hegel’s assertion of the pastness of art a great contradiction in the Hegelian system. In opposition to this reading, Kottman understands the pastness of art as an internal phenomenon of art itself: it is the way in which art enters into history. Finally, Kottman analyses the Epilogue of the Tempest in order to show how Shakespeare can help us better understand the role of art in its realization as something historical. Translated by Elena Romagnoli from P. Kottman, Hegel, Shakespeare and the pastness of art, in P. Kottman e M. Squire (a cura di), The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspective of Art History, Fink, Padeborn 2018