In the damning criticism that Kant once wrote of the Swedish spiritist Emanuel Schwedenborg, he apologizes for depriving his reader of a few moments ‘he might otherwise have spent reading substantial texts on this material but probably with equally limited results.’ Yet Kant believed he still accommodated his reader ‘by leaving out many wild fantasies,’ for which he expected as much gratitude ‘as a patient might ever owe his doctors because they made him eat only the bark of the quinine tree, whereas they might have made him eat the whole tree.’ This, I believe, is the best attitude a philosopher can adopt whenever he or she ventures into the realm of the arts. In the present book, I avoid wherever possible the numerous wild speculations often found in aesthetics, albeit for the purpose of making space for my own, a space I no doubt have granted too sparingly to others.

First published in Dutch in 1994, this book has evoked many critical responses, some of which I have incorporated here. Its original thrust, and, I hope, relevance, however, remain unchanged. Regrettably, I have had to make one major concession to the translation. The original version included two empirical case studies: the first on ideas of progress in the De Stijl movement in art and architecture, the second on the so-called ‘Fifties’ Movement’ (Beweging van Vijftig), which brought about a revolution in postwar Dutch poetry. I have had to drop the latter as it would have required too much explaining and because any attempt to conduct a thorough discussion based on translations of poetry is a risky undertaking.

As a result, there is relatively heavy emphasis on the visual arts. On the one hand, this is not problematic because the discussion concerning the presumed end of the arts in the final chapter of this book is conducted most explicitly precisely with reference to this area. On the other hand, I have no desire to limit myself to the visual arts, given that the apparent crisis in the contemporary arts has much broader significance and that the historical debates preceding it touch on all the arts.