Re-examination of Hegel’s “The End of Art” in the Perspective of Hermeneutics

“The end of art” has always been the focus of academic circles, but most researchers agree that Hegel first proposed the thesis. Based on the perspective of hermeneutics, the paper explores whether the author’s original meaning has a certain legitimacy when interpreting a particular text. Heidegger and Gadamer, two representative figures of ontological hermeneutics, respectively sum up Hegel’s aesthetics with the thesis of “great art comes to an end” and “the past character of art”. The Paper compares Hegel’s text with Heidegger and Gadamer’s interpretation of Hegel, and analyses in detail, finds that Hegel himself has not put forward the thesis of “the end of art”. Although Heidegger and Gadamer’s interpretation of Hegel rely on the framework of ontological hermeneutics and creatively explain their understanding, they try to fit the original meaning of Hegel’s textin concrete analysis. This particular hermeneutic phenomenon means that the claim of methodological hermeneutics to seek the author’s original meaning is not entirely obsolete, it can complement ontological hermeneutics under certain conditions.