ABSTRACT
Philosophers tend to position the visual arts at a distance from philosophy itself in a hierarchy of activities. Both Kant and Hegel, for example, in comparing the “aesthetic value of the various fine arts,” locate poetry, not painting, nearest to the discursive domain of philosophy. Operating in the ineluctably universalizing medium of language, poetry, in its formalities of style, self-consciousness, and power of nonsensuous representation, approaches the horizon of philosophy. Of all the arts, it is the least dependent upon sensible intuition and the least likely to degenerate into what Kant calls the “merely agreeable.” Poetry, however, never actually enters into the discursive domains of science, politics, and philosophy that are said by Hegel to define the “serious pursuits of the dialectician.”
