The Genealogical Presuppositions of Danto's End of Art Thesis and Their Ancient Greek Roots

Abstract

Arthur C. Danto's “end of art” thesis, framed within Hegelian philosophy of history, narrates the history of art as a teleological process in which art, through self-reflection, ultimately achieves philosophical self-consciousness. This article reveals a long-neglected genealogical presupposition behind this narrative: what Danto inherits is merely one of the two ancient Greek classificatory domains of “art”—the tradition of technē (craft), centered on rational, rule-governed making. Running parallel to this in the Greek intellectual world was an equally significant domain: mousikē (the arts of the Muses), whose core mechanism was enthousiasmos (divine inspiration), encompassing the performative practices of poetry, music, and dance. Although these two domains were never unified under a single concept in Greek antiquity, both are ancestors of what we today call art. Danto's “embodied meaning”—meaning prior to materiality, cognition prior to sensibility—is precisely the philosophical culmination of the technē lineage alone. By tracing the genealogical roots of this classificatory fissure, this paper argues that three dimensions carried by mousikē—performativity, inspiration, and syncretic unity—are systematically excluded from Danto's framework, and it corroborates this diagnosis through independent practices drawn from non-Western aesthetic traditions. The conclusion suggests that the “end” Danto proclaims describes not the end of art as such, but the exhaustion of a particular narrative mode internal to the technē lineage. The other half of art never entered the question-framing of this lineage at all.