I The Eighteenth Century Project in Aesthetics and the Emergence of ‘Art’

One philosophical approach to the question of the origin of fine art locates it within a specific historical context: the emergence of the sharp division between art and craft and between artist and artisan that occurred during the development of formal aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Drawing on a famous (though still quite contested) account by Paul Oskar Kristeller heralding the origin of the ‘modern system’ of the fine arts in the eighteenth century, Larry Shiner has traced the distinguishing of ‘fine’ arts as those pursued for their own sake, enjoyed in moments of refined pleasure as opposed to mere entertainment, and requiring creative genius rather than ‘mere’ artistic skill or the application of workman's rules in order to be produced.Footnote ⁵ Over the course of the eighteenth century, the adjective ‘fine’ is ultimately dropped, and art in a newly prestigious sense comes to claim an autonomy that distinguishes it not only from craft but from external purposes (religious or utilitarian) that had previously been bound up with artistic work.Footnote ⁶ A similar development characterizes the new and widening distinction that emerges in the eighteenth century between ‘free’ artists on the one hand and artisans or ‘handicraftsmen’ on the other hand: while genius, inspiration and creativity characterize the activity of the former, the latter are described in terms of skill, working according to a rule, and working within a trade. (In what follows, I will be using the term ‘artisan’ in this narrower sense.)Footnote ⁷

This historical narrative of the emergence of art as such is quite familiar, but it might of course be asked, in the light of the longer trajectory of human making that takes us back to the caves at Chauvet, whether such a rigid dichotomy makes the best sense of art in all its forms. This question is particularly important if we want to come to terms with the many claims made (by Danto, Belting and others) concerning the ‘end’ of art. As Shiner has asked: ‘What would the story of the ideas and institutions of the fine arts look like if we no longer wrote it as the inevitable triumph of Art over craft, Artist over artisan, Aesthetic over function and ordinary pleasure?’ Would the construction of the ‘modern system of art’ look (in Shiner's words) in that case ‘less like a great liberation than a fracture we have been trying to heal ever since’?Footnote ⁸

Since Danto and others often appeal to Hegel precisely in terms of a notion of the ‘end’ of art, it may be useful to see how Hegel's account of the development of art prior to its end—the relevant notions of art and artist at work in his philosophy of art—compare with this one. Does the philosophy of art in Hegel's view require such sharp distinctions between art and craft or artist and artisan?

For an initial answer, if we look at the Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel is clearly the inheritor, in some very evident ways, of this eighteenth century shift in the notion of art. Art for Hegel is, first of all, something that is significant rather than (‘merely’) decorative, since it is concerned—if it is to really count as art—with what Hegel calls the ‘deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of Spirit.’Footnote ⁹ Art is also free, Hegel says, both in its means and ends: art can only be art in its freedom.Footnote ¹⁰ While Hegel (like Shiner and those who question the art/craft distinction) does think that there is an important story to tell in terms of a continuity between art and craft, it is ultimately the larger terms of art's significance and freedom that are relevant for an Hegelian understanding of art as something that matters, and matters in a way that goes beyond what is merely decorative or what we find appealing because of its craftsmanly construction. Hegel's own official list in the Aesthetics of the arts which count in this way is limited to the five identified by Kristeller as canonical in the late eighteenth century after Batteux (architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry); other forms of artistic practice are labeled in the lectures as ‘imperfect’ (gardening, dancing, etc.) and mentioned only in passing.Footnote ¹¹

And Hegel certainly construes his own approach to the philosophy of art as something which has emerged over the course of the development of aesthetics and art in the eighteenth century: the so-called ‘historical deduction’ of art, as the section is titled in Hotho's edition,Footnote ¹² stands in the introduction to Hegel's lectures after a discussion of various eighteenth century approaches that did not fully understand the importance of art, and then traces the rise of art as it matters from Kant to Schiller to Schelling, with Hegel's as the philosophical approach which has best comprehended this development (and Schlegelian irony as something of a coda). It is only in the course of this development from Kant to Hegelian idealism that, Hegel says, ‘the concept of art, and the place of art in philosophy was discovered.’Footnote ¹³

I want to mention at the start, however, two important differences in Hegel's approach to the distinction between art and craft that make it something different from what Shiner attacks. The first is a conceptual point and the second is an historical point.

First, the conceptual point: as opposed to the account Shiner and others give, for Hegel the art/craft difference is not something primarily discoverable in distinctions between types of artistic activity or spectatorial experience, but more importantly in the larger set of cultural and social patterns within which artistic practice is embedded. In other words, the question of how we come to make a distinction between art and artisanry is ultimately for Hegel a question of what a culture comes to value as art. (We might think about this in terms of the resources Hegel's philosophy of art can bring to bear when it accounts for the emergence of new forms of art—for example, what is involved in Hegelian terms when an art, even one like photography, which he never encountered, stops being just a sort of techne¯ or craft that draws curiosity and comes to be conventionally considered as being a fine art in itself. Hegel's answer would seem to be that behind the new attributions of genius and inspiration to photographers as well as painters lies a set of social and cultural norms in terms of how photography is viewed.)

The second and historical point also makes the story more complicated. Like Winckelmann, Schiller and Schlegel, Hegel's view of the history of art—however much it owes to new philosophical distinctions that emerge over the course of the eighteenth century—gives nonetheless a particular privilege to a much older moment: that of ancient Greece. In fact, in the official Hegelian story, both in his earlier and his later aesthetics, the real origin of art is always located in ancient Greece, whether we look to the emergence of the ‘spiritual work of art’ as such in the Phenomenology of Spirit or the classical ideal of beauty in the lectures. So there are actually, in Hegel's view, two significant historical moments of diaeresis: it is only with the Greeks that art in its genuine sense emerges, but at the same time the full philosophical significance of the Greeks’ achievements in the arts is philosophically understood only in the wake of the eighteenth century and Kant.

With these two important differences in mind, I'd like to explore the art/craft distinction particularly through the lens of the issue raised in the title, that is to say, Hegel's own distinction between artist and artisan. Hegel makes clear that what is at issue here is precisely what he calls the recognition of ‘the inner process of the origin of art (den inneren Entstehungsgang der Kunst)’.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite some differences, the Hegelian narrative about this emergence remains consistent over the development of his philosophy of art from Jena to the Berlin lectures, so I'll begin with the PhG's account of the distinction of artisan and artist and then turn to this distinction in the context of the lectures.

II From Artisan to Artist: Hegel's Characterizations of Artistic Activity

In paragraph #702 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in a section entitled ‘Religion in the Form of Art,’ Hegel heralds the emergence of what he calls ‘absolute art,’ which he contrasts with the ‘instinctive fashioning of material’ that had characterized the figure in the previous section, ‘the artisan,’ der Werkmeister.Footnote ¹⁵ The artisan, as opposed to der Künstler, the artist, ‘produces itself as object but without having yet grasped the thought of itself’; its productions are thus equivalent, says Hegel, with ‘the building of honeycombs by bees’ (PhG #691). Hegel tends to use the term Werkmeister in ways that stress a certain unconsciousness of agency, at least for some part of an agentive whole; he uses it, for example, in the section of the Phenomenology on physiognomy and palm-reading to descibe the hand as the ‘ensouled artisan of its fortune’ (PhG #315), and in the later systematic works to stress the larger actions of Geist, the Concept or history as kinds of artisans as they work themselves out beyond the immediate control or perspective of individual agents (there is in this sense also an important concern with how artisanry is in fact masterly (meisterhaft), a point to which I will return).Footnote ¹⁶

It's striking that what happens in order for the transition from artisan to artist to be effected is not something which Hegel details in terms of the development of new specific artistic skills, tools or media, but rather in terms of a new religious and artistic conception—a shift that Hegel seems to link especially to the development that occurs between Egyptian and Greek religious artwork and is thus in Hegel's later aesthetics essential for understanding the move from the symbolic to the classical form of art. It is only when the artisan gives up ‘the synthetic effort to blend the heterogeneous forms of thought and natural objects’ (characteristic of the sphinx and other products of Egyptian religious art where animal and human forms are blended) that ‘the shape has gained the form of self-conscious activity’ and has thus become a ‘spiritual worker’ (geistiger Arbeiter).

The emergence of this spiritual worker in the context of the Religion chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit is a compressed and seemingly Delphic moment within an especially compressed and Delphic section of Hegel's text. Systematically and in terms of Hegel's development, there is a great deal afoot. First of all, in terms of the larger progression of moments within the Phenomenology, the Religion chapter represents a key narrative deepening of the task of the Phenomenology and hence a moment of revision and expansion — in this case, as often in the Phenomenology, retrospectively, since, while Chapter VII, the Religion chapter, clearly tracks the moments of Chapter VI's account of Spirit from ‘true’ to ‘self-alienated’ to ‘self-certain’ spirit, and thus is concerned with a development that runs from ancient Greece to contemporary Romanticism, it does so now from a new point of departure, that of religious conceptions that historically antedate the Greeks. Systematically, Hegel is concerned here with the relation between self-conscious Spirit and world, the relation between Spirit and nature, and with the transition from conscience, by way of religion, to absolute knowing. Moreover, from the perspective of the development of Hegel's philosophical position on absolute spirit, these sections represent an important expansion of Hegel's detailed concerns with religion and art in their embodied historical concreteness—on the side of religion, one that particularly offers a certain opening to the East (and that comes to be amplified in Hegel's Heidelberg years as he studies Creuzer's mythology, among other things) and on the side of art one that offers the possibility of breaking beyond the Romantic duality between Greek and modern that Hegel thought had unduly constrained Schlegel's account of symbolism and art.Footnote ¹⁷

All of this means that the initial appearance of Hegel's distinction between artisan and artist is one that seems to bear unusually heavy freight. And there is a dense concentration, even confusion, of imagery surrounding the sections where the artisan appears as we move across the three phases of Natural Religion—the Zoroastrian view of God as Light, which as the ‘shape of shapelessness’ does not yet involve a wide range of imagery or an account of the makers of such imagery; the Hindu incorporation of Plant and Animal into new religious imagery, where we first have some account of human making; and the third section entitled ‘The Artisan,’ which is the transition point directly into the moments of religious artistry proper.

The emergence of the artisan in the section on Plant and Animal is odd, in that he is neither really identified nor introduced as a figure. The first indication of the potential importance of a human maker comes at the end of this section, where an anonymously described ‘worker’ (der Arbeitende) is said to be a self-producing and self-consuming self because it ‘retains the upper hand’ over the mutually destructive animal spirits that it presumably involves in its construction of religious imagery. The key to the transition to the section on the ‘artisan’ proper lies in the conditionality or imperfection of the worker's constructive activity: at this stage, he still uses material that is just ‘to hand’ or found (that is, for example, still in the form of an animal) rather than material that itself reflects the human being behind the construction of religious imagery (#690).

The task for the artisan proper is to overcome this division between objective material and subjective human maker: as Hegel puts it, this task is the Aufhebung of the division between body and soul, and what the artisan's activity accomplishes at once gives a shape or form of clothing to the soul (the German is bekleiden and gestalten) and a soul or liveliness to the body (beseelen). Owing to the natural medium in which the artisan works, there is still a division that must be overcome: the artisan blends both natural and human shapes and produces creatures like the Sphinx, an ‘ambiguous being which is a riddle to itself, the conscious wrestling with the non-conscious, the simple inner with the multiform outer, the darkness of thought mating with the clarity of utterance, these break out into the language of a profound, but scarcely intelligible wisdom’ (#697). But what is achieved in the artisan's production of the riddling Sphinx has the significance of being the ‘end of instinctive effort’ and affords the artisan finally a recognition where his own active self-consciousness can be met with self-consciousness in the object. Thus the partly human, partly animal ‘monsters in shape, word and deed’ that are central to this moment of the artisan are ‘dissolved into spiritual shape’ in the newly self-conscious activity of the artisan as he is transformed into an artist proper: now we have ‘an outer that has retreated into itself, and an inner that utters or expresses itself out of itself and in its own self’; we have ‘thought which begets itself, which preserves its shape in harmony with itself and is a lucid, intelligible existence.’

Once the attempt to blend human and animal forms has been given up, and the artisan has created a shape which has the form of self-conscious activity—that is to say, the human form—he is now an artist, a ‘spiritual worker’ (#699). And this moment allows therefore the transition between natural religion and the religion of art proper.

What sort of an account has Hegel given, then, of the artisan in transition to become artist? Notice again that very little, if anything, has been said about the material conditions of the artisan's work or what might lie behind the specific creative achievement involved in moving from a blended use of naturalistic and human forms to anthropomorphic images of the god—the key moment in the move to the Greek ‘art religion.’

Hegel effects the transition instead—as I hope was evident in what I stressed—by a peculiar appeal to a figure that is itself part of a construction within a poetic work of art. As he emphasizes in the later Lectures on Aesthetics in taking up precisely this transitional scene to give an account of the move from the symbolic to the classical form of art: the artisan who becomes artist—who is the first to turn in his art to the human shape as such—is not Pheidias or even Sophocles but rather the person who was able to understand that the ‘riddle’ of Egyptian art embodied in the Sphinx has a ‘solution.’ The artisan who becomes artist, the thinker who can recognize in the Sphinx the ‘symbol of the symbolic itself’ is, in Hegel's rich iconography of the emergence of art, the character Oedipus. To quote the account from the Hotho version of the lectures (a scene which is, however, also clearly attested in various versions in the lecture notes, as well):

As we look at what the Lectures make explicit on this point of transition (the naming of Oedipus in this context, which does not happen in the PhG, despite the strong hints in that direction), a number of other questions arise. The transition in the Lectures from the symbolic to the classical form of art is as strange and Delphic in its way as the transition in the PhG from natural religion to the religion of art. As in the PhG account, there is significant ambiguity about exactly when the relevant transition occurs: while Hegel calls the symbolic realm in general the realm of Vorkunst or pre-art, when we reach the ‘actual symbolic’ (die eigentliche Symbolik) moment of Egyptian art, the Egyptians are described as ‘the properly artistic people,’ as well (das eigentliche Volk der Kunst), a people that Hegel emphasizes is engaged in a wider set of human artistic activities such as building, agriculture and excavation.Footnote ¹⁸ Hegel's sequence of Egyptian art also confirms this: only the pyramids, the Egyptian use of animal imagery and the statues of Memnon come on the scene before Hegel insists, as he turns to what he calls vollständige Symbolik, that in fact at just this point the symbolical form has already started to disappear, insofar as the inner and the spiritual becomes itself the content of the represented human form. Thus by the time we have reached what Hegel calls die eigentliche Symbolik, we are already in fact at the classical—a point which Hegel confirms in his sweeping remark that ‘[t]he symbol, in the meaning of the word used here, constitutes the beginning of art, alike in its nature and its historical appearance.’Footnote ¹⁹

But the question persists in both the PhG and the Lectures: why is Oedipus the figure to whom Hegel appeals in trying to give some account of what makes the artist in his work distinctive from the artisan, and what sense can we make of Hegel's account of this transition? I think there are important Hegelian reasons for this stress on the kind of artistic ‘activity’ we can see within created artworks rather than in presumed glimpses ‘behind the scenes’ into the artist's studio or study (something in the hundreds of pages of notes on the hundreds of details of art from Hegel's lectures we very rarely have), and they have to do with a richer but in many ways strange understanding of the notion of ‘artistic intention’ that we can find in Hegel. So I will turn to that topic in the third and final section of the paper.

III Intention and Creation in Art

In this section, I want to link some recent discussion of the issue of intentionality in agency with questions that have arisen in Hegel's account of the relation between artist and artisan. Robert Pippin and Alexander Nehamas have both recently raised questions about the relation between art and intention that link the inquiry into artistic activity with contemporary philosophical questions about ordinary human agency. Pippin draws on Hegel's criticism of the form/content distinction to question whether intention and action—whether in a piece of our everyday agency or in the works created by artistic agency—can ever be held as formally apart as the standard account assumes. Pippin argues that it is one of the philosophical merits of Hegel's view of action that it levels a strong skeptical suspicion toward accounts which falsely separate intention and action and which construe an agent's reasons for acting as isolatable and ‘episodic or dispositional and perhaps uniquely causal mental states.’Footnote ²⁰ If, following Hegel, we do not start in our account of the philosophy of agency with assumptions about an intention as something always separable from and causally put into play in action, the animating question here is something like this: what might it mean to be an agent whose sense of his own desire or will is always one that she is coming to terms with after the fact? Hegel's boldest claim (as he puts it in the Phenomenology of Spirit) is that ‘an individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action.’Footnote ²¹

In his recent article on ‘The Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel's Aesthetics,’ Pippin has extended this claim in the direction of artistic intentionality, arguing that neither in action nor in artistic creation is there anything like a ‘“two-stage” process’; ‘neither the conceptualization of independently acquired sensory material, nor an inner intention functioning as a distinct cause, initiating a subsequent bodily movement as one might kick a ball to start it rolling’: ‘Art-making is not an incidental or contingent or merely illustrative expression of an already achieved self-knowledge, any more than action is the result or expression of a distinct inner intention.’Footnote ²²

Hegel himself makes this point about intentionality clear in a number of ways in the Aesthetics—for example, in his claim that the Greek art forms—the genres of sculpture, epic, tragedy and comedy, etc.,—were not pre-existing and therefore ready to be seized by artists and imposed on new material, but were instead the only forms in which the essential content of Greek art could actually have been expressed. The mode of expression is essential to the artwork itself, in other words.Footnote ²³

But could it really be Hegel's position that we can't understand any artwork as the result of an artist's intention? Such a position would seem to be in tension not only with some of our own basic intuitions about art but also with Hegel's own account of artistic production elsewhere in the Aesthetics. Hegel does, for example, say very straghtforwardly in his discussion of the ‘position of the productive artist in classical art’ that appears in the introduction to the Hotho edition of the lectures that the production of the artist is ‘the free deed of the clear-headed man who equally knows what he wills and can accomplish what he wills, and who, in other words, neither is unclear about the meaning and the substantial content which he intends to shape outwardly for contemplation, nor in the execution of his work does he find himself hindered by any technical incapacity.’Footnote ²⁴

I want to argue that it is important that we see both how Hegel subjects his broad account of intentionality in ordinary agency and artistic activity to a critique of the artificial separation between intention and action and how he nonetheless preserves elements of the traditional distinction between artist and artisan as resting on the further distinction between conscious and unconscious activity. To do that, I would like to look a little more carefully at the role Oedipus is playing in his account of the transition from the activity of the artisan to the activity of the artist.

What I'd like to suggest is that Hegel's account of Oedipus’ role gives us a window onto two important components of artistic intentionality that are distinctive of Hegel's approach to this question—one related to the social and geistig character of artistic activity and the other concerned with the importance of interpretation.Footnote ²⁵

(1) If we trust Hegel's account of the riddle-solving Oedipus, we must notice that an important part of the ‘work’ that must go on for there to be a transition from artisanal handwork to the genuine possibility of art—or more broadly, for there to be a transition to a new mode of art-making at all—is something which must be viewed as an achievement of the larger social world in which the artist lives and which the artist himself can then somehow pick up as lying in front of him within the cultural world he inhabits (it is fertig and vorhanden, as Hegel says). The achievement of Greek culture must precede the cultural work of the artist. (This is perhaps clearest in Hegel's insistences that the real difference between instinctive artisanal Arbeit and the spiritual work of the artist lies first of all in what is being used as material for fashioning: in the first case, it is a natural product—the plant or animal—and in the second case it is something that already is a spiritual product—the human shape.)

(2) If we think about Oedipus the riddle-solver as the embodiment of the Hegelian notion of the artist at work, we may be prompted to the conclusion that the activity of the artist involves not so much the imposition of some new and separable artistic intention on the world in front of him but rather—above all—a form of interpretation. In the case of Hegel's Oedipus metaphor, interpretation involves the sort of insight needed to solve a riddle. An old problem which has no answer in the context of one cultural world has—thanks to already ongoing efforts within culture as a whole—the potential for resolution, but it is often only an especially geistreich artist who can see what that potential is and seize it with the result that a new form can emerge. (The question is: how do we understand what happened when a Greek artist first thought to himself: ‘god doesn't look like an animal, but like a human being!’)

What has happened to the artist/artisan distinction and the conscious/unconscious creation distinction in the process? One thing we might suggest is a certain commonality between what Hegel distinguishes as instinctive and absolute art: both of course involve some connection to strivings of which the artisan or artist is himself unconsicous. But it's important to notice that Oedipal interpretive artistry is clearly intentional in a recognizable sense: the discovery of a solution to the Sphinx’ riddle is Oedipus’ and no one else's. Like the products of our own intentional agency in the world around us: what he has done is something he owns, and for which he is famous. The Oedipal solution is Oedipus’. But it is not because Hegel is employing some notion of a prior and separable intention which the artist has put into play in his work, but—again like our experience in ordinary everyday agency—it is because we have ways of construing and recovering our actions that ultimately have retrospective significance.Footnote ²⁶

And here it's worth noticing that the very strongest claims Hegel makes for intentionality and art are claims that are made about the artwork: it's not (or not only) the artist but the work which Hegel says ‘knows and therefore points’ to itself (indem sie sich weiss, sich weist)Footnote ²⁷—and it is thus as much a ‘cultural achievement of the Greeks’ as it is the distinctive ownership of particular artists. Of course the artist in some sense becomes himself the object of his work, but it is in his work—in its completion and ultimately in its interpretation—that he really becomes self-aware.

We might consider one of the more famous passages from the Hotho edition of the lectures in this regard. In the transition from symbolic art, where free individuality is not yet the content and form of art, to the classical realm where genuine art is about the person, it is asserted:

This is one of a number of passages where it's not clear exactly what figure Hegel is talking about: the gods, but presumably the gods as they appear within Greek works of art, yet in the discussion of person feeling himself ‘master over his entire objective world,’ Hegel uses language that he elsewhere links directly to the artist's power as Meister des Gottes, a phrase that Hegel seems to connect with Werkmeister, the German word for ‘artisan’ and which plays a significant role in the awareness of human making that allows for the transition from art and religion to philosophy within Hegel's mature account of absolute spirit. But that Meisterschaft on the part of the artist is deeply embedded in the work the artisan or artist creates. It's in this sense, I think, that Hegel gives such an active role in his account of Greek art to the ‘action’ of figures like Zeus and Athene or Oedipus and Antigone as they appear in the works of Homer, Sophocles and Pheidias (as opposed to an account of the daily actions of actual artists like Homer, Pheidias and Sophocles).

Of course we have still a question about the kind of artistic activity Hegel is ascribing to his Oedipus (and in fact why he may have chosen this figure at all): if the Oedipus who is at the center of this scene is Oedipus the riddle-solver (a scene which Sophocles in any case does not show us), what are we to make of the tragic denouement which this riddle-solver ultimately encounters, a denouement which involves precisely the defeat of knowledge at the hands of fate?

There are two longer Hegelian answers to this question, both of which are spelled out in his narratives of artistic agency in the PhG as well as in the Aesthetics. These answers take us in further directions that we do not have time to fully examine here, but the outlines may still help us with the question of artistic agency. First of all, Hegel's ultimate conception of the Greek artist, as is well-known, is in fact one of a suffering figure whose achievement of certainty comes at the cost of a figure who has ‘lost his world’: that is to say, an essentially tragic figure who marks a transition to another culture. If the first Oedipus in Hegel's narrative is an Oedipus who sees the way to solve something which marks a cultural leap forward, the second Oedipus in Hegel's narrative is an Oedipus who has an insight that pulls away to what will ultimately dissolve that culture. In Sophocles’ account of Oedipus there is not merely the riddle solver and the perpetrator of the two great crimes (the subjects of the Oedipus Rex) but also a further vision of an older Oedipus in the second play, the Oedipus at Colonus, which Hegel termed a play of tragic reconciliation and which many others, including Bernard Williams, have talked about in terms of its offering a view of agency beyond conventional notions of prior intention. From this perspective there can be found a number of interesting Hegelian insights into the questions of intentional artistic agency, as well, in terms of the notion of reconciliation—or we might say in terms of the recovery of self, if we want the broadest term for what goes on in play like this. Self-recovery, if we want to venture in this direction, is also very much a matter of (self-) interpretation: it must continually take into account the ways in which the ‘I’ that has been achieved has come about through longer-term and not necessarily deliberate action, but it is not for that un-intentional or not mine.

If this seems like a strange account of intention in action and art, it's worth noticing that Hegel is not the only figure in 19^th century philosophy to pursue the question in this way. In a recent paper entitled ‘Nietzsche, Action, Intention,’ Alexander Nehamas suggests a similar Nietzschean critique of separable intention. He argues: ‘[I]n all complicated activites—writing a novel, going on a journey, planting a garden, becoming a philosopher—both agents and interpreters begin with a hazy idea that can't possibly correspond to the intention that is manifested once their actions are complete. In such cases, the intention comes into being with the activity itself.’Footnote ²⁹ (In Aaron Ridley's terms, the success-condition of such actions are ‘internal to the execution’ and unspecifiable in a non-trivial way prior to the event.Footnote ³⁰)

If this point is right, claims Nehamas, intentions are ‘not so much self-sufficient mental states that cause actions as they are markers and modifiers of the more extended performance to which we must appeal in order to explain a particular action… our understanding of both intention and action is therefore provisional.’ On the account of Nehamas’ Nietzsche, too, the task of construing intention is an inherently interpretive activity, one that requires making sense of what happens often seemingly by chance and often taking responsibility even for what we may not anticipate. He quotes in this context Zarathustra, whose language in the great section on ‘Redemption’ is reminiscent in many ways of Hegel's Oedipus:

It is in many ways a similar appeal that Hegel makes to the birth of artistry as an essentially intentional and intepretive activity—what often is, in fact, a kind of riddle-guessing—as he considers the figure of Oedipus. (What Hegel adds, of course, among other things, is a fuller account of the social and cultural origins of the riddles themselves.)