Abstract

Although many have identified similarities between the arts, the question as to what principle they would share has proved difficult to answer. This article unfolds three crucial moments in the search for an answer to the question of the singularity and plurality of art: Batteux’s attempt to reduce the arts to one principle in The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746), the early idealist-romantic attempt to synthesize the arts in The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism (1798), and Nancy’s recent attempt, in The Muses (2006), to understand the Hegelian End of Art as a beginning of the arts in plural.