Why is the Amphibian Status of the Human Unavoidable?

In this paper I first focus on the analogy between action-theoretical meaning and aesthetic meaning that Robert Pippin traces in his “After the Beautiful”. I first argue that, if the analogy between the meaning of social action and the meaning of aesthetic works were to be followed through to its logical conclusion, then one would expect that not only social freedom but also aesthetic experience would not be 'truly' possible. But this contradicts the very understanding of aesthetic experience that Pippin attributes to modernism. The point is, that contrary to social freedom, aesthetic experience can be truly realized (in its most perfected form) even when such conditions aren’t met. Furthermore, I argue that Pippin’s criticism of Hegel’s thesis about the end of art is at first sight based on an historicist reconstruction, but on a deeper leel relies on a metaphysical account of the perennial tension between our mindedness and naturalness. Here question arises as to whether this insistence on the amphibian status of human beings – the fact that we are both corporeal and normative, natural and spiritual beings – is compatible with his previous ‘bootstrapping” account of spirit.