Based on a comparison of Hotho’s version and the several versions of Hegel’s Aesthetics, the paper aims to demonstrate that Hotho’s version is a one-sided view of Hegelian comments on metaphor, because of the developments brought about by the 1821, 1823 and 1826 lectures on Aesthetics, that are compared with the positions represented by Gottsched, Sulzer and Klopstock. From a philosophical point of view, the paper focuses on the way Hegel inherits the reflections of such thinkers: since 1826, Hegel enhanced the spiritual function of the metaphor and its heteronomy, that intertwines the sensible and the spiritual dimension. The autonomation of the metaphorical system could show, as a result, a gap between the sensible and the ideal dimension, therefore giving the metaphor a philosophical meaning in its solidarity with the conceptual thought.