Abstract
In his Introduction to the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Schelling states that “the objective world is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit; the universal organon of philosophy – and the keystone [Schlußstein] of its entire arch – is the philosophy of art” (STI 12 [SW I/3:349]). Artistic production, which is grounded in what Schelling calls aesthetic intuition, realizes what philosophy intuits in the ideal: the identity of subject and object, consciousness and unconscious activity, as well as self and nature. The philosophy of art, he argues, overcomes the limitations of both practical philosophy and nature-philosophy. On the one hand, practical philosophy, which begins by positing the subject’s activity, is limited to the infinite task of approximating – but never objectively realizing – the moral law. On the other hand, nature-philosophy, which begins from the object, can demonstrate nature’s productivity, although this productivity remains unconscious. While both parts of the system proceed from the intellectual intuition of the identity of subject and object, neither can demonstrate this identity; they fail Schelling’s demand, found in the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), that the system should show that “Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature” (IPN 42 [SW I/2:56]). Thus he introduces the philosophy of art, which demonstrates how the intellectual intuition of the identity of subject and object “become[s] objective” through an aesthetic intuition – the production of the work of art (STI 229 [SW I/3:625]).
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Notes
Devin Zane Shaw, Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art (London: Continuum, 2010), 89–90.
Antoon Braeckman, “From the Work of Art to Absolute Reason: Schelling’s Journey toward Absolute Idealism,” Review of Metaphysics 57, no. 3 (March 2004): 551.
See also Joseph P. Lawrence, “Art and Philosophy in Schelling,” The Owl of Minerva 20, no. 1 (fall 1988): 5–19.
The lectures collected as The Philosophy of Art were delivered in 1802–3 in Jena and 1804–5 in Würzburg. Henry Crabb Robinson’s notes on “Schellings Aesthetick” (the lectures from 1802–3) have been published and translated in Henry Crabb Robinson, Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. James Vigus (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010), 66–115. The 1804–5 lectures were published by K. F. A. Schelling in Schellings sämmtliche Werke, and have been translated as The Philosophy of Art.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:158.
Quoted in David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 24.
Noteworthy is Manfred Frank’s proposal that the impetus for Hölderlin’s Urtheil und Sein was Schelling’s Vom Ich rather than Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. See Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 97–111.
Dieter Sturma, “The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature,” in The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 219.
See Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 73–87.
Orrin F. Summerell, “The Theory of the Imagination in Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity,” Idealistic Studies 34, no. 1 (spring 2004): 89.
Dieter Jähnig, Schelling: Die Kunst in der Philosophie, 2 vols. (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1969), 2:259.
Jean-François Marquet, “Schelling et le destin de l’art,” in Actualité de Schelling, ed. Guy Planty-Bonjour (Paris: Vrin, 1979), 85–86. Here are the chronological dates: Michelangelo (1475–1564), Correggio (1489[?]–1534), Raphael (1483–1520). Marquet argues that the different interpretations of these painters found in The Philosophy of Art and the Münchener Rede demonstrate the profound differences between Schelling’s identity-philosophy and his subsequent work.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 4.
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 37.
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Shaw, D.Z. (2014). The “Keystone” of the System: Schelling’s Philosophy of Art. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_26
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