Art and the unconscious: is aesthetic intuition the highest organ of philosophy, accomplishing in finite form what philosophy can only theorize?

F.W.J. Schelling, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

In aesthetic production the conscious activity of the artist coincides with the unconscious productivity of nature. Art is the highest organ of philosophy because it accomplishes in a finite, perceptible product what philosophy theorizes only discursively: the absolute identity of subject and object.¹ The genius is the channel through which nature, as unconscious productivity, achieves self-consciousness in finite production; the work of art is the only place where the absolute is given rather than merely thought.

Aesthetic intuition (ästhetische Anschauung) is a real cognitive mode, structurally higher than discursive reason, because in it the separation of intuition and concept that haunts transcendental philosophy is overcome.²³

Sources

1. ΕΣ ΕΣ [626-28] Art and Philosophy 231 one and the same activity. But this very fact, that where the conditions of emergence are otherwise entirely similar, the one takes its origin from outside consciousness, the other from within it, constitutes the eternal difference between them which can never be removed.

   System of Transcendental Idealism, p. 272

2. It could, however be readily shown in a number of ways, that even these grounds for the presumption may be delusive in the extreme. Genius is thus marked off from everything that consists in mere talent or skill by the fact that through it a contradiction is resolved, which is soluble absolutely and otherwise by nothing else.

   System of Transcendental Idealism, pp. 269–271

3. If A = A (a common equation that both Fichte and Schelling use), one at least has to consider the unit A from both sides of the equation, and thus recognize difference in identity. This suggests that in some way one is nonetheless dealing with a dualistic first principle. In the works constituting the system of identity, Schelling attributes several terminological pairs to this identity.

   The Philosophy of Art, pp. xxxii–xxxiii

Where the argument is made

• System of Transcendental Idealism (1800, especially Part VI on aesthetic intuition), The Philosophy of Art (Stott, lectures of 1802-1804 published posthumously 1859), the dialogue Bruno (1802), the 1807 Munich Academy oration On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature

How the argument was received

Stated most fully in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) and the Philosophy of Art lectures of 1802-1804. The privileging of art is a permanent feature of the authorship, not a Romantic over-reach later abandoned. The late mythology lectures extend rather than retract it: when art's role recedes in the modern world, mythology becomes the new world- disclosing medium. The structural insight — that there is a finite production in which the absolute identity of subject and object is given — survives every shift in the system.