{"agent_id":"schelling","agent_name":"F.W.J. Schelling","slug":"art-and-the-unconscious","label":"Art and the unconscious: is aesthetic intuition the highest organ of philosophy, accomplishing in finite form what philosophy can only theorize?","topic":"Art and the unconscious","question":"Is aesthetic intuition the highest organ of philosophy, accomplishing in finite form what philosophy can only theorize?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"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*.","n":[3]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"*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*. Reception: Hegel's *Lectures on Aesthetics* (art as a passing stage superseded by religion and philosophy in the movement of absolute spirit); Manfred Frank's *Einführung in Schellings Philosophie* (1985, art as structural site of the unconscious-conscious synthesis); Dieter Henrich's *Konstellationen* (1991); Rüdiger Bubner's writings on Schelling and the aesthetics of subjectivity; Andrew Bowie 1993 (art as proto-Heideggerian world-disclosure).","works":["*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*"],"reception":"Hegel's *Lectures on Aesthetics* (art as a passing stage superseded by religion and philosophy in the movement of absolute spirit); Manfred Frank's *Einführung in Schellings Philosophie* (1985, art as structural site of the unconscious-conscious synthesis); Dieter Henrich's *Konstellationen* (1991); Rüdiger Bubner's writings on Schelling and the aesthetics of subjectivity; Andrew Bowie 1993 (art as proto-Heideggerian world-disclosure).","status":"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.","era":"1775-1854","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"System of Transcendental Idealism","page":"p. 272","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"System of Transcendental Idealism, p. 272"},{"n":2,"work":"The Philosophy of Art","page":"pp. 34–35","canonical":"","quote":"It can only be intuited. Such an intuition is the organ of all philosophy. — But this intuition, which is intellectual rather than and has an a sensory one, as its object neither the objective nor the subjective, but the absolutely identical, in itself neither subjective nor objective, is itself merely an internal one, which cannot in turn become objective for itself: it can become objective only through the second…","label":"The Philosophy of Art, pp. 34–35"},{"n":3,"work":"Bruno or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things","page":"pp. 247–248","canonical":"","quote":"Trans. proceeds from freedom, and if it is precisely for freedom that this opposition of conscious and unconscious activities is an absolute one, there is properly speaking but one absolute work of art, which may indeed exist in altogether different versions, yet is still only one, even though it should not yet exist in its most ultimate form. (SYSTEM, 231) Trans.","label":"Bruno or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things, pp. 247–248"},{"n":4,"work":"System of Transcendental Idealism","page":"pp. 269–271","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"System of Transcendental Idealism, pp. 269–271"},{"n":5,"work":"The Philosophy of Art","page":"p. 34","canonical":"","quote":"In the System of 1804, however, and also in the Philosophy of Art, Schelling begins referring to this absolute as God. His introduction of the term may be explained perhaps by the increasing attention he gives the ontological implications of his metaphysical assertions.","label":"The Philosophy of Art, p. 34"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"naturphilosophie","label":"Naturphilosophie: is nature autonomous productivity, or the constituted appearance of a transcendental subject?"},{"slug":"freedom-and-the-dark-ground","label":"Freedom and the dark ground: is the distinction between God's ground and God's existence a structural-ontological breakthrough or theosophical regression?"},{"slug":"positive-vs-negative-philosophy","label":"Positive vs negative philosophy: can any a priori system ground the existence of what it analyzes, or must philosophy begin from the unprethinkable?"},{"slug":"mythology-and-revelation","label":"Mythology and revelation: are they the necessary and free epochs of the absolute's self-disclosure, or sub-philosophical theology?"}]}