Schelling und ein andersgeartetes Ende der Kunst

Abstract

Why Schelling, the philosopher of art par excellence, the man that celebrated the art as the miraculous revelation of the absolute (System, 1800), moves away from the art? Why first he considers it inferior to philosophy as point of identity between the real and in the ideal (Philosophie der Kunst, 1802-1805), although with an important anagogic value as point of indifference between real and ideal, and mainly seems next interested in it only for istitutional reasons (Rede, 1807)? Why then he subordinates art to to philosophy als Mitwissenschaft (from 1809 onwards) and, finally, to religious revelation (Philosophy of mythology and Philosophy of revelation)? The hypothesis, beyond a matter of taste (against the romantic excesses of his time), is that Schelling considers the art and mythology of the past as something unsurpassed, but mostly he binds art tightly to the melancholy, understood as a stasis of healthy evolutionary process of powers and as a nostalgic (even pathological) look back. In this sense, art is the equivalent, on the spiritual plane, to the pain that pervades all nature, or (what is the same) the past. Not that Schelling ceases to try, however, to find ways out, that is other possible intuitive and extrariflessive conditions that, as in the case of art, are not dominated by the concept and logic. First he looks forward to the possibility of narrating even the cosmotheandric story (it’s the unfinished and failed great project of Weltalter, 1811-1815), then to the mystical-theosophical idea (borrowed especially from F. C. Oetinger) of a spiritual body (Geistleiblichkeit), understood both as the happy end of time and as an ontological level already present in all reality, though grossly misunderstood by a dualistic conception of spirit and matter. Finally, he sees – obviously in the broad sense of aesthetic” – a way out in ecstasy of reason, namely the fact that the philosophy can only come to the quid of what exists and not to his quod. What exists, its Das, is unpredictable, absolutely free and non-conceptual. By this Schelling maintains its search for a intuitive, not-reflexive way to the truth and the absolute. It follows that, while for Hegel we can actually talk of a “death of art” but mostly of the aesthetic, in the case of Schelling is more appropriate to speak of “death of art” but not of aesthetic, that is of an area in which the subject is a step back and convinced of the impossibility to reach with the logical concept to what really exists. In this, relatively to the idea that the philosopher must submit to something other than itself, Schelling shows a remarkable continuity from his earliest work until the last ones: the philosopher surrenders first a) to the artistic genius capable of reconciling the opposites, then b) to the narrator of the story of a god that is not god at the beginning, but that at the end only becomes god, c) then to the dream of a spiritual body that already now sustains the entire world and that can only be theosophically understood, and c) finally to a positive content that is represented from mythology and above all from revelation itself: a positive sphare tha comes from outside in any case, represented also this time by something that transcends reason and logic and to which the subject must surrender if he wants to give substance to his philosophy. Obviously we must here speak not of aesthetics but of ecstatics.