How to interpret The Philosophy of Art? Before speculating further on the possible beginning of the positive philosophy, this interpretive task alone is quite challenging, and needs to be settled to a certain extent. In the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling has already declared that art is the highest embodiment of truth, the absolute from which all other divisions spring forth, the "highest potency" which is simultaneously ground and result of all movements of consciousness. Art is what opens up the possibility of consciousness as such, and it is also the source of both sensuous and intellectual intuition. In this respect, for Schelling The Philosophy of Art is an account of the highest being. The stakes are high for him, and also for a reader - such as myself - who has temporarily taken Schelling's philosophy to heart.
Art has been designated as the real representation of the forms of things as they are in themselves, and hence of the forms of the archetypes. [And] if art is the representation of the forms of things as they are in themselves, then the universal material or content of art is found in the archetypes themselves, and our next object is therefore a construction of the universal material or content of art or of its eternal archetypes.
Philosophy is the ideal, art is the real, manifestation of the absolute. In philosophy, the objective element is subsumed under subjectivity, while in art the reverse process takes place. These are thus two channels for the transmission of being from nature, mind, and back into nature.
If the basic element of the human soul is to represent God, and if this representation is achieved through the severability of the understanding from yearning, or being from its ground, then there ought to be a transition from the latter to the former. If nature is identified as ground, then philosophy would be the circuit through which such a transmission is to be accomplished. In this way, nature becomes being, and understanding illuminates the forces or potencies within the ground. This, however, is only the case if the ground is considered as objective. The ground in its subjectivity will need another channel through which it enters into the light of the soul. This is art. More precisely, art is the intuition of the subjective ground, i.e. the incomprehensible stirring not within the external world but rather within the human soul.
On the other hand, however, art and nature are not in such a simple opposition. Art, as the "real representation of things as they are in themselves," already encompass the totality of nature, since nature itself is conditioned by the soul that represents it. It is thus that Schelling conceives art as nature raised to a higher power, as he makes clear in the following disclaimer.
For those already acquainted with my system of philosophy [including the philosophy of nature], the philosophy of art will be merely the repetition of that same philosophy in the highest potence.
Nature still has an element of contingency in it, and even an organism is not yet free, but rather is conditioned and determined by its receptivity. The human being, qua organism, is bound up in a similar fashion. Only the human being qua artist is able to experience freedom to the same extent as the necessity of his or her own life. Schelling will claim in chapter 4 that the essence of art is the removal of accidental aspects from natural things. It is through such an act of subtraction that the unity of the human soul is achieved. In order for such a unification to take place, it is not only necessary to produce art, but also at the same time to be receptive to the work in the appropriate way. Schelling writes:
All effects of art are merely effects of nature for the person who has not attained a perception of art that is free, that is, one that is both passive and active, both swept away and reflective. Such a person behaves merely as a creature of nature and has never really experienced and appreciated art as art.
It is not only for this universal reason that the philosophy of art is pressing. Schelling also gives an historical reason for studying this subject.
With few exceptions, one can learn very little about the essence of art from those who actually practice art in such an age, since as a rule they have no guide concerning the actual idea of art and of beauty. Precisely this dominant disagreement even among those who practice art is a compelling reason for seeking the true idea and principles of art itself by means of science.
Finally, the grand aim and ambition of The Philosophy of Art is the construction of the "entire universe" or the "All" in and through the medium of art. It is quite surprising that Schelling here seems to take the term "universal" quite literally. Art is universal, not merely because it is an activity common to all human souls, but also because it is the very shape of the entire universe, or at least potentially so.
As "potence," art is what Schelling calls the "indifference point." This means that art necessarily arises as a third in any dialectical series. For instance, painting arises as a third between light and darkness. As such, painting, while it is constructed out of light and darkness, is itself an embodiment of something which is neither light nor darkness. At the same time, however, Schelling also makes the enigmatic remark that the "real" or that which appears is a product of the imbalance of potencies. Here, while Schelling is being consistent with his critical apparatus in his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, one still wonders how such a claim is compatible with the other claim that art is the indifference point of two polar opposites.
A few words on artistic beauty. For Schelling, beauty is present wherever the above mentioned "indifference" is achieved. It is a sign that an "archetype" or an idea is made simultaneously conceptual and intuitive, rational and sensuous. As such, beautiful things enjoy a peculiar kind of reality. Schelling claims in this context that "all figures and forms in art, and thus particularly the gods [for the proper content of art is mythology], are actual because they are possible." There is no distinction between possibility and actuality in beautiful things. As soon as it is present, beauty is intuitive, and its reality undeniable. Correspondingly, the gods of mythology are also free from such dichotomies. Therefore, "the gods are in themselves neither mortal nor immortal, but rather are freed from this relationship and are absolutely blessed."
The one content of art, i.e. God, is first and foremost mythological. This already suggests an intimate connection between the philosophy of art and that of mythology, a connection which I will most likely explore on another occasion. Meanwhile, Schelling moves forward by shifting his attention to the forms in which such mythological and divine content is rendered real. First, Schelling starts by claiming that there was a rupture between Greek and Christian mythology. Schelling devotes more than 20 pages to the demonstration of this rupture, which shows that this is an important premise for the subsequent development of his construction. For Greek mythology, art is the "informing of the infinite in the finite." In this way, the Greeks intuit the infinite by encountering its finite manifestation. For example, music, which will turn out to be the fundamental element of all other art-forms, gives us such a sense. When one listens to, say, Ryuichi Sakamoto's Hibari, one is tempted to assume that such a sonorous flow is a representation of something that is infinity present in the world. It continues to flow in our souls, and it moreover first appears to us as if it had always flowed too. The Christian mythology, on the other hand, is the "informing of the finite in the infinite." The movement here is the reverse. The ethical analogy to this is Kierkegaard's famous "leap of faith" whereby the "knight of faith," while remaining firmly rooted and self-conscious within his own finitude, is nonetheless resigning everything that he has in order to continually stare into the abyss of infinite possibilities, thereby living face-to-face with God, whom Kierkegaard defines as "that all things are possible." In Schelling's terminology, the reality that appears for such a knight of faith is a "miracle." Schelling defines a miracle thus: "a miracle is an absolute viewed from the empirical perspective, an absolute occurring within the finite realm without for that reason having any relationship to time."
For Schelling, "the element of the miraculous within historical relationships is the only mythological material in Christianity." Here lies the clue to the connection between art and the positive philosophy. If the content of art is mythology, and if Christian mythology gives us the "miraculous," then, if such "miracles" are the fragmentary "glimpses" of the ground intimated in the Investigations, then art is essentially the preparatory activity for the positive philosophy. Recall that philosophy is the idealization or the subjectivization of that which is real or objective. If the "indivisible remainder," that which "eternally remains in the ground," is momentarily brought forth as a miracle, and if such a moment is then fixed through Christian art, then the philosophy which reflects on the latter and idealizes it once more will necessarily be a positive one. In this sense, the study of Christian art is the pre-requisite for the positive philosophy. This makes The Philosophy of Art a set of prologomena to the positive philosophy.
With this general addition to Schelling's own way of framing the basic nature of art, we can now move on to Schelling's discussion of the particular forms of art. The details of the latter, in so far as art is the medium between the "indivisible remainder" and the positive philosophy, are to be interpreted with care, since these are, at least for me and up to now, the most promising clues for envisioning a way of thinking which breaks free of the closed confines of the negative philosophy.
