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Philosophical Aesthetics (1)
Schelling’s Absolute Idealism
Aydin Areta

After Kant shifted attention away from rationality (the Cartesian tradition) and from the role of the five senses (the empiricist tradition), directing it instead toward the structure of the mind and its role in shaping the structure of experience, another German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, regarded Kant’s “noumenon”—the unknowable world beyond human empirical access—as unimportant. What difference does it make, he asks, what the world is in itself? It is “I” who am here, like an actor on the stage, to experience phenomena and expand my own boundaries. The world is the stage on which our presence is enacted, not an object whose discovery we must endlessly struggle to complete. Hegel, in reflecting on the relation between mind and world, turns instead toward the history of mind, historicizes reason, and attempts to understand history as the arena in which the Absolute and the freedom of the human spirit are realized. In his view, history is a rational path through which freedom and consciousness realize and develop themselves by way of historical events.

Schelling’s Revolution and the Unity of Mind/Nature

Schelling’s revolution within German Idealism begins precisely here. He changes the question. From Kant’s “How does the mind represent the world?” and Hegel’s historical rationality, he arrives at a different question: “How, in the evolution of Being and living things, did the human mind arise and become possible in the first place?”

His criticism of Kant is that, in Kant and many Idealist philosophers, “mind” and “world” remain separate from one another, and mind appears as an entity distinct from Being that is trying to know it. In Schelling’s philosophy, however, “mind and nature” are one; they are not two separate substances. A profound unity links consciousness, nature, and the reality of the world, in which the human mind is like a flower that has grown on the branch of evolutionary history.

History, Freedom, and the “Dark Ground”

For Schelling, Hegel is mistaken in imagining history to be rational. In this respect, like Dostoevsky after him, Schelling believed that when we say history is “rational,” the word rational catches in our throat. In his view, the reason history cannot be entirely rational is the absoluteness of a “mad” freedom that precedes every order and every reason, lies at the foundation of the world, and moves within nature and the profoundly contingent creative process of evolution.

A Cosmological Image (Metaphorical)

One hundred and fifty years before the “Big Bang theory,” he imagined the beginning of the world as the explosion of a point, with two forces—expansion and contraction—born from that event as eternal laws of existence. For him, “expansion” is the spreading of light and the beginning of every new possibility, while “contraction” is the force that attempts to return the world to the primal point of nothingness. From one arises the order of life; from the other, the chaos of non-being.

For him, freedom is the eternal possibility that both possibilities may exist within the world and within the human mind: a mind free at each moment to make Being or non-being possible. Within this, love is Schelling’s greatest force of expansion in the universe. The ethical question, in his view, is whether in encountering the Other we choose contraction and turn away from expansion (self-centredness), or expand ourselves toward the “Other” and the world (love is another name for expansion). Human beings will destroy themselves and the world without love, and they are free to do so.

Art, Philosophy, and Myth

Art occupies the highest rank in Schelling’s philosophy. It stands not only above philosophy but even above nature—and here he departs from the Romantics. For him, art is the frontier where “consciousness and the unconscious,” and “mind and technique,” reach union. In his view, “philosophy” is the conscious movement along the path of freedom, “nature” is unconscious and creative freedom, and “art” is the union of all these elements. For this reason it stands above both: the highest manifestation of freedom, the bringing of the unconscious into consciousness, and the shortest route to the “Absolute.”

For precisely this reason, literature and poetry may, in his view, be placed above philosophy, because they pour art into the soul of philosophy. Perhaps this is the idea that profoundly influenced Heidegger, whose philosophy repeats something of Schelling’s conviction. Likewise, the reunion of the Dionysian dimension of mind—“creative unconsciousness”—with the Apollonian dimension—“formed consciousness”—can be seen again at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Among all these forms, myth stands highest, because in myth art, philosophy, unconsciousness, and consciousness achieve an enduring historical unity that gives birth to the archetypal structure of the human mind. In this sense, even before Jung and Hillman, Schelling can be read as a psychoanalytic thinker with a philosophical and archetypal vision.

Conclusion and the Path Ahead

In the next seminar, we will move not forward but backward, returning to examine Kant’s philosophy as the first philosopher of the German Idealist tradition.