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

Introduction

The relationship between “beauty–art” and “thinking–life” is vital to the articulation of the “philosophy of individuation,” which lies at the centre of all my past, present, and future work in the sphere of thought.

A philosophy emptied of passionate beauty is dead thought, and a life estranged from art has never truly begun.

At the beginning of a new chapter in our conversations, I want to devote several sessions to aesthetics in philosophy. I will begin this path with a philosopher whose name is familiar not only in Iran but across the philosophical world, while his profound and original thought has nevertheless remained largely in the shadows. In my view, he is a philosopher for the future—for years, distant or near, that have not yet arrived.

Kierkegaard remained a philosopher in the shadows for nearly a century after his lifetime, and it was only after the Second World War that his thought received widespread attention. For some philosophers, such as Spinoza, this took several centuries.

Early Tradition and Influences

I have often noted that the tradition of German Idealism, and its great philosophers—Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling—played a very important role in shaping the structure of my own philosophy and my understanding of the philosophy of “individuation.” Today I want to reflect a little more on that influence.

Schelling: Life and Genius

The philosopher from this great tradition whose thought is the subject of our seminar is Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, the brilliant nineteenth-century German Idealist philosopher. By the age of thirteen he had mastered six languages besides his native German, including Greek, Latin, Arabic, and French. At nineteen he wrote his first philosophical work, “On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General,” and at twenty-four he became professor of philosophy at the University of Jena in Germany. Among the great prodigies in the history of philosophy, only Nietzsche likewise attained a professorship at the age of twenty-four—at the University of Basel, though not in philosophy but in Greek language and literature.

Why Did Schelling Remain in the Shadows?

Schelling remained relatively unknown because he consciously resisted constructing a closed philosophical system and never set out to establish a coherent school. The closer he came to the end of his life, the further his lectures moved from classical philosophy, entering instead a dance among philosophy, mystical thought, psychology, and even scientific theories in search of convergence among these fields. This trajectory departed from the course of classical philosophy in his own time and for many years afterwards.

References and Praise

Even so, major philosophers who came after him recognized the value of his work and kept his name alive in the history of philosophy by praising the depth of his thought. Heidegger regarded Schelling’s masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy. Karl Jaspers considered him the true father of existentialism. In more recent years, Žižek has described him as the missing link between German Idealism and modern psychoanalytic systems, while the contemporary philosopher Andrew Bowie has, rightly in my view, identified Schelling as a source of post-structuralist and postmodern thought.

A Personal Judgement and the Connection with the Philosophy of Individuation

I, too, see Schelling as a philosopher whose thought concealed within it the seeds of philosophy’s future, and even of analytical psychoanalysis: from existentialism to the analytical psychoanalysis of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, and from post-structuralist and postmodern movements in philosophy to developments whose time, I believe, has still not arrived. Kierkegaard sat directly in his classes. Freud began one of his most important essays on the unconscious, “The Uncanny,” in 1919 with a quotation from Schelling. James Hillman placed him within the family of archetypal thinkers. With this description, I think his importance for the philosophical path whose history I am trying to reconstruct becomes clear.

Outline of the First Seven Minutes

In the first seven minutes of this seminar, I discuss how the scientific empiricism of Bacon, Locke, and Hume, standing in opposition to the rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, is brought into a synthesis by Kant and gives rise to his great revolution in philosophy. In another decisive turn, the mind is no longer an “inactive mirror receiving the world,” but the “maker of the world,” itself the condition of possibility for any experience. This is the point at which “German Idealism” is born.

Yet in German Idealism the world as it is in itself—the “noumenon”—lies beyond our reach and perception, while our perception of the world depends only on phenomena organized by the mind.

Continue reading in the next post.