Schellings Philosophie der Kunst (review)

640 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 1:4 OCTOBER X99 3 Bernhard Barth. Schellings Philosophie derKunst. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1991. Pp. ~54. Paper, DM 68. In the winter of 18o2-o 3 Schelling chose to lecture on the philosophy of art as an introduction to his Identity Philosophy. He repeated it in 18o4 when he presented the Complete System of Philosophy in lecture form and published Philosophy and Religion. Art and religion, if indeed their metaphysical content can be distinguished, form the ideal side of Schelling's version of absolute idealism; it is these cognitive and affective domains , not ethics, politics, or history, which for Schelling indicate the return of spirit from the otherness exhibited in nature's structured hierarchy of forms. They are the 'homeward journey' indicated in the lapidary text: "History is an epic composed in God's mind; it has two main parts, one depicting humankind's departure from its center to the farthest periphery, the other its return. The first is its Iliad, the second its Odyssey.... The ideas or spirits had to fall from their center and particularize themselves in nature, the general sphere of fallenness, so that they could return again to Indifference as particular, and, reconciled to it, subsist in it without destroying it.''* Bernhard Barth subjects the hundred pages or so of the general or metaphysical part of the Lectures on Art to close textual analysis, supplying conceptual and literary/ historical background where necessary. He produces a sympathetic rendition of what he calls, in contradistinction to Hegel's pessimistic aesthetic (the "death of art" thesis), Schelling's optimistic theory of art and beauty--one which, as in the Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics of old, defends art's capacity to convey ultimate truth. Barth supplies a thematic subtitle for his study Divinelmaging and Aestheticlmagination (Einbildungskraft). He argues that Schelling conceives both the content of art and the experience of the artist-producer as a counterimage of the original in-building of opposites which obtains in reason, the Absolute's form or expression. Aesthetics reflexively reconstructs Indifferenz, or the identity of opposites. Reflexion, human cognitive activity, mirrors reason; aesthetic imagination (Enbildungskraft) mirrors ontological identification of differences (lneinsbildung); art reveals essence. Barth follows the lead of his teacher, Werner Beierwahes, in pursuing themes of Platonic and Augustin!an image metaphysics which are perhaps on the periphery of Schelling's thought in the early Identity Philosophy period. ~ But this approach does not hinder his recognition and exposition of the concepts central to Identity Philosophy in 18o2, reason as "identi-fication" (Ineinsbildung) and the nature of its products as Ideas or perfect particulars. Ineinsbildung is Schelling's static counterpart of Hegel's dynamic dialectic; it is the rational activity in the Absolute and in the artistic genius (or philosophical knower) which makes truth or systematic grasp of the Absolute possible. Ideas are Schelling's counterpart of Hegel's categories or historical and phenomenological stages. Barth's recognition of the centrality of these concepts makes his study an important contribution to understanding Schelling's Identity ,Philosophicund Religion(a8o4), F. W.J. SchellingsSi~mtlicheWerke,ed. K. F. A. Schelling, 14 volumes (Stuttgart/Augsburg: Cotta, 1856-1861 ), 6:57. See Werner Beierwahes, Platonismusund Idealismus(Frankfurt a. M., x972), and ldentitatund Differenz (Frankfurt a.M., 1980). BOOK REVIEWS 641 Philosophy; in its metaphysical depth it iscomparable to DieterJ~ihnig's study of the 1799 System of Transcendental Idealism, which also pursues the thematic of art.~ Barth follows the general structure of Schelling's lectures: a metaphysical introduction to the phenomena of art, a consideration of art's absolute content (mythology, the divine shapes of the new Olympian divinities), then a consideration of its 'form', the productive activity of artist ('genius') and critic. The presentation is complicated, not inaccurate though sometimes prosy. Citations from Schelling's lectures did help to clarify for this reader the author's conceptual drift, but is it outdated or undialectical to expect the reverse? Philosophically, the first section of the study is the most important. It is devoted to a systematic "placement" of art in the whole, a derivation of it from metaphysical first principles; this is what Schelling terms "construction." Barth does a...