259n. Schiller to Schelling in Jena: Weimar. 1 May 1800 [*]
[Weimar] 1 May 1800
I would have answered you earlier, my dear friend, had I had the opportunity to learn anything here about the matter quaestionis. [1] But Goethe has been away for several days now, and I have not otherwise seen anyone here whose opinion we might care to hear. [2]
I have, however, in the meantime learned this much since the initial appearance of your piece, namely, that opinions are quite divided and that, as you may well imagine, the matter is being viewed more with respect to the scandal it has created. But I have not heard anyone suggest the recent law be invoked.
My own, private opinion is that a general review journal that constitutes itself as judge over all writers cannot invoke the law proscribing disputes and warring between academic colleagues, since such a journal is in fact not an academic corporation but a literary entity, and as such must also be subject to whatever publicity it presumes to generate and must be able to be called to full account in that regard. [3]
I am most obliged to you for your work, which I have already started reading and studying with great interest. [4]
All the best on your trip, and may all the muses be gracious to your plans. [5] Since you yourself weave such an intimate bond between poet and philosopher in your system, let such also inseparably bind our friendship. [6]
Schiller
Notes
[*] Source: Plitt 1:298. — This letter is the response to Schelling’s letter to Schiller on 25 April 1800 (letter 259h), q.v. (with note 2 there) concerning esp. the first paragraph in this present letter. Back.
[1] Latin, “(matter) in question.” Back.
[2] Goethe had been in Leipzig since 28 April 1800 and would remain till 16 May; he also met there with Wilhelm Schlegel on 12 May (Weimarer Ausgabe 3:2:288, 295) (Rudolf Koch and Fritz Kredel, Deutschland und angrenzende Gebiete [Leipzig 1937]):
[3] This particular quarrel with the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung is not Schelling’s last; a more serious quarrel, and with more serious (and official) repercussions, takes place in 1802. Back.
[4] Das System des transcendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen 1800), one of Schelling’s most influential pieces; trans. by Peter Lauchlan Heath as System of transcendental Idealism (1800) (Charlottesville 1978). Back.
[5] To Bamberg (Rudolf Koch and Fritz Kredel, Deutschland und angrenzende Gebiete [Leipzig 1937]):
See Schelling’s letter to Schiller on 25 April 1800 (letter 259h) with note 1, and Dorothea Veit’s letter to Schleiermacher on 28–30 April 1800 (letter 259m), note 2. Back.
[6] See the final section of Schelling’s System of transcendental Idealism (here 229–31) concerning the relationship between philosophy and the arts at large, and concerning how through the revelatory function of art the philosopher finds revealed objectively that which grounds the entire system of philosophy, namely, the absolute itself, or absolute identity:
The whole of philosophy starts, and must start, from a principle which, as the absolute principle, is also at the same time the absolutely identical. An absolutely simple and identical cannot be grasped or communicated through description, nor through concepts at all. It can only be intuited. Such an intuition is the organ of all philosophy. — But this intuition, which is an intellectual rather than a sensory one, and has as its object neither the objective nor the subjective, but the absolutely identical, in itself neither subjective nor objective, is itself merely an internal one, which cannot in turn become objective for itself; it can become objective only through the second intuition. The second intuition is the aesthetic.
The work of art merely reflects to me what is otherwise not reflected by anything, namely that absolutely identical which has already divided itself even in the self. Hence, that which the philosopher allows to be divided even in the primary act of consciousness, and which would otherwise be inaccessible to any intuition, comes, through the miracle of art, to be radiated back from the products thereof. . . . If aesthetic intuition is merely intellectual intuition become objective, it is self-evident that art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely that unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity. Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens up to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart.
See in general my (the translator’s) introduction to Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, esp. section 3. Back.
Translation © 2014 Doug Stott