Schelling’s Philosophy of Art

My translation of Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, out of print for many years, is available again in a second printing as volume 58 in the series Theory and History of Literature from the University of Minnesota Press.

Schelling seems to have delivered some version of these lectures in Jena during the winter semester 1802–3, then apparently also in Würzburg during the summer semesters 1804 and 1805 and the winter semester 1805–6. They were not published until 1861 in his Sämmtliche Werke.

The growing interest in theories of literature and art has led to a reexamination of classic texts on aesthetics. The Philosophy of Art, a central work in its time, has a place in that discussion, as it does in the contemporary reassessment of Romanticism.

In The Philosophy of Art, Schelling presents an ordered system of the arts based on the his philosophy at the time, including key elements of his transcendental idealism and philosophy of nature. He systematically treats various forms of art, including music, painting, sculpture, narrative, and poetry, and ends with a theory of tragedy. Schelling bases this system on the structure of the Absolute, discusses classical and Christian mythology, and presents a philosophical disclosure of the idea or essence of art itself, an essence that transcends the actual work in history.