ABSTRACT
Philosophy of art in nineteenth-century German idealism is divided into distinct schools corresponding to their author’s characteristic metaphysical principles. Aesthetics in this tradition, despite basic points of agreement, radiates outward in different directions from a convergent source in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1978). Kant’s critical idealism in metaphysics and epistemology sets the stage for the aesthetic philosophies, among others, of G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schopenhauer, Schiller and Schelling. All of these post-Kantian thinkers are idealists, yet there are substantial differences in their interpretations of art, reflecting underlying differences in the specific forms of idealism they develop. What they generally share in common, despite significant disparities in their views, is a commitment to the problem set by Kant of trying to reconcile the fundamental opposition between freedom and necessity. The Romantic spirit associated with idealism in its later phases, in the writings of
Schopenhauer, Schiller and Schelling, glorifies the rebellion of will struggling tragically or heroically against the forces of moral and political authority, social conformity and the regimentation of artistic styles in the world of art. At a deeper metaphysical level, it is the same battle for supremacy of the human spirit and its sense of freedom in conflict with the necessity of natural forces represented by the rigidity of natural scientific law. This is a perennial theme of ethics and metaphysics that is by no means unique to Kant or the post-Kantian thinkers of the period, but one that is made a vital part of the idealist philosophical background to developments in the art and politics of the period. The idealist and later Romantic conception of the human condition in turn promotes the prominence of aesthetics over other subdisciplines of philosophy. In most other intellectual movements, aesthetics is made an adjunct to a more central elaboration of logic, metaphysics and epistemology, consigned to secondary importance almost as an afterthought. For Schopenhauer, Schiller and Schelling, aesthetics is transformed into a topic of primary concern. Even when their philosophical systems are presented first as speculative investigations of basic metaphysical distinctions, they eventually give such importance to aesthetic considerations that they are plausibly interpreted as pursuing problems of ontology and theory of knowledge for the sake of the aesthetic superstructure they support rather than merely exploring aesthetics among a system’s other peripheral implications.
