ABSTRACT
Hegel and Schelling understand art to be a central human activity, one that models, rivals, or even supersedes the accomplishments of philosophy. This exalted status attributed to art rests upon a novel conception of art as a distinctive metaphysical and cognitive achievement: art presents the Absolute, ultimate being, in sensible or …nite form. Their theories of art are the source, in the history of aesthetics, of the in¶uential claim that artistic value resides in the “unity of form and content” and are also the …rst philosophies of art that treat art systematically, differentiated both by media (art forms) and in historical periods. This essay concentrates on Hegel and Schelling, alone, because Fichte pays little attention to aesthetics, and because the central concern of Kant’s aesthetic theory – the justi…cation of judgments of taste – …ts squarely within the eighteenth-century project of philosophical aesthetics (the investigation of taste) and is quite alien to Hegel’s and Schelling’s shared dominant concerns and methods. For this reason, Kant’s aesthetics will be discussed in the “historical background” section; various aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory that were in¶uential on Hegel and Schelling will also be noted.
