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5 - The Non-Sovereign Exception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2017

Saitya Brata Das
Saitya Brata Das
Affiliation:
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
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Summary

Gift of beatitude

Schelling's 1802–3 lectures on The Philosophy of Art begin with a formulation of the task of such a philosophy: to present the laws of art's phenomenal apparitions as ideas. It attempts a presentation (Darstellung) of ideas to disclose the truth of works of art rather than a representation of aesthetic objects in concepts for our cognitive possession. This task of the philosophy of art is distinguished from the empirical-historical approach to the arts that is content with classifying works of art under general concepts. The task of the intellectual intuition of the philosopher is to present these ideas in a constellation, as distinct from the objects of empirical intuition addressed by the theoretician of art. Ideas are as irreducible to the conceptual logic of subsumption as the presentation of the absolute in intellectual intuition is to the theoretical representation of particulars. Ideas as truth, in their highest mode of being, are at one with absolute beauty. Absolute beauty is none other than ‘the truth of ideas’: it radiates like rays emanating from a ‘constellation’. Schelling writes:

Philosophy, which concerns itself only with ideas, must present only the general laws of phenomenal appearance as regards the empirical side of art, and must present these only in the form of ideas, for forms of art are the essential forms of things as they are in the archetypes. Hence, to the extent that these can be comprehended universally and from the perspective of the universe in and for itself, their presentation is a necessary part of the philosophy of art … philosophy of art in the larger sense is the presentation of the absolute world in the form of art. Only theory concerns itself directly with the particular or with a goal, and only according to theory can a project be executed empirically … that which the philosophy must recognize and present in it is of a higher sort, and is one and the same with absolute beauty: the truth of ideas. (Schelling 1989: 7)

The metaphor of the constellation is indispensable to understanding the early Schelling.

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The Political Theology of Schelling , pp. 182 - 210
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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