The Final Countdown

I know that very little has appeared on the blog during 2014. That's largely due--at least in my case--to the fact that I've been writing Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière (here). At this point, the book is almost done. I'm currently writing up the conclusion, which summarizes the contents and then proceeds to compare my reading of Rancière to the politics of aesthetics elaborated in his book Aisthesis. These concluding remarks will in part respond to Peter Gratton's review of the book for Society and Space. He notes a vitalist undercurrent in this work. More specifically, Peter shows that the politics of the aesthetic regime of art, as it is framed in Aisthesis, aims to uncover the singular moments of life unburdened by reified representative structures:

In these pages, Rancière privileges the clown, the prisoner awaiting execution, the de-gendered dancer, and so on, all in the name of an inactivity that is but another name for the pure vital force of living, while calling for an indifference to differences that for the author would only be hierarchical and power driven. Indeed they are and have been, but isolating non-hierarchical moments in some sort of eidos of pure inactivity in these descriptions becomes a phenomenological epoché that has to bracket so much away from given contexts, and thus only reinforces what a pretense the “ignorance” and invisibility of the writer were in the first place.

Unlike Peter, however, I don't think this is the culmination of Rancière's work (I also have some qualms with Peter's characterization of Ranicière's account of mimetic norms in the representative regime of the arts, but that discussion has to wait for Chapter 3 of my book). While the book is doubtlessly important, I don't think its vitalist resonances are foregrounded by his other major works on aesthetics (Aesthetics and Its Discontents, The Emancipated Spectator, etc.), which focus on how new forms of social practices become visible and intelligible. I argue that there isn't one politics of aesthetics, but that it takes multiple forms. Thus Rancière's Aisthesis elaborates one possible account of the politics of aesthetics. In my book, I defend a different theoretical approach, emphasizing Rancière's account as a micropolitics of aesthetics that works in the interstices of egalitarian politics and policing. It's also an account of art that is non-teleological (à la Benjamin) and non-monumental (as in Badiou and Schelling).

On Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, Globalectics

I've occassionally mentioned my interest in Negritude, existentialism, and postcolonial theory. Over a decade ago, I was floored when I first read Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, and over the last few years I've taught Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Frantz Fanon in my introductory philosophy courses--they've often been taught under the rubric of "Great Philosophers," as a challenge to the traditional Western canon. This spring, I can add two publications on the topic of African/Africana philosophy and aesthetics.

The first is my review of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Globalectics, which has been published by Society and Space, available here. 

Later in the spring, a review essay on Souleymane Bachir Diagne's African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011) will appear in Comparative and Continental Philosophy.

Coming Soon: The Paperback

You've read this blog, clicked the links, and read the reviews. You've seen the previews online. And you've looked at the price tag, and figured that you'll need to spend that $120 dollars on something other than the hardcover edition of Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art. Maybe we're friends and you haven't invited me over to visit--for almost two years--because you're afraid I'll be checking your shelves for my debut effort.* Well, if I've described you, Continuum Bloomsbury has announced a publication date and price for the paperback edition HERE: July 26th, 2012, with a list price of $29.95.**

* And maybe I would, but I wouldn't judge you.

**For the Americas, Bloomsbury says September 27th, but Amazon.com won't wait; it also lists July 26th.

Representing Art Theories

One of the most, maybe the most, time consuming parts to preparing a lecture for the course "Theories of Art" is searching for decent digital reproductions of paintings and sculptures. Even when you can access a resource like ARTstor, I spend a lot of time considering what images are most appropriate (is an image verging on cliche? if less known, is it still formally interesting? etc.). Note that ARTstor is not complete, which leads to the next paragraph:

If you don't have access to these resources via a library, things get tougher. As long as a work is in the public domain (more or less), Wikipedia is fairly reliable, although you often have to switch between languages to find your way to the more extensive galleries (often this requires going to the page in the artist's native language, where there is often the most interest in his or her work). When the work is still under copyright, things get much trickier. I spent the last two days working on a lecture on Max Raphael's Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, on excerpts from the chapter on Marx. Overall the book was a pleasure to read--too bad it's faded into obscurity (I discovered it  while researching Walter Benjamin's sources).

Every lecture starts with an image of the critic if possible. This lead me to MoMA, where I discovered a watercolor by Max Pechstein, Max Raphael, 1910:

But when I wanted to address some of the questions posed by Raphael, and pose them through the interpretation of visual arts, I had some difficulty finding the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Diego Rivera. To save you some time, if you like, and if you would like a source for images for teaching some contemporary work under copyright, here are a few links:

• Diego Rivera's murals from 1931-1932 at MoMA are here.
• Basquiat, at Potomitan, a resource for créole culture.
• And from my research last year, the gallery Latin American Masters. I found the site while looking for José Bedia, whose work figures prominently in Gerardo Mosquera's article "The Marco Polo Syndrome."

Courbet and Proudhon

I've already mentioned the texts that I am teaching in the course "Great Philosophers," but I haven't yet posted about "Theories of Art," which I am teaching for the Department of Visual Arts. The course is organized around three themes, the first being "The Intersections of Art and Politics." We're reading, during this part of the course, Plato, Baudelaire, Proudhon, Zola, and Max Raphael.

Courbet, Proudhon and His Children in 1853 (1865)

Tomorrow, I'll be teaching an excerpt from Proudhon's Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale, and next week, we'll look at Zola' rejoinder (to an already dead Proudhon, and not in a metaphorical sense). The debate, as it were, turns on whether the artist or the artwork has some kind of social obligation--and the work of Courbet is right in the middle of it all. Proudhon says yes (in a very moralizing kind of way), Zola says no, and Courbet says, when he rejects being awarded the Legion of Honor in a letter (which was published) dated June 23, 1870:

My opinions as a citizen do not allow me to accept a title that derives essentially from the monarchic order....Honor is neither in a title nor in a ribbon, it is in actions and the motivation for those actions....When I am dead, they must be able to say of me, "That one never belonged to any school, to any church, to any institution, to any academy, and, above all, to any regime except the regime of freedom" (From Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, University of Chicago, 1992).

Courbet demands independence, but not on a purely individualistic basis like Zola. I think at least this much is evident from the fact that Courbet participated in the Paris Commune--and was it not, then, "the regime of freedom?"

Jason Wirth Reviews "Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art"

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has published a review by Jason M. Wirth of my Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art. Read it (HERE) and you will find that Wirth concludes:

Shaw has given us a thoughtful retrieval of the problem of art that invites us into the epicenter of Schelling's project.

Henry Miller, "Bathroom Monologue"

In his book Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller wrote, "Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war." I agree. This "Bathroom Monologue" is far from obscene. So many magical things he created surrounding a world of shit.

The First Review of The Schelling Book

Symposium has published the first review (to my knowledge) of my Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art (technically speaking I know of another review that has been written but it has yet to be published by the journal that accepted it). The review is by Jeremy Proulx, of Eastern Michigan University, and it is generally positive. In any case, Proulx concludes:

In the end, Shaw’s careful analysis of the various ways in which art is significant for Schelling provides a sorely-needed guide for readers of Schelling’s difficult work.

On Plato's "Historical" Rejection of Art

I just finished reading Plato's Republic for my current research project on Rancière and philosophy (parts of which, I hope, will appear in print sometime soon...). In Book X, after banishing the poets from the city, Socrates admits that it is still possible that the poets could return from exile if its defenders, speaking "in prose on its behalf" show "that it not only gives pleasure but is beneficial both to constitutions and to human life" (607d).

Rereading this passage reminded me of the way that Schelling, who often had neo-Platonic moments, deals with Plato's rejection of art (in the lectures on The Philosophy of Art from 1802-1804). Schelling argues that Plato's stance is merely historical and not philosophical, and that, historically speaking, contemporary philosophy is in a much better position to give a "more comprehensive understanding and construction of poesy." 

Yet aside from this merely historical, not philosophical, opposition, an opposition philosophers readily admit, what is Plato's rejection of the poetic arts -- compared particularly with what he says in other works in praise of enthusiastic poesy -- other than a polemic against poetic realism, a foreboding of that later inclination of the spirit in general and of poesy in particular? That judgment could be applied least of all to Christian poesy [especially Schelling's favorite, Dante], which on the whole just as decisively displays the character of the infinite as the poesy of antiquity as a whole displays that of the finite. [...] The Christian religion, and with it a sensibility directed toward the intellectual and ideal...created its own poesy and art in which such sensibility could find satisfaction (V, 346-347).

But, as I argue in my book, Schelling's philosophy of art and idea of the new mythology does not end with Christian mythology (which he speaks of as a living form in the past tense), rather he announces the possibility of an art and mythology that overcomes the limitations of both ancient and Christian mythology, a new mythology which, incidentally, has its roots in naturphilosophie.

Arthur C. Danto," Andy Warhol"

Arthur C. Danto's Andy Warhol (Yale, 2009) is a philosophical biography of the most famous representative of American pop art. A biography is more than appropriate for the pop artist who was himself an  icon, because, as Danto notes, Warhol "invented, one might say, an entirely new kind of life for an artist to lead, involving music, style, sex, language, film, and drugs, as well as art" (47-48). Nevertheless, Danto avoids the temptation of filling the book with lurid prose, focusing on Warhol's philosophy of art.

Perhaps it has something to do with Danto's own intellectual/biographical trajectory, but Warhol stands out for him as the artist who reconfigured the central questions of the philosophy of art. In brief, Danto's account goes like this: the long-standing and traditional question of the philosophy of art was "what is art?" The question, and more importantly, the solution (art has something to do with beauty) had been largely unchallenged until modernism and the avant-gardes, and more specifically the anti-aestheticism of Dadaism. Modernism turned the question into an aesthetic self-interrogation,  and Dada used their art to ridicule the decadence of the ruling classes who had led Europe into the first world war.

Modernism and Dada, according to Danto, only challenged the solution to the question 'what is art?', while Warhol transformed the question:

The new form of the ancient question was this: given two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object (62)?

Enter the Brillo Boxes, and drumroll, please:

Andy's various challenges to what philosophers and others have said that art is pale in comparison with the grocery boxes. Since he has found an example of a real object and a work of art, why can't anything have a counterpart that is a work of art, so that ultimately anything can be a work of art? That means at the very least a new of era of art in which artworks cannot be discerned from real things, at least in principle--what I have called The End of Art (65-66).

Danto immediately answers the obvious challenge that Marcel Duchamp's readymades caused this kind of havoc for art by arguing that the "one thing that has to be said about the Brillo Boxes is that they are beautiful" (66). The irony, though, is that choosing Warhol over Duchamp gives us a new question, but the old answer: the line might not be drawn in principle, but the work of art still has something to do with beauty.

That, however, might not be as important as the politics that Danto derives from Warhol's work. Warhol, he says, "celebrated ordinary American life" in his work (of course, one would have to exclude much of the underground film work, but I digress). Warhol the painter, celebrates "what every American knows." His genius, in Danto's view, rested in his ability to pick potent images that reflected what was on the American mind:

He represented the world that Americans lived in by holding a mirror up to it, so that they could see themselves in its reflection. It was a world that was largely predictable through its repetitions, one day like another, but that orderliness could be dashed to pieces by crashes and outbreaks that are our nightmares [...] It is a world of little people--us--with the imperfections that gnaw at us and explain why we are not loved the way we would like to be, but imperfections that afflict even the stars and celebrities who take their own lives, even though we envy them for their beauty, their success, their supposed success (126-127).

From what I can gather, Warhol represents a world that Danto felt at home in, and, for all its self-obsessed pathos, more than likely the world that he feels nostalgia for. Warhol or not, that's not a world I want to glorify, let alone live in.

Thoughts on the Schelling Book and After

Today was the day that the typesetting and proofing and indexing of the Schelling book (if you're not already in the know, it's here) was supposed to be finished, and...we made it.

To think, only a year ago, to the day, I was writing Chapter 4, which is about Schelling's philosophy of art during the period that he held to a position he called absolute idealism (1801-1806), and which, as almost everybody knows, he developed with Hegel, before their later break over that one book that Hegel published in 1807...

I've already discussed, in a very schematic fashion, Schelling's absolute idealism and his philosophy of art on the blog (parts one, and two), and the nice part is, much of this discussion doesn't appear in the book, so if you read it, it won't be redundant. In fact those posts are more than likely going to be used for a future paper about Schelling and Hegel.

But a year ago, to the day, I was still grappling with a flaw in previous Schelling secondary-lit. Most people follow this line: Schelling's philosophy of art was important when he held to the subjectivism of transcendental philosophy (through the System of Transcendental Idealism), and when he dismissed that subjectivism, he no longer needed artistic production as the 'keystone' of the system. I argue that he still needs the philosophy of art, in fact, he makes recourse to artistic production to move his changing system along through 1807.

During the period of absolute idealism, Schelling argues that philosophy constructs a system from the perspective of reason itself, and in the lectures later published as The Philosophy of Art he argues that artistic production in the form of mythology provides the historical content of the transition from the infinite to the finite. That is, philosophy deals with the infinite as the perspective of reason, and art (via the imagination/Einbildungskraft) 'forms into unity' the historical content of art through mythology, art presents the absolute in finite form. Far from dismissing art, Schelling needs it to give content to the absolute. (now I know that some might say that nature-philosophy does that as well, and it's true, although Schelling claims that art is a superior truth; we have to just leave it at that for the moment).  But I argue that the historical content that art is to provide is itself formally different than what the so-called perspective of reason (absolute idealism) tells us about the world, and the two can't be, or weren't, reconciled. This sends us off to Chapter 5, which you are all going to have to wait for.

Now, I had been rehearsing this post for a few weeks, because I was going to tell you that, for the first time in years, I didn't have a project with a deadline at hand for the first time since I spent the summer reading the three volumes of Foucault's History of Sexuality (that was the summer between my BA and the start of my MA...in 2001).

But it's no longer true. I've volunteered to review Rancière's Dissensus, and last week the RPA accepted my conference abstract on a critique of Laclau and Agamben, both so far apart and yet so similar in not quite grasping, for very different reasons, the uses of violence. 

However, with just that gloss, I know what you're thinking: between the time you write the abstract and the time that it's accepted, you've been reading a lot of Fanon and Lukacs, and now you're quite certain that the paper has transformed into something entirely different and you're right. Laclau's got to go, and you've got to get serious about Agamben's tendency to turn historical violence into metaphysical violence. Hell, you might even get a chance to throw in a critique of Zizek, because they have a common fault: too much early Benjamin, not enough later Benjamin.

Yeah, that's it, that's exactly what I'm working on. Imagine if conference abstracts started reading like the paragraph above...

Schelling, the 'Secret' Pythagorean?

Sure, his manuscripts (those that survived destruction in World War II) probably don't contain a hidden numerology, but we couldn't let Plato be the only philosopher recently 'outed' for Pythagorean tendencies. In his lectures given in 1802-1804 and later collected under the title of The Philosophy of Art, Schelling writes:

to the extent that the eternal things or the ideas are revealed from the real side within cosmic bodies, the forms of music as the forms of ideas viewed concretely are also the forms of the being and life of the cosmic bodies as such; hence, music is nothing other than the perceived rhythm and harmony of the visible universe itself. 

After noting that Pythagoras was the first proponent of this view, Schelling continues:

People have usually understood Pythagoras's doctrine of the music of the spheres quite crassly, namely, to the effect that the fast movements of such large bodies must cause resonance. Because these bodies rotate with different yet measured velocity and in increasingly expanded circles, this resonance generates a consonant harmony organized according to the tonal relationships of music, such that the solar system resembles a seven-stringed lyre. This view takes the whole affair empirically. Pythagoras does not say that these movements cause music, but rather that they themselves are music. This indwelling movement needed no external medium through which to become music. It was music within itself, or inherently.

Schelling's Philosophy of Art in a Nutshell

Or, the most recent draft of the cover copy of my book:

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. In Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding the relationships between three of Schelling’s original contributions to philosophy as they are expressed in his work from 1795-1810: his idea of freedom, his philosophy of nature, and his philosophy of art. Schelling’s idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant’s and Fichte’s practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw’s careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.


Any suggestions? I'm sending it off by the end of the week. The final draft, which differs somewhat from this version, is here. See my posts on Schelling here (part one and part two).

Forthcoming: Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art

Continuum has added my book, Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, to their website. If you've noticed that my review output has lagged in the new year (I've got a stack of books I'd like to discuss...), it is because I have been revising my dissertation to turn it into a book. The initial revision process is now almost finished; I'm not writing any more content, just cleaning up whatever mistakes remain. I can't say that I'm not excited about seeing this through to press.

Schelling: Absolute Idealism and Art

The following is the second part of my reading of Schelling's System of Philosophy in General and Philosophy of Nature in Particular. The first part, in which I discuss the first principle of Schelling's absolute idealism, or identity-philosophy, can be found here. Unlike the first post, which is primarily the lecture notes that I give to students, I've expanded this post to include more information about Schelling's philosophy of art in general, and a footnote about the use of quantity and quality in his deduction of the finite world within the absolute. I will spare my class the discussion on the categories.

1. The "Double Life" of the Individual

In the last lecture, we left off with Schelling’s first principle as it is found in the System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere (the Wurzburg Lectures of 1804). As we have seen, Schelling argues, through an indirect proof, that the only possible presupposition for philosophy is that knower and what is known are the same, or identical: God or Reason is only the self-recognition or affirmation of all things as One. All other presuppositions, he argues, lead to either an absurdity or contradiction.

However, by arguing that the first principle of all philosophy is the identity of the One, Schelling is left with the difficult task of showing how finite things, like plants, animals, and you and I come to be. The ‘bridge,’ as I have called it, from the infinite to the finite, is what Schelling calls life. Schelling, over the course of 1801-1806 gives various different answers to this problem, and this time, his solution is a kind of life-force in the universe that each particular being takes part in. Now, of course, this sounds like some kind of new age philosophy, but Schelling is not opposing some mystical ‘force’ to Reason; for him there is no difference between God and Reason. Like Spinoza, this leads people to read Schelling as both an idealist with mystical tendencies and as materialist (so on the one hand, he spiritualizes matter, or on the other, he reduces all ‘divine’ ideas to material explanations). I think Schelling is trying to show, however problematically, that there is no difference between the two. As a contemporary of Schelling’s states, “Schelling is reproached with almost always being in suspense between idealism, realism, and even materialism.” Suspense, which I have emphasized here, probably says it best.

To deduce life, Schelling argues that a particular being is the negation of its Idea or archetype. Life is the middle point between being and nonbeing. I will begin by summarizing his argument (which is primarily on p. 177/6: 190).* Schelling wants to show that “the universe, by virtue of containing all forms, is none of them in particular but also that, precisely in containing all of them, it is none of them” (p. 170/6: 181). The language already determines the direction of Schelling’s argument: the absolute is all, but it is not one of them. A particular being is not in-itself, it is only in-the-absolute. As Schelling argues, each particular is a concrete individual that exists between being and nonbeing. Here is his argument:

1. The absolute is everything.
2. Particular things are not the absolute.
3. But nonbeing cannot be outside the absolute (or else it would exist outside), so nonbeing can only be relative.
4. Thus relative nonbeing implies relative being.
   
5. Therefore particular things are a mixture of reality and negation.

This argument attempts to show that particular things are a limitation of their universal idea or archetype. Then, the question is how do individuals exist between being and nonbeing? Schelling’s answer is life. Through the absolute, the particulars of the universe

are granted a double life, a life in the absolute– which is the life of the idea, and which accordingly was also characterized as the dissolution of the finite in the infinite and of the particular in the universal– and a life in itself– which, however, is only proper to the [particular] merely to the extent that it is simultaneously dissolved into the universe, [for] in its separation from the life in God the latter is a mere semblance of life […] the particular attains an absolute life […] though only to the extent that it is in the universe (pp. 174-175/6: 187).

Schelling goes on from here to argue that particularity implies multiplicity. While the absolute is one, all limitation involves a plurality of beings.** While absolute life is One, particular life is one of the many. So individuals can only be as a multiplicity. But, each individual expresses part of the whole:

The individual human being, for example, is such an individual not by virtue of the idea but, rather, because he is not the idea but its negation. Being can only be One, whereas the Nonbeing is indeterminably multiple. The infinite reality whereby the idea of man is linked with God always achieves but a partial expression in each individual human being, i.e., it [involves] negation” (p. 178/6: 191).

So, to summarize, through philosophy, that is, ideally, Schelling has shown (however problematically) how the identity of the knower and what is known is the first principle of all philosophy, and how it is possible to demonstrate how the finite world comes to be; that is, finite beings live between being and relative nonbeing. Yet, Schelling is also interested in showing how the absolute can account for life in its totality; or, in other words, how the individual human being lives in relation to the absolute.

2. The Philosophy of Art

After dealing with philosophy in general and his nature-philosophy, Schelling turns to humanity as it lives theoretically, practically, and creatively. In other words, how people have knowledge (theoretical philosophy or science), how they act (in history and in religion) and how they create (the philosophy of art).

As I have mentioned, I wrote my dissertation on the topic of Schelling’s philosophy of art. There are three conditions for his philosophy of art, and they are all present in the Wurzburg Lectures:

1. What philosophy constructs in the ideal, art produces in the real. Thus artistic activity is the highest human vocation (Bestimmung) because practical philosophy can only approximate its object, which is the moral law.
2. While both the natural organism and the artwork embody the same identity of real and ideal, necessity and freedom, the work of art overcomes these oppositions through the identity of conscious and unconscious production, whereas the organism’s activity is unconscious.
3. Artistic production has a socio-political task: it aims to overcome the fragmentary condition of modernity through a new mythology and artistic renewal.

A majority of the literature on Schelling’s philosophy of art overlooks the fact that there is a philosophy of art in this text despite the fact that it completes the system of the Wurzburg Lectures. By completion, I mean that artistic creation is the realization of the ideas of philosophy in the real world. Art expresses the highest stage of freedom and the highest stage of social life. First, artistic production is the synthesis of freedom and necessity in the work of art, but second, and more importantly, art aims to create a new mythology to unify a people under a common set of ideas. Finally, art is the intuition of beauty, which completes the system because the “highest bliss of humanity lies in the intellectual intuition of beauty” (§324). Beauty in art is the realization of the divine idea of the absolute.

In the Würzburg Lectures, Schelling presents the state as the ultimate realization of science, religion and art. His remarks on art are brief, and are oriented toward his conception of a public sphere. As Schelling states, the modern world lacks a proper Symbolik (6: 571), which, in German usage, is “not only a system of symbolism but also a coherent doctrine of faith.”*** As mentioned in the Philosophy of Art, the modern condition has only created partial and fragmentary mythologies, such as in the work of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe (6: 572). The diagnosis, according to Schelling, is that a truly public sphere can bring about a truly organic state:

Where all public life collapses into the particulars and dullness of private life, poetry more or less sinks into this same sphere…But even mythology is not possible in the particular; it can only be born in the totality of a nation that as such acts as identity [or] an individual. In dramatic poetry, tragedy grounds itself in the public law, in virtue, religion, heroism– in a word– in the holiness of the nation. A nation that is not holy, or which was robbed of its holy places, cannot have true tragedy…the question of the possibility of a universal content of poesie, just as the question of the objective existence of science and religion, impels us to the highest itself. Only in the spiritual unity of a people, in a truly public life, can the true and generally valid poesie arise– as only in the spiritual and political unity of a people can science and religion find its objectivity (6: 572-573).

The political unity of a people arises organically in the nation-state, not in the private pursuit of individual right within a state. Instead, the state develops organically, through the development of religion, science and art, into their highest expression. As Schelling recognizes, this state has never existed, but he is here giving a prescriptive account of a future state. Although he gives very little indication of how this state is to come about, he claims that the relationship of reason to the universe is analogous to that of philosophy to the state: just as reason realizes itself in the universe, philosophy realizes itself through the public life of the state. As Schelling concludes, “Philosophy, which is no longer science, but rather becomes life, is that which Plato called the politeia, life with and in an ethical totality.”

As we will see, later philosophers will directly challenge the idea that the state is like an organic totality. As Marx will argue, a position like Schelling’s obscures, or mystifies, relationships of domination and inequality by normalizing or de-politicizing human relationships by thinking them like natural relationships (so the state is like an organism). While I think it is correct to dismiss the idea of the 'organic state' or community, I don’t think it is a reason to dismiss artistic production as an important aspect of human life or politics.

Footnotes

*All page references are to the English translation, and then the pagination of Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke. Where only the latter appear, the translations are my own. In the tradition of German idealism, I had to use my notes for preparing the text, so a few quotes run the risk of paraphrase.

**On the categories: Schelling denies, during the period of absolute idealism, that there can be any transition from infinite to finite in terms of quality, because a difference in quality implies a difference in respect to essence or substance (p. 169/6: 179). Hence he argues that there is a quantitative difference between the infinite and finite, between the unity of the One and plurality (which form a totality). However his quick reference to the difference between the One and multiplicity cannot obscure the fact that his argument relies on the categories of quality: individuals, as limited, are a mixture of reality and negation. The problem? The absolute, for Schelling, does not admit negation. This is his significant difference with Hegel.

***The reference to the role of the Symbolik comes from George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 336, n. 35.

Further Reading:

For the importance of the aspect of the public sphere, aside from its less salient political features, see Manfred Frank’s Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie. Vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 188-216.

For the metaphysics, see Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 118-132.

For a stronger reading of Schelling as a naturalist, see Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard: 2002).

Finally, I cannot recommend too highly Jean-François Marquet’s excellent Liberté et existence. Second Edition (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2006).