Chapter 8 - Beauty reconsidered: freedom and virtue in Schelling’s aesthetics

Summary

F.W.J. Schelling's Freiheitsschrift signals a new philosophical orientation that yields his most significant philosophical contribution and legacy. In contrast to philosophical knowledge, which amounts only to knowledge of what is necessary, aesthetic experience is capable of unveiling the free and thus contingent act of the divine in which the real became ground and basis of the ideal in the divine decision to create the world. In Schelling's Freiheitsschrift, the human experience of freedom and ethical choice is the central and grounding dynamic of his metaphysics. The Münchener Rede distinguishes itself from earlier texts and brings itself into line with the Freiheitsschrift by conceiving of creation, artistic and otherwise, as a quasi-moral act of self-limitation through which the ideal achieves determinate form. The Münchener Rede, Freiheitsschrift, and the Weltalter transform and enrich our understanding of Schelling's aesthetics.