Chapter 4 - Knowledge and pleasure in the aesthetics of Schelling

Summary

Friedrich Schelling transformed Immanuel Kant's conception of aesthetic ideas as a form of free play with truth back into a more traditional conception of an apprehension of truth that is certainly different from other forms of cognition, but does not really involve an element of free play. Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 completed his first philosophical system, in which he presented the parallel disciplines of Philosophy of Nature and Transcendental Philosophy as coinciding and culminating in the philosophy of art. The task for uniting the two forms of thought conceived by Schelling to underlie nature on the one hand and our own knowledge and action on the other is to find something that makes manifest the original identity of the conscious with the unconscious activity. Schelling claims that beauty is the basic feature of every work of art.