Abstract: “Rethinking Aesthetic Value Through Hegel and Schelling: Between Aesthetics and Naturphilosophie”
In the “Appendix” on disease in his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), Schelling writes that apart from the “perspective… for the whole of organic nature” there is another for “the organic individual” (159). At several points he associates the universal perspective with the graduated stages of nature, or Stufenfolge, in which nature “gradually brings forth the whole multiplicity of its products through continuous deviations from a common ideal,” so that “deviations” are recognized but subordinated to the logic and ideology of the whole. But elsewhere he asks how “individual natures which have torn themselves away from universal Nature” in its drive towards the “absolute organism,” can “maintain an individual existence” (53), as if he feels they have the right to do so. The value of these non-normative forms is the troubling question he sets aside for further thought in the Appendix. For on the one hand, he describes these deviations as “disease.” On the other hand, he concedes that this term is entirely “relative”: what counts as disease in one organism may be health in another (159). To be sure, Schelling takes back this concession when he offers the polypus, a lower organism in the Chain of Being, as an example of different norms. But if we extrapolate from this questioning of normativity in the history of nature to aesthetic history, to the realm of human values, things become different. Romanticism, for example, which Goethe saw as sickness in relation to Classical health, can be revalued as its own form of health, and indeed does become higher than Classicism when Hegel adapts Schelling’s Stufenfolgeinto a Stufenfolgeof aesthetic modes.
In this paper I suggest that German Idealism is the site of a veritable Copernican revolution in aesthetic value, one that departs from theories of an aestheticised organic form projected back onto the period by the New Criticism. However, I will not take up the Romantic art-form, which A.W. Schlegel had already given its own space in relation to a normative classicism. Instead, working with Hegel’s triad of modes–Symbolic, Classical, Romantic– I will focus on the most radical of the three, the Symbolic: a term Hegel uses to describe a still undigested dys-synthesis between matter and spirit, provocatively contravening the more standard use of “Symbolic” by Goethe and Schelling to connote the embodiment of the universal in the particular. On the face of it, Hegel defines art in terms of beauty and totality that align with values of organic unity. But only the Classical, as “the adequate embodiment of the Idea,” achieves this ideal, while the Symbolic and Romantic, though in inverse ways, struggle with a disparity of matter and spirit, or content and form. Nor is the ideal progressively realised through deviations from it, as in Schelling’s Stufenfolge, since the Classical comes in the middle, as if to mark the falsity of synthesis. Hegel, to be sure, values the Romantic more than the Symbolic deviation. For the Romantic is aesthetic and spiritual, while the Symbolic is crude. Yet he associates the Symbolic with the Sublime, and despite dismissing it as pre-art, pre-mature, he also says that “the specific shape which every content of the Idea gives to itself in the particular forms of art is always adequate to that content” (Aesthetics 1.300). To unpack the value of the Symbolic–a value with which Hegel admittedly struggles–this paper thinks with and beyond Idealism as an archive and not a system of ideas. It therefore reads experimentally between Hegel and Schelling, using Hegel’s Aesthetics to catalyze an aesthetics more dangerously epigenetic than the static triad of options we find in Schelling’s own Philosophy of Art (1803/4), which privileges synthesis, while deploying Schelling’s Naturphilosophieto open up the resistances of Hegel’s Aesthetics to its own radicality. For in the Outline Schelling seems particularly fascinated by forms which, having separated themselves from the universal process, are inhibited, stalled, and yet continue to develop this “diremption.” Given that the terms Gattungor Genus and Art or Species occur in both aesthetics and Naturphilosophie, the “diremptions” from universal process that occur in Schelling’s account of the Stufenfolgecan analogically help us understand the diremptions in Hegel’s aesthetic Stufenfolgethat put Symbolic and Romantic rather than Classical art at the imaginative centre of Hegel’s lectures. The result is not meant to be a strict reading “of” the Aesthetics or the Outline, but what Novalis calls a Potenzirung: the “application” of one science–the science of life–to another (aesthetics) for which it can serve as an “analogous model and stimulus,” leading to the “self-(post)development” of both sciences (Romantic Encyclopedia, #487).
Bio: University of Western Ontario, Canada
Tilottama Rajan is Distinguished University Professor and former Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, as well as the founder of NASSR. She has been a plenary speaker at five GER conferences and co-organised the joint GER-NASSR conference on Romanticism and Knowledge in Munich. She is the author of four books, including Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Cornell, 1980) and Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Johns Hopkins, 2010); the co-editor of eight books, most recently The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Post-structuralism (2023); and the author of over a hundred articles. She is currently working on organizations of knowledge and the transferential relationships between philosophy, science and aesthetics in Romanticism and German idealism.