Many things Schelling says may seem obscure (and probably were somewhat obscure even to him). Don’t worry too much over individual sentences but try to get a general sense of his distinctive point of view, especially the role he assigns to art. In particular, look for things he says that help you understand his idea that art serves “to resolve an infinite contradiction in a finite product” (this phrase appears on HK 372 though the idea it expresses is introduced before then).
• The main selection you will read comes almost at the end of Schelling’s book. I’ve added a few brief selections from earlier in the work to fill out the context.
• From Introduction, §1 (¶¶1-4A through to the end of HK 347 and ¶4B on HK 349 up to §2). This explains Schelling’s distinction between the philosophy of nature and the transcendental philosophy that is the subject of his book.
• From Introduction, §3.D (HK 354f). The characterization of the objective world as the unconscious “poetry of the spirit” is probably the most concise presentation of Schelling’s radical extension of Kant’s idea that the world we know is a world of appearances or phenomena. (Recall this idea when you get to the last paragraph of the assignment, on the middle of HK 374.)
• From section V.2 (HK 361f). This sets up the concluding section and is referred to at its beginning.
• From section VI.1-3 (HK 362-374). (This begins very abstractly but don’t give up; it becomes more accessible as you go on.) Of course, look for Schelling’s view of the significance of a work of art but also compare him to Kant on the following points:
• Schelling’s concept of genius (HK 366) is not the same as Kant’s but it is similar and he discusses some of the same issues in connection with it as Kant does. One of these is the relation between science and art (HK 370f), where Schelling’s example of Newton should be compared to the following comment in Kant (which we discussed in class on Monday):
Thus we can readily learn all that Newton has set forth in his immortal work on the Principles of Natural Philosophy, however great a head was required to discover it, but we cannot learn to write spirited poetry, however express may be the precepts of the art and however excellent its models. The reason is that Newton could make all his steps, from the first elements of geometry to his own great and profound discoveries, intuitively plain and definite as regards consequence, not only to himself but to everyone else. But a Homer or a Wieland cannot show how his ideas, so rich in fancy and yet so full of thought, come together in his head, simply because he does not know and therefore cannot teach others. (Critique of Judgment, §47)
• What is perhaps Schelling’s most important difference from Kant appears in his brief comparison of the work of art and natural beauty (HK 369).
The two “corollaries” at the end of the assignment elaborate further the central place Schelling gives to art. Notice the discussion at the end of §3.1 (HK 372f), which shows that the important role he assigns to art carries with it high standards for what counts as art.
There is already much to discuss here, but I’ll suggest that you might also think about the following issue. In the Symposium and for neo-platonists the beauty of concrete art objects can point us toward higher forms of beauty that seem to be accessible only to philosophy and the sciences. For Schelling, on the other hand, art is “the sole true and eternal organon [i.e., means of inquiry] as well as document of philosophy” (HK 373) and philosophy, and the sciences will “return as just so many individual streams to the universal ocean of poetry from which they started out” (HK 374). Which view is closer to the truth? Does art lead to philosophy and the sciences or do they lead to it?