Abstract

The transition from Schelling's System des Transzendentalen Idealismus (1800) to the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (1801) marks the difference between romantic and idealistic aesthetics. Romantic aesthetics maintains that the Absolute cannot be recaptured. This idea is kept alive by the concept of irony. This irony is discernable in the position of the work of art within Schilling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus. The subject, who intends to recapture the whole domain of objectivity, is finally referred to an instance (the work of art) outside himself, which discloses its essence. Ironically, selfconsciousness thus seems to exhibit a blind spot. In the end, this blind spot is remedied by the revelatory vision of the work of art, without the mechanism of its production having become transparent. In idealistic aesthetics, this awareness is abandoned. The external character of the work of art is internalized, under the guise of „ reason", within knowledge itself. Reason is now understood in an aesthetic way : as the ultimate principle of unison. The way reasoning proceeds is modelled after the artistic process of creation. Philosophy, which has the task of making explicit the absolute identity of reason, now becomes an aesthetic construct, which in every way can best be compared with the work of art. Not only with respect to its inner constitution, but also in so far as its status as an autonomous work goes. As a result, art loses its exclusive epistemological significance; its transformation into an identity-theoretical paradigm of rationality as such, however, offers aesthetics an unparallelled philosophical strength. Paradoxically, however, the concept of art as an autonomous instance is thus endowed with a metaphysical extension, by which it may countervail the modern process of autonomy of science, morality and art