The I that has created the
universe can also destroy it. The universe is a vain appearance, smiled
at by the Ego its creator, who surveys it as an artist his work, from
without and from above. For Friedrich Schlegel, art was a perpetual
farce, a parody of itself; and Tieck defined irony as a force which
allows the poet to dominate his material.
Novalis, that Romantic Fichtian, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art
of creating by an instantaneous act of the Ego. But Schelling's "system
of transcendental idealism" was the first great philosophical
affirmation of Romanticism and of conscious Neo-platonism reborn in
Aesthetic.
Schelling has obviously studied Schiller, but he brings to the problem a
mind more purely philosophical and a method more exactly scientific. He
even takes Kant to task for faultiness of method. His remarks as to
Plato's position are curious, if not conclusive. He says that Plato
condemned the art of his time, because it was realistic and
naturalistic: like all antique art, it exhibited a _finite_ character.
Plato's judgment would have been quite different had he known Christian
art, of which the character is _infinity_.
Schelling held firm to the fusion of art and beauty effected by
Schiller, but he combated Winckelmann's theory of abstract beauty with
its negative conception of the characteristic, assigning to art the
limits of the individual.
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