Abstract

Through study of key texts by three representative philosophers of German transcendental idealism, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, the dissertation demonstrates that the ground of philosophy--spontaneity and the absolute identity of differentiation engendered by conceptual thinking--cannot be thematized or conceptualized. There cannot be a self-grounding philosophy in terms of self-consciousness. Instead, it can only be exhibited and demonstrated via the exemplar of the work of art, which is an indispensable mirror for philosophy to recognize the ground of its possibility. ;Chapters One and Two shows how Kant's Critique of Judgment presents alternative approaches to the problems opened up by his first two Critiques. The aesthetic feeling is key to the attunement or harmony of our cognitive powers. Furthermore, it is the origin of our cognition, for the pleasure found in the attunement of our powers of cognition with nature is what motivates cognition. The work of art created by genius is the sensuous embodiment and articulate expression of the harmony and unity of freedom and necessity and of the supersensible substrate of nature. ;Chapters Three and Four traces Schelling's two different, though related, approaches to the Kantian legacy. In the System of 1800 the work of art is given the role of enabling us to understand what cannot appear to the consciousness of the absolute subjectivity: absolute identity of freedom and necessity, conscious and unconscious activity. Schelling's failure to philosophize from the absolute in the System of 1804 as an attempt to overcome dualism and negative conception of the absolute is redeemed in the Philosophy of Art, which shows, if not explains, with the examples of Greek mythology, the possibility of the individuation of the absolute. ;The dissertation concludes with a critique of Hegel's philosophical system, focusing on Hegel's negative dialectics and the indispensable role of art in his system, despite his theory of the end of art, in order to show that the ground of thought is irreducible to thought, as attempted in his Logic. Hence art is indispensable as the "organ of philosophy" in revealing the absolute identity of spirit and nature, a lesson taught by Schelling