Abstract

In his earlier work on the System of Transcendental Idealism, which combined Naturphilosophie and transcendental philosophy, Schelling argued that it is only by becoming-art that philosophy can complete itself as a discipline. He proposed this formulation in response to Kant’s critical inventory of reason offering to reclaim philosophy from its entanglement in pre-critical or dogmatic traditions. But Kant avoided to ground reason in the notion of externality, the in-itself, which, owing to its pre-critical derivation, must give way to the a prioris and categories of the understanding. Meanwhile, by renewing the problem of the in-itself via the self-positing ego, Fichte was the first to challenge the Kantian legacy. But the emphasis on subjectivity through its power of self-positing gave way to what in principle negates nature as the true ground of the initself; in Schelling’s description, the equivalent of the annihilation of nature. Comparatively, Schelling proposed to demonstrate the reverse, which is the extinction of the subject that has continued to nourish the reflexive standpoint of reason. To accomplish this end, Schelling invoked in his Philosophy of Art, one of the places in which he extended his discussion of the so-called identity-system, the concept of the ideal type, or rather, the destroyer of known world established by critical reason.