Tracing History: Between Hegel and Schelling, Between Nature and Art

Methodologically, this paper outlines a way of reading the idealist corpus as an archive of dynamically intersecting texts that allows for a thinking not restricted to single texts but occurring between texts, between thinkers and beyond them. Thus history, for example, is not to be sought positively in texts on history like Hegel’s Philosophy of History, but elusively and speculatively in other texts with analogical potential. I suggest that Schelling wrote two texts that incorporate this Archival textuality in their very form: the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799) for the Naturphilosophie, and Ages of the World (1815) for the ideal part of philosophy, which, given their resonances, can be used to catalyze a thinking between the real and the ideal.

Interpretively, I read between nature, art and history, so as to break open the Idealist closure of these fields. Thus I use texts by Hegel and Schelling as accelerators for each other’s work, deploying Hegel to open up an aesthetics more riskily epigenetic than we find in the static triad of options in Schelling’s early Philosophy of Art (1803/4), which privileges synthesis. By contrast, Hegel’s three modes—Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic—are decentred into history and decentre history itself. Yet while Schelling’s idealistic aesthetics is untouched by his Naturphilosophie, his more experimental Outline provides a lever to open up the resistances of Hegel’s Aesthetics to a radicality suppressed if we simply sublate his ruinous historicisation of art into the Aufhebung, as this is usually conceived.

This diagonal reading of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Hegel’s aesthetic history across each other then allows me to turn to Ages (1815) as a space where the larger Weltalter project’s goal of ascensionist history is blown open by a non-linear text that throws us back to what Schelling calls the “rotary motion”: a movement of thought as well as nature, which does not so much stall history as generate it in new, albeit traumatic, forms.

The handout (with extracts) can be downloaded from Google Docs.

Speaker

Professor Tilottama Rajan is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, Canada.