German Romanticism

Some material for this article originated with my "Music as a Metaphor for Metaphysics: Tropes of Transcendence in Nineteenth-Century Music from Schumann to Mahler" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994). An earlier version of section 5 was read at the Winter 1993 Meeting of ...

Russian public opinion in the first half of the nineteenth century was buffeted by a complex of cultural, psychological, and historiosophical dilemmas that destabilized many conventions about Russia's place in universal history. This article examines one response to these dilemmas: the Slavophile reconfiguration of Eastern Christianity as a modern religion of theocentric freedom and moral progress. Drawing upon methods of contextual analysis, the article challenges the usual scholarly treatment of Slavophile religious thought as a vehicle to address extrahistorical concerns by placing the writings of A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevskii in the discursive and ideological framework in which they originated and operated. As such, the article considers the atheistic revolution in consciousness advocated by Russian Hegelians, the Schellingian proposition that human freedom and moral advancement were dependent upon the living God, P. Ia. Chaadaev's contention that a people's religious orientation determined its historical potential, and the Slavophile appropriation of Russia's dominant confession to resolve the problem of having attained historical consciousness in an age of historical stasis. *

I: A Problematic Concept Attempts to define Romanticism characteristically begin by conceding the difficulty, even impossibility, of the task. The entry on the subject in an encyclopedia of German literary history summarizes the challenge: "The Romantic movement must be understood as a unity, but it is in itself so polymorphous and contradictory that both a definition and an historical presentation are extraordinarily difficult." 1 Rather than proposing a normative definition, as if that were possible, this chapter will take the resistance to definition and its historical roots as keys to understanding Romanticism as distinctly European and modern. Accordingly, the focus here will be less on the art produced during the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Romanticism began to be theorized as a contemporary concern, than on discursive selfunderstanding in that unsettled period in which, as the poet William Wordsworth acknowledged, "a shock had then been given / To old opinions; and the minds of all men / Had felt it." 2 Inaugurating modern scholarship on the subject in 1870, Rudolf Haym argued that "to investigate the essence of Romanticism from a purely historical position [in rein historischer Haltung]" had become possible because it lay over half a century in the past-by Haym's account, in the circle of the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), Ludwig Tieck, and F. W. J. Schelling in the university town of Jena. 3 Many others, however, have questioned whether there ever was such a thing as Romanticism. Indeed, from its earliest articulations the concept of Romanticism has been haunted by a sense of its lack of correspondence to empirical reality. Thus the Russian poet Pyotr Andreyevich Vyazemsky complained in 1824, "Romanticism [Romantizm] is like a phantom. Many people believe in it; there is a conviction that it exists, but where are its distinctive features, how can it be defined, how can one put one's fingers on it?" 4 The perceived elusiveness of Romanticism itself is due largely to the diversity of the intellectual and artistic phenomena-in literature, music, the visual arts, philosophy, even science-to which the term has been applied, across most European nations. In some, like Germany and France, the identification of Romantic "schools"

This article explores how Romantic literatures imagine the lives of and reconfigure encounters with poplar trees. It pays particular attention to German-language writing, its arboreal contexts, and the aesthetic modes of talking and listening to poplars. The Romantics, I argue, were interested in poplars not (only) because they were aesthetically pleasing objects, but because poplars evidently made themselves known as self-expressive subjects of a lifea life that the poplars themselves, in turn, imposed upon Romantic poetics. The article reads Romantic poplars as deeply entrenched in the material semiotics of human-tree histories, co-habitation, and the various forms of mourning and remembering with poplars in the Romantic period. Approaching Romantic writing with poplars as a form of sympoetics that is closely connected to poplars outside of the texts, the article analyzes selected poplar writings transcending realms of the symbolic and translating the nonverbal soundscapes of poplar articulations into written texts.

This paper argues that German literary studies was, from its inception, an entirely nationalist and nation-building endeavor, perhaps the quintessential nationalist project. Among the discipline's foundational premises are its belief in and commitment to a diversity of culturally individuated national communities (rather than one uniform humanity), a non-hierarchical plurality of vernaculars (rather than classical languages), and historically inflected and culturally expressive aesthetic forms (rather than transhistorically and transregionally valid templates of excellence). Three disciplinary activities of early Germanistik—Germanic historical linguistics, vernacular canon formation, and national literary history—are introduced as key instruments of nationalization. In conclusion, the paper claims that contemporary German Studies in the US, thankfully a reflective and critical enterprise, nonetheless remains institutionally completely dependent on the paradigm of the linguistically and culturally defined nation.

The new mythology for which the German Romantic period called was not envisioned as antithetical to empiricism or experiential/experimental knowledge, but rather as emerging in dialogue with it to form a cultural foundation for such inquiry. Central to the mytho-scientific project were problematic theories of sexual division and generativity that established cultural baselines. This article examines the mythological investments of two influential thinkers of the period-Goethe and Schelling. It then analyzes Goethe's unique merger of mythological approaches to sex and generation with empirical observation in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It next traces Schelling's expansion of Goethe's theories of nature beyond their empirical justifications to develop a metaphysics of sexual differentiation. Finally, the article illuminates Goethe's final reply to the sexual dynamics of Naturphilosophie at the end of his life, through the analysis of a single poem, "Finding Again," in the collection God and World. Ultimately and in spite of its empirical commitments, Goethe's more flexible view of sexual correlations would lose ground to the powerful metaphysical mythology of sexual opposition as both scientific and cultural bedrock.

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In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.

This essay serves as an introduction to a collection of essays on the topic of “Romantic Anarchism.” Along with providing a summary of the main points of each essay, the introduction undertakes a critical and historical analysis of the master narratives through which romanticism and anarchism have been historically linked, usually in order to be dismissed, such as the charge that both are theoretically confused, unscientific, too contradictory, too “aesthetic,” practically unworkable, as well as politically and emotionally immature. Looking to the dramatic resurgence of cultural and academic interest in anarchist ideas in recent years, which some critics have called an “anarchist turn” across the disciplines, the essay explores how these master narratives have begun to break down. In so doing, the essay argues that the recent anarchist turn necessitates the subsequent re-turn of and to its roots in romantic-era literature. The introduction then poses a series of questions in order to frame the issue's overall scope and concerns: What would it mean to locate, or generate, an anarchist turn in romanticism, and a corresponding return of romanticism for anarchism? What developments in the fields of anarchist studies and romantic literary criticism make it possible to think these two disciplines together today? And in what ways does the idea of anarchy, more broadly construed as a figure for the deconstitution of disciplinary archē, raise questions about the very identity and nature of a critical field? How might anarchism provide useful coordinates for romantic studies to navigate a post-Marxist critical landscape?

Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Hindemith, composing about one hundred years apart, integrated visual elements, including drawings and illustrated notations, into musical manuscripts they designed as gifts for women they admired. The two documents, illustrating Mendelssohn’s Schilflied (1842) and Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis (1942), are strong declarations of compositional and artistic ideology. This article examines the scores as reflecting, respectively, aspects of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century conceptions of musical composition and form, and their relation to visual media.

NB: Translated by Farshad Moshfeghi for Iran's Music Report Magazine (2012)

Wittgenstein’s later remarks on music, those written after his return to Cambridge in 1929 in increasing intensity, frequency, and elaboration, occupy a unique place in the annals of the philosophy of music, which is rarely acknowledged or discussed in the scholarly literature. These remarks reflect and emulate the spirit and subject matter of Romantic thinking about music, but also respond to it critically, while at the same time they interweave into Wittgenstein’s forward thinking about the philosophic entanglements of language and the mind, and also his pervasive pessimism as a philosopher of culture. In this essay I explore and explicate some of the major tenets of this unique position. I argue that Wittgenstein appropriates the Romantic focus on the specificity of musical expression by means of the idea that gesture consists in complex vertical interrelations between language games. Understanding what a musical passage is about logically presupposes a myriad of correlate moves in the entire range of our language-games. Wittgenstein explicates the notion of musical aboutness in terms of intransitive understanding, which expresses an internal relation conjoining musical gesture and our culture, our entire life in practice, whereupon the related concepts cannot be identified independently of the relation which holds them together.  Wittgenstein responds to the Romantic focus on the unique knowledge of human life which is afforded by musical experience with his idiosyncratic later notion of Menschenkenntnis. I conclude that, in the context of Wittgenstein’s late work, ineffability pertaining to musical meaning is not a shortcoming, but rather constitutional of the type of games, which admit what Wittgenstein calls ‘imponderable evidence’, or indefiniteness.

Aunque la forma definitiva que tomaría el Libro de los pasajes es algo que nunca podremos
llegar a conocer, Benjamin dedicó varias anotaciones metodológicas del “Convoluto N” a discutir su
diseño o ‘dispositivo crítico’. En el presente artículo prestamos especial atención a la anotación N 1 a 8,
en la que se confrontan dos maneras de entender la tarea del historiador: por un lado, aquella en la que
el historiador “dice” (sagen) –propia del “historicismo”–, y aquella en la que el historiador “muestra”
(zeigen) –propia del “historiador materialista”, y que Benjamin busca hacer suya. Sostenemos que
esta confrontación contiene una especificación fundamental acerca de la forma o ‘dispositivo crítico’
del Libro de los pasajes, en virtud del cual los materiales de trabajo (“harapos” y “desechos”) podrían
llegar a ‘hablar por sí mismos’. El esclarecimiento de este procedimiento obliga revisar los conceptos
de “presentación” y “objetividad” lingüística, y permite clarificar el problema del método en el
pensamiento de Benjamin.

This article puts forward a philosophical interpretation of Bettina von Arnim's epistolary book Die Günderode, in the following stages. First I situate von Arnim's work in relation to women's participation in early German Romanticism and idealism. The ideal of Symphilosophie, which was integral to Romantic epistemology, created possibilities for women to participate in philosophical discussion, albeit not on equal terms with men. This suggested that perhaps Symphilosophie between women could be more equal and reciprocal. However, interpreters have considered the Sym- in Günderrode and von Arnim’s Symphilosophie more than the -philosophie, whereas here I foreground Die Günderrode’s rich philosophical content. I trace the stages in the unfolding dialogue between Günderrode and von Arnim and identify von Arnim’s philosophical standpoint as it emerges from this dialogue. For Günderrode, finite beings are attracted together and can only fully unite by dying and superseding their boundaries. This feeds into a gigantic cosmic process through which the earth spiritualizes itself, progressively transcending its own materiality. Von Arnim likewise thinks that all finite beings are dynamically interconnected within the earth’s creative process. But, unlike Günderrode, von Arnim thinks that finite beings can realize their interconnectedness within life without needing to die, which means in turn that material nature can rise into successive levels of spirit without its materiality having to be superseded. This metaphysical difference orchestrates many other philosophical disagreements between the two women. I then conclude that on balance, and with significant qualifications, Die Günderrode embodies a successful Symphilosophie between women, but that von Arnim is simultaneously pointing out the fragility of Symphilosophie. The more independence dialogue partners have, the more liable they are to move away in new directions and abandon or outgrow the conversation, just as Günderrode turns away from von Arnim by the end of the book.

Recent years have witnessed a rehabilitation of early German Romanticism in philosophy, including a renewed interest in Romantic ethics. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) is acknowledged as a key figure in this movement. While significant work has been done on some aspects of his thought, his views on ethics have been surprisingly overlooked. This essay aims to redress this shortcoming in the literature by examining the core themes of Schlegel’s ethics during the early phase of his career (1793–1801). I argue that Schlegel’s position stands out against both the dominant Kantianism of his era, as well as against some of fellow Romantics. I show how Schlegel anticipates contemporary philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Harry Frankfurt, John McDowell, and Stanley Cavell in both his criticisms of traditional moral theory and in his attempts to develop a positive position.

Why should philosophy, or even thinking, get in the way of seeing? In attempting to address this question, this paper identifies post-Romanticism as a phenomenologically inflected response to the failure of both pre-Romantic Reflexionsphilosophie and Hegelian speculative overcoming, a response that seeks to express our relation to the world in a way that does not rely on a reflection model of consciousness and gives no support to the notion of a cognitively inaccessible absolute. It will be suggested that the poetry of Fernando Pessoa offers lessons in such a post-Romanticism, showing how a phenomenological attentiveness to the world-disclosive power of poetry and to the everyday mereness of things constitutes a more coherent way of relating to the world. With reference to Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, it will be argued that Pessoa's poetry shows us that it is by reining in the reflection model of consciousness that we achieve a greater sense of the world and of our position in it.

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard's pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard's journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned antiidealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher's view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher's conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher's view.

Contra widespread readings of Karoline von Günderrode's 1805 "Idea of the Earth (Idee der Erde)" as a creative adaptation of Schelling's philosophy of nature, this article proposes that "Idea of the Earth" furnishes a moral account of the human relation to the natural world, one which does not map onto any of the more well-known romantic or idealist accounts of the human-nature relation.

The article argues in favor of the idea that works of art in Early German Romanticism, as conceived of by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, were conceptually considered as an integrated whole, consisting of very different and diverging elements that determine each other in a dynamic process. In this respect, the aesthetic views of this literary movement can be related to some basic postulations about dynamic systems, chaos, order, and emergence. The assumptions of system theory as well as of chaos theory can lead to their application to postmodern works of art that can be described by the categories of nonlinearity, self-reflectivity, irreversibility and self-organization. Moreover, it can be supposed that these categories apply also to Romantic works of art. The article demonstrates it through the analysis of some late narrative texts of E.T.A. Hoffmann, who could be considered as a very modern or an avant la lettre postmodern author.

Arendt claims that evil is banal and its perpetrators merely shallow. Deliberate evil she takes to be extremely rare. However, nonrare examples of deliberate evil, whose aim is to spoil one's story, abound in everyday life. Arendt also makes forgiveness personal, not requiring repentance. This prompts a consideration of certain personal relations among philosophers. Heidegger's relation to Husserl shows a betrayal of teacher by student. His seductive and philosophic power over Arendt, a betrayal of student by teacher, should not be dismissed in terms of reductive Freudian notions. Faced with a real feminine predicament, Arendt made the wrong choices: in her exoneration of Heidegger, her report on the Eichmann trial, and her exculpatory doctrine of evil.

The life and ideas of F. W. J. Schelling are often overlooked in favor of the more familiar Kant, Fichte, or Hegel. What these three lack, however, is Schelling's evolving view of philosophy. Where others saw the possibility for a single, unflinching system of thought, Schelling was unafraid to question the foundations of his own ideas. In this book, Bruce Matthews argues that the organic view of philosophy is the fundamental idea behind Schelling's thought. Focusing in particular on Schelling's early writings, especially on Plato and Kant, Matthews explores Schelling's idea that any philosophical system must be perspectival and formed by each individual student of philosophy, providing a unique new understanding of an important and often-overlooked figure in the history of philosophy.

In The Romantic Absolute, Dalia Nassar explores the treacherous philosophical territory between Kant and Hegel, which is the reserve of the early romantics: the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), the classicist Friedrich Schlegel, and the boy-philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Danger lurks here. Without a reliable guide, the reader can quickly tumble into crevasses of incomprehension. Nassar provides such a guide. With articulate verve, she shows how the romantics construed nature and mind as identical, how in Schelling's terms nature was the poetry of mind and mind the outgrowth of nature. Following a careful path through thickets of disputing critics, she illuminates the darker areas of German romanticism and protects the reader from sliding into the slough of despond."-Robert J. Richards, University of Chicago

In this article, I argue for the consideration of the Counter-Enlightenment engagement with Catholicism as an important yet mostly unexplored influence on the development of early Romantic theories of aesthetics, religion, and the characteristic intermingling of the two called Kunstreligion [art-religion]. I specifically trace the reception of a poem by the mystic Johann Kaspar Lavater and show how Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, and Novalis portray a similar ecstatic synesthesia accompanying Catholic religious practices in their own works.

Im Beitrag soll kursorisch gezeigt werden, wie theoretische Prämissen, die sich auf Kondolenz-/Trauerbriefe beziehen, im privaten Briefwechsel in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts konkret umgesetzt bzw. nicht umgesetzt wurden. Als Beispiele werden dabei die Kondolenzbriefe Karl August und Rahel Varnhagens herangezogen, die das Ehepaar an die Schwägerschaft David und Rosa Maria Assings nach dem Tod ihres erstgeborenen Sohnes Carl Eginhard Mitte April 1818 schrieb.

In this paper, I trace a ‘leading thread’ from Kant’s Critique of Judgment to Goethe that involves a shift from a conceptual framework, in which a priori concepts furnish necessity and thereby science, to a framework in which sensible experience plays a far more significant and determining role in the formation of knowledge. Although this shift was not enacted by Kant himself, his elaboration of organic unity or organisms paved the way for this transformation. By considering both the methodological difficulties that Kant encounters in his attempt to articulate the structure of organisms and Goethe’s response to these difficulties, my goal is to locate a specific trajectory in the history of nineteenth century philosophy, in which empirical experience and sensibility play a far more significant role than otherwise acknowledged

This is a study of the main theoretical points of German philosophical Romanticism. The reception of Kant's philosophy of freedom as it is developed by Fichte, the growing significance of the literary works of Schiller and Goethe, and the impact of the French Revolution, converge in the Circle of Jena to transform deeply the vision of history and mankind, as a universal project which defines the European Consciousness till the end of 20th. Century. To study Romanticism, its essence, possible deviations, near temptations, and even perversions, is to know where we come from and the horizon of our present delusions. Nevertheless this is a sympathetic treaty: a romantic exposition of Romanticism.

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings.

This article examines the paradoxical coexistence of metaphorical and analytical language in Hoffmann’s Beethoven criticism. The ambivalence of Hoffmann’s critical language is approached through recent writings on musical analysis and metaphor by Thomas Gray and Marion A. Guck. The main goal of this article is to shed light on this ambivalence as a fruitful starting point for contemporary music criticism. In the present situation, Hoffmann paradoxical example shows a path ahead, when the impossibility of a purely objective language about music is an insight musicology cannot ignore, while the private subjectivity of taste dominates the public discourse about music. The subjective and the objective cannot exist as isolated categories in music perception, but, like Hoffmann implies, we can still gain valuable understanding by letting them play roles in a hermeneutic circle.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) has often been regarded as a symbol of "Germanness." Despite this view, few studies have been undertaken regarding his nationalistic thinking. Imagined Germany focuses on Wagner's idea of Deutschtum, especially during the unification of Germany, 1864-1871. Salmi discusses how Wagner defined Germanness, what stereotypes, ideas, and sentiments he attached to it, and what kind of state could realize Wagner's natural ideals.

"Salmi lays forever to rest the myth, propagated by some of Wagner's older apologists and by many of his more recent critics, that there existed a communality of interests between Wagner and Bismarck, as well as between the new 'Reich' and the Wagnerian cultural enterprise. Salmi shows, more clearly than anyone has done thus far, how Wagner at first styled himself as the 'most German of Germans' only to realize, in the end, that he had been crucified 'am Kreuz des deutschen Gedankens'." -- Hans Rudolf Vaget, Smith College

"Salmi makes an important contribution to our understanding of one of the most fascinating artistic figures in German politics and culture, particularly his political role." -- Michael Meyer, California State University, Northridge

"The recent philosophical interpretations of Novalis have argued that the so-called Fichte-Studien, notes taken during Novalis’ study of Fichte (1795–1796), are the most important contribution to philosophical Romanticism. These notes, however, are often contradictory and incoherent. Thus, in the Fichte-Studien, one can locate two mutually exclusive conceptions of being and of the status of being. Furthermore,
the Fichte-Studien do not appear to provide a unique understanding of the meaning and role of the work of art, as many scholars have argued. Therefore, although the
Fichte-Studien provide valuable insights into the direction of Novalis’ thought, they cannot be understood as providing a consistent and philosophically-cohesive worldview, but must be read alongside and in relation to Novalis’ later writings.

Die neueren philosophischen Novalisinterpretationen gehen davon aus, dass die sogenannten Fichte-Studien (Notizen aus den Jahren 1795–1796) den wichtigsten Beitrag zur philosophischen Frühromantik darstellen. Diese Notizen sind aber häufig widersprüchlich und inkohärent. Zwei sich gegenseitig ausschließende Auffassungen des Begriffs »Seyn« und des Status des Seins sind in den Fichte-Studien zu finden.
Außerdem bieten die Fichte-Studien keine originelle Auslegung der Bedeutung und Rolle des Kunstwerks an, wie mehrere Deutungen behaupten. Obwohl die Fichte-Studien wichtige Einblicke in die Richtung von Novalis Denken geben, dürfen sie
deshalb nicht als eine einheitliche und philosophisch geschlossene Weltanschauung begriffen werden und müssen in Bezug zu den späterenWerken Novalis interepretiert werden."

Set in the vast Sundarban mangrove forest of Bangladesh in the shadow of the colonial past and the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre, The Hungry Tide traces the transformation of three metropolitan characters from disengaged spectators to invested insiders. The novel may be read as elaborating the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, whose revision of the sublime as the “differend” in both aesthetics and politics and provides a compelling context for exploring the postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected with ethics and politics. In his novel, the postcolonial sublime no longer reifies metaphysical or anthropocentric pure reason, but instead enables discovery of our interpenetration with the natural world, spurring us to witnessing and activism in partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

Wenn man Schellings ästhetische Theorie über die bildende Kunst liest, bemerkt man sofort, dass Schelling viel Rühmens von Winckelmann macht: "ich [halte] es für ganz unmöglich, in den Teilen der Kunst, von welchen er [sc. Winckelmann] gehandelt hat, höhere Prinzipien erreichen zu wollen" (V, 611). Im Folgenden soll betrachtet werden, was für einen Einfluss Winckelmanns Kunsttheorie auf Schellings Philosophie der Kunst - vor allem seine Münchner Rede Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Kunste zu der Natur von 1807 - ausübte. Im 1. Abschnitt erkläre ich, warum Schelling sowohl die Lehre der Nachahmung der Natur als auch diejenige der Nachahmung der "Alten", die im 18. Jahrhundert noch herrschend waren, ablehnt. Er widerspricht Winckelmanns These in seinen Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst von 1755, dass die modernen Künstler die Werke der klassischen Griechen nachahmen sollen. Schelling behauptet, den Lehren der Nachahmung der Natur und derjenigen der "Alten" liege die Voraussetzung zugrunde, dass die Natur tot und nur formal sei. Die formale Naturauffassung verursachte die bisherige formalistische Ästhetik. Im 2. Abschnitt erörtere ich, wie Schelling den Formalismus der Ästhetik überwindet. Der formalen Naturauffassung, die er als negativ charakterisiert, setzt er dis positive entgegen, der zufolge die Natur nicht tot, sondern lebendig ist, weil sie sich selbst ihre Form gibt. Dadurch, dass die Kunst diese lebendige Natur nachahmt, kann sie sich dem Formalismus entziehen. Im 3. Abschnitt zeige ich, dass, obwohl Schelling Winckelmanns Nachahmungslehre ablehnt, Schellings positive Naturauffassung auf Winckelmanns geschichtlicher Sicht der Kunst beruht. Winckelmanns Kunstgeschichte bietet Schelling nicht nur historische Daten; sie liegt Schellings positiver Natur- und Kunstauffassung zugrunde. Im 4. Abschnitt mache ich klar, dass sich der Einfluss der kunstgeschichtlichen Auffassung Winckelmanns auch in Schellings späterer Philosophie zeigt, die nicht mehr unmittelbar die Kunst behandelt.