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Covering the elder Schlegel brother's Theory of Art (ca. 1800), as excerpted in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings.
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August Wilhelm Schlegel was five years older than Friedrich, and was also a well known art critic of his time. This text is a Romantic response to Kant's Third Critique, and we looked back at Kant's comments on the sublime to help us prepare. A.W. Schlegel thought that our appreciation for Beauty has to do with our relationship with infinity, whereas for Kant, that's only a factor when we confront the awesome power of the sublime.
For Kant, all we can legitimately apply pure reason to is the world of our experience, even though we can apply practical reason to ethical and theological matters (and so be justified in believing in God and prescribing ethical laws even though we can't prove these matters). The Romantics likewise weren't interested in proving things about the Absolute (God, the primordial unity of everything), but they wanted to argue that our feelings open us up to this, and that art is able to tread where pure reason (philosophy) cannot in achieving this fundamentally religious goal. Schlegel saw a hint in Kant's theory of the sublime, which is an experience where we react to something vast and and awesome. However, Kant thought that this was fundamentally different than our experience of Beauty, where we appreciate a finite form, like the shape of a beautiful face, a geometric shape, or the patterns of sound in a Bach etude.
Both cases do involve Kant's classic "disinterest," in that for beauty, we're appreciate the abstract forms and are not wanting to, e.g. sensually caress that beautiful face, and even for the sublime, we're not actually scared by the vastness, because we're able as artistic spectators to put a certain distance between us and the sublime object, whether this be a mighty storm depicted on film, or a huge piece of architecture or sculpture, or more metaphorically, the awesome power of fate that we see in the tragedies of Sophocles, battering around the lives of the characters. But even Kant admits that the beautiful carries with it a feeling of life's being furthered, so it's not just a cold appreciation totally divorced from our moral impulses.
For Schlegel, the beautiful and the sublime are just different flavors of the same kind of experience: Art symbolically reveals the inner lives of things: their true nature as underlyingly One. Through drama, we depict the dynamics of our mental lives in ways that other people identify, because they feel similarly. These dynamics aren't just characteristic of humans, but (Schlegel thought) are common to nature itself, properly understood not as cold, blind mechanism but as spiritual and responsive.
Image by Chris Warr (aka Solomon Grundy). Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
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