Schelling on the Sublime in Art

“For the difference between a beautiful and a sublime work of art rests only on the fact that where beauty exists the infinite contradiction is resolved in the object itself, whereas where sublimity exists the contradiction is not unified in the object itself but is merely raised to a level at which it involuntarily removes itself in the intuition, which then is as good as if it were removed from the object.”

-Schelling, Deduction of a Universal Organ of Philosophy, or Main Propositions of the Philosophy of Art According to Principles of Transcendental Idealism

Schelling prefigures Marion’s conception of the Saturated Phenomenon by about a century and a half.  In case you didn’t know, all of phenomenology’s best ideas can be found in 19th century German Idealism.

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