UC Irvine

Aesthetic Ecology considers the way that F.W.J. Schelling reconceived the relationship between human philosophical consciousness and the natural world by looking at the capacity of art to mediate and transform these terms. I propose Schelling’s aesthetic idealism as crucial to the project of bringing clarity to recent philosophical engagements with art and nature, as well as giving historical depth to our contemporary discourse around thinking ecologically in the current moment, in which the problem of the human relation to the environment is becoming exponentially urgent in the face of the climate crisis. I show that German aesthetic philosophies of the Goethezeit are indispensable resources for nurturing and rethinking our ecologically interconnected world, conceiving of the agency of the environment, and respecting the nonhuman. I begin by reconstructing Kant’s attempt to objectively ground knowledge in schematic and symbolic hypotyposes by creating a necessary link between concepts and language. I argue that Kant privileges an aesthetic notion of the symbol, and nature, viewed aesthetically, reflects a preconceptual unity of consciousness and sensible intuition. I then turn to Schelling’s transcendental philosophy and his early Naturphilosophie (1795-1800), where he demonstrates that the schematism and the idealism of the self cannot be completely disentangled from the aesthetic activities of nature; such creaturely organisms as corals, crabs, and spiders participate in the aesthetic ecological systems of sensing and perceiving otherness that form the conditions of possibility for the very transcendental perspective that aims to elucidate them. In Schelling’s view elaborated in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), it is in works of art that philosophical consciousness is put in touch with the strange otherness of these aesthetic ecologies. Finally, I turn to Schelling’s moral and political philosophy where he views history through an aesthetic lens as a tragic drama. I argue that Schelling invents an aesthetic ecological ethics in his analyses of the particular constructions of time, freedom, and nature in Attic and modern tragedy in the symbolic figures of Prometheus and Faust. I conclude that Schelling’s tragic ethics are capable of motivating environmental action with a necessity that eclipses individual interests. For tragedy requires that we reorient our understanding of moral praxis, and that we deliberate with deference to the unforeseeable consequences of our actions on a transforming environment while respecting a multiplicity of moral claims, including the moral claims of future unknown Others.