Art and philosophy in the post-Kantism: the controversy between Fichte and Schiller about the aesthetical impulse

Abstract

The aim of this project is to study the debate during the last decade of the eighteenth century between Fichte and Schiller about the relationship concerning art and philosophy. Revolving around key issues of this relationship, such as, for example, on the status of the so-called aesthetic impulse in regard to practical and knowledge impulses, the debate between Fichte and Schiller, known as the debate of the Hours, was symptomatic of a tension own that period, which called, on the one hand, the overcoming of normative aesthetics and anticipated, on the other, the main elements of the philosophy of art of the nineteenth century. If this concept of philosophy of art reached its peak in the lectures on aesthetics of Schelling and Hegel, and in Schopenhauer's aesthetic system, its onset is in Kant's third Critique, which is why this work is always on the horizon of the current project. After having shown how far artistic genius comes along and how far it is away from the philosopher, Kant, in this work, lays the first foundations to think a poetic or a philosophy of art no longer based only on imitation, but that would take into account the ability of creating of the radical productive imagination. Now, the disagreement between Fichte and Schiller is because, for the first, in the spirit of Kantian philosophy, it would have indicated the possibility of thinking about a rapprochement between the philosopher and the artist never thought so far, whereas for the second, performing a reading over the letter according to this philosophy, it would be necessary to maintain the separation it makes between genius and scientist. Although they have never fully agreed about it, the debate itself shows how this was one of the most pressing issues of that period, namely: what is ultimately the role of the aesthetic element - and, within it, particularly in poetry - in field of philosophical investigations? It is precisely this question proper to that very period of German philosophy which we seek to study here. (AU)