On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature by Friedrich Von Schelling

Schelling is a German-Idealist, in the post Kantian development in German philosophy. He rejects Kant’s idea that' things in themselves' are unknown. Instead he posited a subject and object that are joined in aesthetic activity. This joining is a creative act. Man's creativity is analogous to the unconscious creativity of nature.

In this essay, he says that although epistemologists consider that the natural world is illusory and dead, they still think of art as copying it, holding to a theory of native realism. Schelling claims that there is no lifeless nature; it strives for shape, just a man tries to shape nature in art. In artistic activity, the mind seeks to join subject and object, finite and infinite, soul and nature. For Schelling, a work of art must be considered as very closely related to its author. The real work of art is not what we have before us but the activity of its making.

Schelling also talks of universally and particularity. In on the Relation of the Plastic Art of Nature he holds that the particular gains universally through its self- identity and the resistance of its form to the universe. An artistic makes the individual a world in itself, a class, and an eternal prototype. Schelling tends to see the world in a grain of sand. This view of Schelling on the relationship between the particular and the universal invites further elaboration.

Schelling says that if the particular gain self- identity it can jump in to the domain of universality. Moreover the particular must strive to defend its form from the universal form. Then only it can move in to the dimension of universality. Hence, it is correct to sum up Schelling in the following way- through self- identity and resistance the particular moves in to the universal.