Ideas on Art: J. P. Richter.
The Romantic theorists, artists themselves for the most part, abounded in truthful and subtle observations concerning artistic procedure. Jean Paul Richter makes many excellent remarks about productive imagination, which he distinguishes clearly from the reproductive and asserts to be shared by all men as soon as they are able to say "This is beautiful"; for "how could a genius be acclaimed or even tolerated for a single month, not to mention thousands of centuries, by the common herd, if he had not a strong connecting-link of relationship with the herd?" He also describes how imagination is variously divided among individuals: as simple talent, as passive or feminine genius, and in the highest degree as the active or masculine genius, formed by reflexion and instinct, in which "all faculties flourish simultaneously and fancy is no isolated flower, but the goddess Flora herself who, in order to produce new combinations, crosses with each other those blossoms whose conjunction is fertile, and is, so to speak, a faculty full of faculties."[12] This latter sentence betrays a tendency on Richter's part to exaggerate the functions of imagination and to construct upon it a kind of mythology.
Romantic Æsthetic and idealistic Æsthetic.
Contemporary systems of philosophy are partly impregnated with, and partly the source of, such mythologies: the Romantic conception of art may be said to have found its most complete expression in German idealism, where this attained its most coherent and systematic form.
J. G. Fichte.
It did not attain this form with Fichte, the first great pupil of Kant; for though Fichte regarded imagination as the activity which creates the universe, effects the synthesis of the ego and the non-ego, posits the object and therefore precedes consciousness, he does not connect it with art.[13] In his æsthetic notions Fichte is influenced by Schiller, with the addition of a moralism imposed upon him by the general character of his system; hence the ethical sphere, midway between the cognitive and the æsthetic, becomes from his point of view a mere appurtenance of morality, as being the representation of, and hence reverence for, the moral ideal.[14] His subjective idealism eventually produced an æsthetic doctrine through the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck; the doctrine of Irony as the basis of art.
Irony: Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis.
The ego which created the universe can also destroy it; the universe is an empty appearance at which the only true reality, the ego, can smile, holding itself aloof, like an artist or a creative god, from creatures of its own which it does not take seriously.[15] Friedrich Schlegel described art as a perpetual parody of itself and a "transcendental farce." Tieck defined irony as "a power which allows the poet to dominate the matter which he handles." Another Romantic Fichtian, Novalis, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art of creation by the instantaneous act of the ego and of realizing our dreams.
F. Schelling.
But it is only to the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of Schelling, to his Bruno (1802), to his celebrated course of lectures on the Philosophy of Art given at Jena in 1802-1803 (repeated at Würzburg, and distributed subsequently in manuscript notes all over Germany), to the no less celebrated lecture on the Relation between the Figurative Arts and Nature (1807), as well as to other works of this eloquent and enthusiastic philosopher that we owe the first great philosophical affirmation of Romanticism, and of a renewed and conscious neo-Platonism in Æsthetic.