Art as the Absolute: Art's Relation to Metaphysics in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer [Paperback]

Art as the Absoluteis a literary and philosophical investigation into the meaning of art and its claims to truth. Exploring in particular the writings of Kant and those who followed after, including Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, Paul Gordon contends that art solves the problem of how one can know the absolute in non-conceptual, non-discursive terms.

The idea of art's inherent relation to the absolute, first explicitly rendered by Kant, is examined in major works from 1790 to 1823. The first and last chapters, on Plato and Nietzsche respectively, deal with precursors and post-cursors of this idea. Gordon shows and seeks to reddress the lack of attention to this idea after Hegel, as well as in contemporary reassessments of this period.Art as the Absolutewill be of interest to students and scholars studying aesthetics from both a literary and philosophical perspective.

Paul Gordonis Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. He is the author ofThe Critical Double: Figurative Meaning in Aesthetic Discourse(1995),Tragedy After Nietzsche: Rapturous Superabundance(2001), andDial 'M' for Mother: A Freudian Hitchcock(2008).German idealism, in the boldness of its textual and systematic design, in the innovative persistence of its investigations, and in its profound, multinational repercussions, has, over the past four decades, served contemporary critical theory as a primary 'scene of interpretation.' The critical community is in Paul Gordon's considerable debt for the fresh and conclusive update delivered byArt as the Absoluteon the constellation of concepts and constructs crystallizing around the Romantic figure of the artist, and on the liberties, privileges, and restrictions attending this complex and ambiguous figure. The theoretical acumen and erudition that Gordon had to derive in order to synthesize this study are prodigious;l³Å