YAHATA Sakura

In Schelling’s lecture entitled Philosophy of Art (1802–03, 1804–05), he explains the absolute in the form of art according to the system of the philosophy of identity. He introduces the theory of genre and describes tragedy as the highest genre of the literary arts. Schelling focuses on Greek tragedy: he praises Prometheus as “the true archetype of tragedy” and gives the same evaluation to Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus. For Schelling, Greek tragedy can represent indifference through the conflict between freedom and necessity. Schelling finds human freedom in the hero’s victory against fate, which is represented through his defeat. This paper argues how Greek tragedy can realize human freedom in the difference between freedom and necessity, by summarizing Schelling’s theory of tragedy in Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) and the Philosophy of Art, and examining his analysis of Oedipus Tyrannus. In the Philosophy of Art, the tragic hero is seen as a symbol of the tragic sublime. From this discussion, I conclude that the idea of human freedom, realized in the Philosophical Letters through acceptance of voluntary punishment, is the foundation of the theory of tragedy in the Philosophy of Art, and that his theory of tragedy can be understood as a theory of human freedom.