War Schelling ein politischer Denker? Und wenn ja, wie lässt sich seine politische Denkweise einordnen? Die Antworten auf beide Fragen gehen in der Forschung weit auseinander. Die vorliegende Dissertation schlägt daher eine neue Lesart vor, in dem sie Schelling als Antipolitiker deutet. Hierdurch gelingt es, der Ambivalenz und Breite Schellings Politikauffassung Rechnung zu tragen und die bisherige Forschung aus der Perspektive herauszuführen, die den Autor entweder als „unpolitischen Denker“ oder „politisch-reaktionären Denker“ verstanden wissen will. Die Arbeit begreift Antipolitik dabei als ein Unternehmen, welche das „Überinklusive“ und „Unausweichliche“ am Politik-Begriff zurückweist und im Gegenzug den Raum des Privatbürgerlichen, ja der Gesellschaft verteidigt. Die Praktikabilität des Begriffs wird in der Arbeit sowohl in Bezug auf Schelling als auch in Bezug auf spätere Fallbeispiele wie Heinrich von Treitschke, Constantin Franz oder Friedrich Nietzsche demonstriert. Außerdem plädiert die Untersuchung dafür, Antipolitik auch als ein aktuelles Phänomen zu begreifen, das sich in Gesellschaft immer dann formiert, wenn die Privatsphäre, der nichtpolitische Bereich, durch „staatliche Übergriffe“ oder „politisches Fehlversagen“ tangiert wird. / Was Schelling a political thinker? And if he was, what kind of political idea did Schelling prefer? These questions have been differently discussed in literature during the last decades. The following thesis argues for a new interpretation of Schelling as an antipolitician. The term antipolitics copes with Schelling’s ambivalent political thinking and avoids the recent perspective in research classifying him as a nonpolitical philosopher or reactionist. Antipolitics is described as an ambition that rejects the „unavoidable“ and „Überinklusive“ of politics in order to strengthen the area of privacy and society. The paper demonstrates the practicability of the term using the example of Schelling and also later authors like Heinrich von Treitschke, Constantin Franz or Friedrich Nietzsche. Moreover, the thesis argues that antipolitics can also be seen as a modern phenomenon, which usually takes place when privacy or the non-political space is restricted by political power.

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Alchemical imagery and ideology is present in many Romantic works of literature, but it has largely been overlooked by literary historians in their contextualization of the time period. The same can be said for mysticism in general, of which alchemy is a subset. This project accounts for alchemy in the works of transcendental philosophers and writers as it contributes to some of the most important conversations of the Romantic time period, particularly the reaction against empirical philosophy and the articulation of creative processes. The transcendental conversation is a transnational one, encompassing Germany, Britain, and America, with its use of alchemy also following this transnational progression. The German idealists developed an epistemology that took from alchemical precepts that in turn informed their spiritual models of genius and the creative process. German idealism largely influenced Romantic conceptions of art and creativity, which then contributed to the Romantic ideal of a poet-prophet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Nathaniel Hawthorne further developed their own models of the creative process by incorporating alchemy as an image of the transformation from vision into art. I examine Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful" for their alchemical imagery that articulates such a genius ideal. I also found, however, that these two Romantic works express an awareness of artistic limitations and frustration in the face of this ideal, which illustrates the ambiguity these two writers are known for. But alchemy, as a discourse of contradictions and their negotiation, is a site that accommodates the tension between a posited ideal and the reality of actual experience. As such, alchemy, as an underlying ideology to the poet-prophet, allows for flexibility in an artist's identity. Furthermore, as a deeply personal philosophy of transformation, alchemy's image as a work of art suggests the artist's personal investment in the creative process, which is necessary to art's viability in an increasingly materialistic world.