ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues a specific theoretical lineage, which begins with the active subversion of Kantian Transcendental philosophy both by certain contemporaries (such as Salomon Maimon) and by later contributors to the tradition of German Idealism (Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx). It focuses, for reasons of brevity, on the overriding influence of F. W. Schelling on the German philosophers, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. One of the objectives in tracing the lineage is to bring together two thinkers who have contributed to our understanding of the role of art and creativity in an age of "mechanical reproduction". For Immanuel Kant, pure intuition is the form of empirical intuition so that reality is secondary to objectivity. For Maimon, differences and relations between them are prior to their objects. Understanding resides not in intuition; instead, what is required is that we get behind intuition to grasp its production. In other words, we must abandon both pure and empirical intuition to understand the real.
