Review: The subject of this research is the aesthetics of early works of Friedrich Schlegel. In his aesthetics, Schlegel continues the traditions of German classical philosophy, placing emphasis on the principles of beautiful and sublime in art. Schlegel believes that both, beauty and morality are innate traits of a person, which besides ethical also has “aesthetic imperative”. Beauty, as a ”transcendental factor”, beauty is based on indifferent pleasure and represents the ideal that was reached by the ancient Greek art, while contemporary art does not tend towards it. The higher beauty is organic with nature; two key “elements” comprise the essence of beauty: “phenomenon” and “good”. In broad sense, beauty also embraces the sublime. Schlegel pays particular attention to disgraceful as an aesthetic category that contradicts beautiful and sublime, and draws a sketch of the future theory of disgraceful. He connects disgraceful with human animality, and shows that it is based on the disgusting, painful, agonizing, “indigent chaos” of existence, manifesting an absolute negation. The central aesthetic principles – beautiful and sublime are contradicted by two types of disgraceful: personal and exalted. One of the main components of culture as a humanistic factor, Schelling considers art and determines the three types of culture: natural, organically growing on the basis of mythology (it reached high level in Antiquity), artificial, created on the basis of reason according to aesthetic laws (new-European), and aesthetic that implies special emphasis in culture on aesthetic essence and artistry. Schlegel is persuaded of the fact that further positive development of culture and art is possible only under the control of a “proper” aesthetic theory, the beginning of which he sees in the works of his contemporaries.

Keywords: phenomenon, culture, art, ugly, sublime, beautiful, aesthetics, Schlegel, good, artisty