Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich (1759–1805)

Schiller was an artist first – a major poet and the leading dramatist of eighteenth-century Germany – and an aesthetician second. At the height of his involvement in aesthetics, he calls the philosopher ‘a caricature’ beside ‘the poet, the only true human being’. But reflection had deep roots in his nature, to the point where he felt it inhibited his creativity, yet would also have to be the means to restore it. He eventually came to terms with this paradox by devising a typology of ‘naïve’ and ‘reflective’ artists that explained his problem – and incidentally the evolution of modern European literature (On Naïve and Reflective Poetry, 1796). Schiller was also driven by a passionate belief in the humanizing and social function of art. His early speech The Effect of Theatre on the People (1784; later title The Stage considered as a Moral Institution) celebrated the one meeting-place where our full humanity could be restored. In the mature essays of the 1790s, an immensely more complex argument cannot hide the ultimate simplicity of his faith in art, even and especially in the midst of historical crisis: his culminating statement on beauty, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) is at the same time a considered response to events in France, where a ‘rational’ Revolution had turned into a Reign of Terror. Schiller proposes an education for humane balance as the only sufficiently radical answer to the violent excesses of impulse, and argues that art is its only possible agent. Schiller’s ideas are imaginative, generous and intuitively appealing as an account of what art is and might do. With the authority of his poetic standing and the high eloquence of his prose, they are powerful cultural criticism. Arguably they could have been more effective still and less vulnerable if he had not tried to make them something else by giving them a systematic quasi-Kantian form, as a result of which philosophical commentators have often patronized him while the Common Reader has been scared off.

1 Life

Schiller was born at Marbach in Württemberg. At fourteen he was placed in the Duke of Württemberg’s military academy against the wishes of his parents, and made to study medicine against his own. Apart from an occasional autopsy and some observations of melancholia in a fellow-student, ‘medicine’ largely meant philosophical speculation on the workings of mind and body. Schiller was fascinated by the problem of mind–body interaction which was to remain central to his aesthetics. His ‘medical’ dissertations emphasize the effect and value of the physical component, true to the pattern of German eighteenth-century aesthetics which upgrades sense experience and alters the priorities of rationalism. Frustrated by a lowly post as regimental doctor and a ducal prohibition on writing any more drama after his sensational début The Robbers (1782), Schiller fled from Württemberg into the dubious freedom of a hand-to-mouth existence. There followed years of editing journals and writing pot-boiler fiction and popular history, necessary means of survival but obstacles to his higher ambition. In 1789 he was appointed Professor at the University of Jena, lecturing on history and aesthetics: a post that brought prestige but little pay. He only became relatively free of financial pressures in the very last years before his premature death. By then at least his fame was secure as poet, dramatist and critic and (from 1794 on) the literary partner and acknowledged equal of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in what came to be known as Weimar Classicism.

2 First essays: the sublime and tragedy

Schiller’s first work in aesthetics proper is avowedly derivative from Kant’s account of the sublime, except that Schiller takes over this standard eighteenth-century concept as the basis of his definition and practice of tragedy (see Kant, I.). Burke in 1757 had already suggested that sublime objects – towering crags, desert wastes and the like – ‘exercise the finer parts of the system’ in a virtually physiological way. By 1790 Kant is explaining the pleasures of sublime phenomena by an intricate psychological-cum-moral sequence in which their threat to overwhelm us forces us back on our distinctively human rational nature. By now, too, human actions such as principled self-sacrifice have crept in among the sublimities. The proximity to tragedy is obvious. Schiller locates tragedy in the necessary assertion of ‘moral being’ (Sittlichkeit) in the face of threats from or to the agent’s ‘sensuous being’ (Sinnlichkeit). This may seem a reaffirmation of rationalist moral values, but for Schiller ‘sensuous being’ is not so readily abandoned as in earlier heroic and Christian drama. The pleasure of tragedy is not the simple one of moral triumph at the rejection of something worthless, but the poignant mixed feeling at the necessary sacrifice of something intensely valuable. In his last essay on the sublime (probably late 1790s), the tragic vision has been intensified by European wars, and the primacy of the stoic moral will is even more in the foreground. Yet tragedy still only treats the harsher aspect of life, is only one literary genre, and not for Schiller the highest. This rank he gives to the genre he never worked in, comedy, because of its final harmony and balance. Schiller was the last writer to make significant use of the sublime in its traditional sense before it expired with the century, to be reassumed into a single larger conception of beauty (although the concept recurs with a different function in Hegel’s Aesthetics and is resurrected in twentieth-century theories of ‘Post-Modernism’).

3 Beauty and aesthetic experience

On this central theme, Schiller once again starts from Kant, and after following some false trails goes well beyond him. In particular he does fuller justice to the complexity of both the aesthetic object and its reception. Both aspects bear out Schiller’s aperçu that it was crucial for a theory of art that the thinker should be a practising artist. Kant’s principle that aesthetic experience consisted in ‘pleasure without interest’ had set the object apart from practical purposes like use or desire, to be dwelt on for its own sake; while the effect of the pure form-percept lay in its power to seem nevertheless mysteriously purposive. This is conventionally seen as a philosophical breakthrough, but it only codified what contemporary writers were already perceiving and demanding in their practice, namely that the work of art and its constituent elements must be free of the constraints, moral, political or religious, placed on utterances in the practical world, and that it had formal laws of its own. Art was a distinct realm of contemplation and representation where the writ of authority did not, or at least should not, run – a recognizable off-shoot of the central Enlightenment principle of independent thought and free public communication. This is not of course to explain away in social terms the new insight that art is a means to hold external demands in suspense while life is inspected with a fresh eye and reshaped by the imagination. To all this, Schiller the writer was deeply committed.

For Kant, however, aesthetic judgment and the very attribution of aesthetic status were subjective, resting on an adjustment of the observer’s mode of seeing. This left Schiller dissatisfied. Was there nothing in the constitution of the object that positively invited such a mode of seeing – more compellingly than Kant’s example of the arabesque, which inspired no ‘interest’ the observer would need to disregard and could thus, by a too simple logic, actually rank higher in beauty than the human form? An equally dubious logic had established Kant’s next step. If observers all abstracted from their personal ‘interests’, then what was left must be common ground, for they had categorically lost the wherewithal to disagree. Ergo, aesthetic judgments were universal. But this was to reduce the beholder to a pure Nobody, emptying both subject and object of the reality that must surely be present – transformed, yes, but not purified out of existence – if art is to matter to anybody.

4 The Kallias Letters

Kant’s limitations set Schiller’s programme. In the never-completed project Kallias, sketched in 1793, he tried to establish an objective (but not empirically dependent) definition of beauty. He begins in Kantian spirit by calling it the ‘form of a form’, that is, a pure percept which is, as it were, permitted by the functional form of objects. (In line with much eighteenth-century aesthetics, he has natural objects in mind at least as much as artefacts.) But where for Kant it was the observer who disregarded purpose, for Schiller the object has itself ‘overcome’ its purpose, to appear free. Hence beauty is ‘freedom in the phenomenon’ or ‘in appearance’. Though the German Erscheinung does not mean ‘mere’ or ‘illusory appearance’, Schiller cannot get round the fact that his freedom is merely in the eye of the beholder, or even just a metaphor for beauty’s effect. Nor is there, incidentally, any clear reason why aesthetic pleasure should stem from the sight of freedom, other than that it offers ‘an analogy with the form of the pure will’, and that Schiller is avowedly one of those ‘for whom freedom is the highest principle’. His fall-back position – that beauty comes about when nothing in the phenomenon too obviously belies the appearance of freedom – remains just as open to his friend Körner’s objection that the whole theory rested on ‘the autonomy which the observer mentally adds to the phenomenon’, that is, it was irretrievably subjective.

5 Grace and Dignity (1793)

But instead of pursuing this central problem with a changed approach, Schiller keeps his flawed approach and changes the problem, to a secondary one which promised to fit it better. He defines grace as ‘beauty in motion’: motion at least was objective. Yet, lacking a satisfactory definition of the beauty to be observed in motion, he was (as he admitted) trying to fly before he could walk. ‘Grace’ moreover, when further unpacked, turned out to depend on the same criterion that had given trouble in Kallias: it was ‘the beauty of the [human] form [Gestalt] under the influence of freedom’. Admittedly freedom in human beings, even if problematic in other ways, is not in doubt as an illusion of the beholder. And it soon becomes clear that Schiller is attempting an aesthetics not just of physical movement per se, but of total modes of behaviour in real situations. This might seem to cross the border from aesthetics into ethics altogether. Schiller distinguishes two basic responses to two equally basic types of situation. When human impulses are in harmony with each other and not under pressure from the surrounding world, the agent can freely choose how to act, and as an unconscious effect (Schiller constructs careful provisos against its conscious pursuit) grace may result. In contrast, when the impulses are at war with each other or under attack from the world, so that only a stoic defence is left, dignity may result. The first case shows freedom in, the second freedom from nature, where ‘nature’ is both the system of inner purposes that constitute our organic form, and the nexus of outer constraints that shape our lives. Schiller also posits a character type – the ‘beautiful soul’ or ‘fine mind’ (schöne Seele) – whose serene inner nature entails grace as a constant attribute. Yet even this ideal type cannot be immune to life’s tribulations. In adversity, the harmony of mind and body has to be replaced by the freedom of mind from body, the ‘sublime’ quality of dignity. The links with Schiller’s theory of tragedy are plain, as is the implication that the schöne Seele would be in its literary element as the hero or heroine of comedy or idyll.

The direct claims of morality that had been expelled from eighteenth-century aesthetics seem at first sight to have got in again. Schiller however is asserting a value higher than mere ethical outcomes. This emerges clearly in his discreet rebellion against the moral authority of Kant. If, as Kant had argued, an action can only be accounted moral when duty is kept sharply distinct from inclination, and indeed has normally had to overcome inclination, then there can be no such thing as an inherently moral being. Surely, Schiller argues, the ideal should be an inclination to duty? Only then would virtue be a value we embrace with our whole self, and no longer merely an external requirement that we obey in an endlessly repeated struggle with ourselves. Schiller concedes that Kant’s rigorism may have been a necessary prescription for their age. But the highest moral norm should surely not be set by emergency; it must lie in the kind of primal spontaneity of action that defines the schöne Seele. Kant’sfootnote to the second edition of Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, acknowledging Schiller’s ‘masterly treatise’, is a response but hardly an answer. Schiller, diplomatically, hastened to declare himself satisfied. Yet his conception remains a significant challenge to Kant’s axiom of pessimistic dualism. It is an appeal to balance spirit with sense, and moral with aesthetic judgment.

6 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)

Balancing opposed elements is the central idea of Schiller’s major essay. It is the key both to understanding the nature of beauty and to creating a stable free society in some future age. These disparate aims make an unlikely pair, but to Schiller art seemed to offer precisely what the politics of the 1790s cried out for. Imbalance was the common condition in a world already suffering from division of labour. Here Schiller prepares the ground for Hegel and Marx on alienation, drawing a familiar eighteenth-century contrast with the wholeness of the human individual that was possible in Ancient Greece (L6). The added stress of revolutionary upheaval in France had now produced internecine violence. The French had acted with the ruthless rationality of ‘barbarians’ untouched by feeling, or the crude sensuousness of ‘savages’ unchecked by spirit (L4), an analysis that incidentally echoes the comments of observers in Paris. The project of an ideal society had failed not through the use of reason to guide reform, as conservatives like Burke held, but through its unmediated use by the unreformed. A force was needed that would smooth and stabilize the transition from sense to reason, exercising the human agent as both sensuous and rational being and strengthening or moderating each element as needed. That, according to Schiller’s philosophical poem ‘The Artists’, was the role beauty had played in human evolution, and it could be repeated now. Art was the only force potentially free from the vicious circle of unregenerate humanity and the society that resulted. Art’s highest exemplars fused substance and form and thus could balance and integrate sense and spirit in the beholder. The structural correspondence is clear. Less clear is how art might get a purchase on political reality. Schiller however is not offering a plaster for present ills, but a means to stop them recurring in the long term and so to create a new civic starting-point. There is no question of art’s relapsing into didacticism to achieve this. Its effect for any specific purpose is avowedly ‘nil’. Yet precisely by nullifying all previous determinations, its effect is ‘infinite’ because that restores human beings to themselves and sets them free once more to be – ‘what they are meant to be’ (L21). This is the still undaunted Enlightenment or Rousseauian faith that a new start will necessarily be a start in the right direction. The more pessimistic view, that our only realistic course is to practise a stoic rationality since life will always be crisis, is left for that tailpiece on the sublime (see §2 above) which in a sense completes the programme of aesthetic education.

We are again at frontiers, with ethics, politics, social anthropology. To get there has required new solutions in aesthetics, and it was the pressure of an urgent problem in those areas that drove Schiller to find them. After sketching the crisis and arguing that art alone can help (L1–9), he has analysed human makeup into ‘person’ and ‘condition’, the core identity and its changing determinations (L10); and identified two matching drives, a sensuous impulse (Stofftrieb) towards realization and involvement in the material world, and a formal impulse (Formtrieb) towards moral and intellectual control (L12). These elements are only separable in the abstract; we actually experience them in their various interactions and imbalances. The ideal fulfilment of our dual nature would be to assimilate a maximum of reality but with a maximum of formal coherence. Such a state would bring into being a third drive, the play impulse (Spieltrieb), whose concrete object would be a fusion: the material world, or in its broadest sense ‘life’ (Leben), would join with formal structure or ‘shape’ (Gestalt) to produce ‘living shape’ (lebende Gestalt) (L15). More important surely for art’s role as a sociopolitical remedy, though Schiller does not say this, would be the reverse sequence: once aesthetic play was in some measure achieved, the two original impulses would be brought into some kind of balance. ‘Living shape’ meantime becomes Schiller’s definition of beauty, and ‘play’ his account of aesthetic experience. Although he proposes the aesthetic state as the long-term answer to a political problem, in the still longer term he intends it to be self-sufficient. It can be borrowed to meet a need, but is ultimately an ideal (L27). For ‘human beings only play when they are human in the fullest sense of the word, and they are only fully human when they play’ (L15). The language of the Letters, incidentally, enacts the complexities of opposition and reconciliation in a play of its own with a rich and at first confusing array of concepts, all of them however variations on an underlying pattern. Readers will find the game is better played fast for its form than slowly for its detailed content.

Leaving the political application aside, the Letters are a great advance on earlier aesthetics, both Schiller’s own and Kant’s. No longer is an ‘objective’ theory insisted on, though there are vestiges of it in the original draft of Letter 1. Instead, both the constitution and the effect of beauty are grounded in the psycho-physical constitution and needs of human beings. Whereas Kantian ‘disinterestedness’ was a passive state that denied individuality, ‘play’ is an activity that subtly redeploys it. People bring to aesthetic encounters not an ‘empty indeterminateness’ but their whole past experience in a state of ‘active determinability’ (L20ff). This ensures, not a depersonalized universality of aesthetic judgment as in Kant, but a deeply personal response to both the forms and the substance of art. It restores reality to the abstractions of aesthetics: a landscape painting works with our accumulated experience of landscapes, a statue of Venus provokes more than an appreciation of assorted arabesques. The notion of ‘play’ means we take things seriously but not solemnly, in and for themselves, in an act of contemplation and savouring. In Brecht’s deceptively simple words, ‘In art, people enjoy life’. Such enjoyment involves separating ‘appearance’ – Schein this time, the standard word for illusion – from reality (L26). But it clearly no longer bothers Schiller that this makes his theory a subjective one. It has strong enough roots in the individual experience art springs from and appeals to, while ‘play’ is universal not as a logical abstraction but as an anthropological phenomenon.

7 On Naïve and Reflective Poetry (1796)

Schiller’s final large-scale essay is not so much aesthetic theory as literary and cultural history, with sections of brilliant practical criticism. In the wake of long-running European debates on the relative merits of Ancients and Moderns, it traces a movement from the Greeks’ oneness with the natural world to the hyperconsciousness of post-Christian Europe where, except for a few outstanding cases like Shakespeare, Molière and now Goethe, reflection necessarily intrudes between the poet and the object. Modern writing is constituted by reflection’s many forms, but their underlying constant, and hence the deepest shaping influence on European literature, is an elegiac sense of lost harmony. To restore that harmony and the perfection of artistic form that went with it in antiquity, while managing somehow still to retain the riches of the modern sensibility – a postmodernism of serious substance – is the near-impossible millennial goal. But Schiller was never short on aspiration.