Although Schiller (1759-1805) was primarily a poet and dramatist, he also produced a number of theoretical works. The most important of these were written in the mid-1790s, just a few years after the publication of Kant’s 3rd critique. The selections on the handout are drawn from the series of 27 letters that form On the Aesthetic Education of Man. The work began in a series of actual letters to a Danish royal patron of Schiller but was later expanded with a more elaborate theoretical discussion, from which most of the text on the handout is drawn.
• The selections from letters 3 and 9, reflect an emphasis in the original letters of moral and political reform to which Schiller returns in the final letters of the current set. (The selection from letter 9 seems to echo some of the ideas in Kant’s own brief discussion of aesthetic eduction, which is quoted at the end of this reading guide.)
• The selections from letters 11-13 sketch Schiller’s version of Kant’s distinction between our passive response to the senses and our free action under moral laws.
• Letters 14 and 15 present the most distinctive feature of Schiller’s account of art and beauty, the role he gives to play. It is hard not to think he was influenced by Kant’s references to the “free play” of the cognitive faculties, but Schiller’s references to play are far more literal than Kant’s are likely to have been. What Schiller has to say here is likely to be the main focus of our discussion.
• The selections from letters 18, 19, and 21 are the deepest development of Schiller’s thinking in these letters, and they have the closest ties to the people we will reading next. Both Schelling and Hegel were interested in the resolution of what they saw as fundamental contradictions intrinsic to humanity. Schelling’s focus will be on something very close to the opposition Schelling sees between sensation and reason, and Hegel’s way of resolving such contradictions is thought by many to have been inspired by Schiller’s discussion in letter 19. (The German verb aufheben, which is here translated mainly as “abrogate,” is central to Hegel’s philosophy and is used by him in a way that seems similar to Schiller’s use of it in this context.)
• The remaining selections are from the end of the series of letters and serve to fill out the idea of “aesthetic education” that was the focus of the original series. All say something about the place of art and the aesthetic in human culture, a topic that will become the central concern of philosophers of art in the material we will read over the next several weeks.
The following selection from Kant immediate precedes the paragraph from §60 of the third Critique that is included in Hofstadter and Kuhns.
Kant, from Critique of Judgment, §60
The propaedeutic to all beautiful art, regarded in the highest degree of its perfection, seems to lie, not in precepts, but in the culture of the mental powers by means of those elements of knowledge called humaniora, probably because humanity on the one side indicates the universal feeling of sympathy, and on the other the faculty of being able to communicate universally our inmost [feelings]. For these properties, taken together, constitute the characteristic social spirit of humanity by which it is distinguished from the limitations of animal life. The age and peoples, in which the impulse toward a law-abiding social life, by which a people becomes a permanent community, contended with the great difficulties presented by the difficult problem of uniting freedom (and equality) with compulsion (rather of respect and submission from a sense of duty than of fear)—such an age and such a people naturally first found out the art of reciprocal communication of ideas between the cultivated and uncultivated classes, and thus discovered how to harmonize the largemindedness and refinement of the former with the natural simplicity and originality of the latter. In this way they first found that mean between the higher culture and simple nature which furnishes that true standard for taste as a sense universal to all men which no general rules can supply.
With difficulty will a later age dispense with those models, because it will be always farther from nature; and in fine, without, having permanent examples before it, a concept will hardly be possible, in one and the same people, of the happy union of the lawabiding constraint of the highest culture with the force and truth of free nature which feels its own proper worth.