Abstract
This chapter discusses Friedrich Schiller’s critical response to the conception of moral agency advanced by Kant, who was Schiller’s main source of inspiration and criticism in both aesthetics and ethics. Criticizing Kant for his disregard to inclination, Schiller argues that a complete conception of moral life can be sustained only if we recognize the moral value of sensuous and understand moral agency as a harmonious unity of both duty and inclination. The chapter shows that at the very core of Schiller’s ethical theory lies the notion of aesthetics that becomes a specific experience of freedom and thus an essential accompaniment of morality itself. The chapter also reveals how Schiller’s aesthetics assigns a distinctive place for the development of general moral sentiments and permits the cultivation of man toward the truly moral individual.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stephen Houlgate, “Schiller and the Dance of Beauty,” Inquiry, 51(1), 2008; David Schindler, “An Aesthetics of Freedom: Friedrich Schiller’s Breakthrough Beyond Subjectivism,” Yearbook of Irish Philosophical Society 2008; Anne M. Baxley, “Pleasure, Freedom and Grace: Schiller’s ‘Completion’ of Kant’s Ethics,” Inquiry, 51(1), 2008; Baxley, “The Aesthetics of Morality: Schiller’s Critique of Kantian Rationalism,” Philosophy Compass, 5(12), 2010.
- 2.
Jeffrey A. Gauthier, “Schiller’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Psychology: Reconciling Practical Reason and an Ethics of Virtue,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 27(4), 1997; Sabine Roehr, “Freedom and Autonomy in Schiller,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 64(1), 2003; Katerina Deligiorgi, “Grace as Guide to Morals? Schiller’s Aesthetic Turn in Ethics,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 23(1), 2006; Deligiorgi, “Schiller’s ‘Philosophical Letters’: Naturalizing Spirit to Moralise Nature,” Philosophical Readings, 2013(5); Baxley, “Pleasure, Freedom and Grace: Schiller’s ‘Completion’ of Kant’s Ethics,” op. cit.; Baxley, “The Aesthetics of Morality: Schiller’s Critique of Kantian Rationalism,” op. cit.; Zvi Tauber, “Aesthetic Education for Morality: Schiller and Kant,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 40 (3), 2006.
- 3.
Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination, op. cit.
- 4.
Ibid., 81, 178.
- 5.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ak 4:394–397.
- 6.
Ibid., Ak 4:398.
- 7.
Ibid., Ak 4:397.
- 8.
See Daniel Dahlstrom, “The Ethical and Political Legacy of Aesthetics: Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind’,” in Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 97.
- 9.
“On Grace and Dignity” is the first major published work of Schiller where he decisively criticizes Kant’s views of aesthetics and ethics. The essay appeared in July 1793, in the second issue of New Thalia.
- 10.
Friedrich Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” translated by William Wertz. In Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, volume II, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Washington D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1988), 363.
- 11.
Ibid., 364.
- 12.
Ibid., 363.
- 13.
Ibid., 361.
- 14.
Ibid., 361–362.
- 15.
Deligiorgi, “Grace as Guide to Morals? Schiller’s Aesthetic Turn in Ethics,” op. cit., 8.
- 16.
Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” op. cit., 337.
- 17.
Ibid., 340.
- 18.
Ibid., 363.
- 19.
Deligiorgi, “Grace as Guide to Morals? Schiller’s Aesthetic Turn in Ethics,” op. cit., 13.
- 20.
Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination, op. cit., 100, 158.
- 21.
Deligiorgi, “Grace as Guide to Morals? Schiller’s Aesthetic Turn in Ethics,” op. cit., 11.
- 22.
Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” op. cit., 370.
- 23.
Ibid., 374.
- 24.
Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination, op. cit., 114.
- 25.
Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity,” op. cit., 376.
- 26.
Ibid., 377.
- 27.
Ibid., 380.
- 28.
Ibid., 364.
- 29.
In his direct reply to Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in the second edition of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant praises Schiller’s “masterful treatise” and claims that he and Schiller agree on the important principles and need only to clarify their positions to each other to avoid any misconception. However, Kant concedes that he sharply distinguishes between duty and grace as well as grace and dignity, because his overarching aim has been to emphasize the purity of duty, whose main characteristic is “unconditional necessitation, to which gracefulness stands in direct contradiction” (Immanuel Kant, 1998. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, translated and edited by Allen Wood and George de Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Ak 6:23n; cf. Ak 6:48n).
- 30.
Deligiorgi, “Grace as Guide to Morals? Schiller’s Aesthetic Turn in Ethics,” op. cit., 16.
- 31.
Ibid., 17.
- 32.
Schiller’s notion of the harmony of one’s inner nature is reminiscent of Plato’s conception of justice as an inner harmony that the thinker introduces in Republic and the discussion of the good life to find in Philebus.
- 33.
At the time, political philosophers who adhered to the tradition of Rousseau and Locke were scrambling to make sense of the French Revolution. What was to be the culmination of enlightenment democracy had devolved into a bloody terror, and it was baffling to see every attempt at government fail. This led many, including Schiller, to ask the obvious question: how are men to form a stable, sustainable state? Schiller did not believe that a mere change of circumstances is the ultimate cure for social ills. Instead, he associated human progress with the internal harmony that man must find within himself.
- 34.
Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. In Essays, edited by Walter Hinderer, Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1993), 95.
- 35.
Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man were originally written in 1793 in a correspondence between Schiller and a Danish Prince Friedrich Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenborg. The nine original letters burned in 1794 as a result of a fire at the Prince’s palace. Almost two years later, Schiller rewrote the whole set, nearly doubling their length, and published them by installments in Die Horen, a journal he founded and edited.
- 36.
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, op. cit., 126.
- 37.
Ibid., 127.
- 38.
Ibid., 90.
- 39.
Schiller quoted in Steven Martinson, Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 187. Patrick Murray defines Schiller’s goal in almost the same terms, claiming that Schiller saw a “need for a means of powerful moral education which will develop man’s capacity for feeling, and reform his sensuous life, rather than directly assail his intellect with moral precepts” (Patrick T. Murray, The Development of German Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Schiller: A Philosophical Commentary on Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994), 68).
- 40.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, edited by Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ak 5:203 ff. (Book 1: Analytic of the Beautiful).
- 41.
According to Kant, knowledge is based on a correspondence between concept and experience. Yet since aesthetic judgment is not associated with any concept, it cannot teach us anything, at least not in the same way as any judgment produced through purely intellectual activity (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, op. cit., Ak 5:191, 227–228, 233). For a more detailed discussion of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment (judgment of taste) see Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 42.
Schiller finds as ungrounded Kant’s claim that there could be no objective principle of beauty as well as Kant’s insistence that aesthetic experience should be associated with subjective feeling of pleasure, rather than with any property of the object itself. In his view, the subjective-rational theory of beauty developed by Kant, while correctly distinguishing between the logical and the beautiful, “misses fully the concept of beauty” by emphasizing its non-objective character. Schiller, recognizing the need to give reasons for aesthetic judgment, begins relating the latter to objective qualities. In the “Kallias Letters,” he proposed a new sensuous-objective theory of beauty, which would largely overcome Kant’s own. See Friedrich Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner,” translated by Stefan Bird-Polan, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, edited by J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 43.
Ibid., 152.
- 44.
Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination, op. cit., 5.
- 45.
Ibid., 60.
- 46.
Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner,” op. cit., 159.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Schindler, “An Aesthetics of Freedom: Friedrich Schiller’s Breakthrough Beyond Subjectivism,” op. cit., 85ff.
- 49.
Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 88–105. See also Marina F. Bykova, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the Humanistic Tradition of Bildung,” Philosophie und Pädagogik der Zukunft. Die Brüder Ludwig und Friedrich Feuerbach im Dialog (Münster-New York: Waxmann, 2018), 171–172, 184.
- 50.
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, op. cit., 176.
- 51.
See, for example, Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, op. cit., Ak 5:351–354, cf. ibid., Ak 5: 355–356. On linking Schiller’s pedagogical concept to this particular argument in Critique of Judgment, see David Pugh, Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 289.
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Bykova, M.F. (2020). Friedrich Schiller and the Aestheticization of Ethics. In: Millán Brusslan, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53567-4_8
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