Abstract
This chapter reconstructs Schiller’s ethics and moral philosophy, referring to his aesthetics and anthropology. After analyzing Schiller’s early philosophical writings, the chapter outlines Schiller’s ethical thought in his On Grace and Dignity (1793) and his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795). The chapter argues that Schiller’s ethics is complex: it comprises a perfectionist, a teleological, and an expressivist dimension, and can be interpreted as a kind of virtue ethics. In doing so, the chapter focuses on Schiller’s conception of man, of will, of heautonomy, and of the aesthetic state.
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Notes
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- 2.
- 3.
For the notion of a “resonance effect”, see Frankfurt (1971, 16): “When a person identifies himself decisively with one of his first-order desires, this commitment ‘resounds’ throughout the potentially endless array of higher orders.”
- 4.
There are different ways to translate Schiller’s notion of “Geist”. Wilkinson and Willoughby translate it with “spirit”, whereas Curran translates it with “mind”. Since the German word “Geist” can be understood in terms of “spirit” and “mind”, I will use both English words to refer to Schiller’s notion of Geist.
- 5.
Cf. Kant’s concept of heautonomy as individual self-determination versus universal self-determination: “The power of judgment thus also has in itself an a priori principle for the possibility of nature, though only in a subjective respect, by means of which it prescribes a law, not to nature (as autonomy), but to itself (as heautonomy) for reflection on nature” (CPJ Ak 5:185–186). For the notion of heautonomy in Schiller, see Schindler (2012, 67).
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For a discussion of the relationship between individuality and multiplicity, see Beiser (2005, 140–141).
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Noller, J. (2023). Schiller on Morals. In: Falduto, A., Mehigan, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16798-0_19
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