Abstract
This chapter attempts to show that there are important convergences between Schiller’s and the young Marx’s account of alienation. The common approach to Schiller’s problem of alienation addresses the question solely from an anthropological perspective. The chapter rather focuses on alienation from a political and juridical perspective. It claims that Schiller’s account of alienation is better understood in the context of a politico-juridical debate on the relation between ‘right of mankind’ (Recht der Menschheit) and ‘state’ (Staat) following the French Revolution. Looking at Marx’s early writings, it transpires that he describes the problem of alienation in similar terms to Schiller: as a conflict between particular and universal spheres, that is, private human being (individual) and political human being (species-being, state).
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Notes
- 1.
In his magnificent work Schiller as Philosopher Frederick Beiser almost exclusively highlights the critical position of Marxism on Schiller, leaving aside the positive aspects of the reception developed in this tradition (cf. Beiser 2005, VIII, 11, 12). A critique of this approach is given by Violeta Weibel in her review of Beiser’s book (see Waibel 2008, 52). For a reply to this objection see Beiser 2008, 63–78, particularly 76–77. Considering this discussion, the term ‘ambiguity’ offers, in my opinion, the most appropriate way to characterise Schiller’s reception in the Marxist tradition. For more details about Schiller’s reception in the twentieth century, see Matuschek 2009, 231–239.
- 2.
Marx/Engels (2010d, 259): ‘Goethe was too universal, too active a nature, too much a man of flesh and blood to seek refuge from this wretchedness in a Schillerian flight to the Kantian ideal; he was too keen-sighted not to see how ultimately such a flight amounted to no more than the exchange of a prosaic form of wretchedness for a grandiloquent one.’
- 3.
Continuing with his critique, Marx writes in this letter: ‘To come down to details, I would censure the sometimes excessive preoccupation of individuals with themselves—the result of your predilection for Schiller’. Ibid.
- 4.
See Refl. 7884, Ak 19: 545: ‘Personalitas non est alienabilis’.
- 5.
Beiser refers to the political context in Germany and claims also that the main aim of the Letters is related to the German discussion between conservatives and radicals. Cf. Beiser (2005, 129–134).
- 6.
- 7.
Cf. Schiller (2010, 137).
- 8.
Cf. NA 20:318, AE:21: ‘If […] in the character of a whole people the subjective man sets his face against objective man with such vehemence of contradiction that the victory of the latter can only be ensured by the suppression of the former, then the State too will have to adopt towards its citizens the solemn rigour of the law, and ruthlessly trample underfoot such powerfully seditious individualism in order not to fall a victim of it’.
- 9.
NA 20: 322, AE:33: ‘How different with us Moderns! With us too the image of the human species is projected in magnified form into separate individuals—but as fragments, not in different combinations, with the result that one has to go the rounds from one individual to another in order to be able to piece together a complete image of species.’
- 10.
See NA 20:317, AE19: ‘The State should not only respect the objective and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honour their subjective and specific character, and in extending the invisible realm of morals take care not to depopulate the sensible realm of appearance.’ See also NA 20:318, AE:21: ‘But just because the State is to be organization formed by itself and for itself, it can only become a reality inasmuch as its parts have been turned up to the idea of the whole. […] Once man is inwardly at one with himself, he will be able to preserve his individuality however much he may universalize his conduct, and the State will be merely the interpreter of his own finest instinct, a clearer formulation of his own sense of what is right.’
- 11.
Marx (2010c, 8): ‘The idea is made the subject and the actual relation of family and civil society to the state is conceived as its internal imaginary activity. Family and civil society are the premises of the state; they are the genuinely active elements, but in speculative philosophy things are inverted’ (Marx 2010c, 8).
- 12.
Marx (2010c, 6): ‘Hegel has further developed one side of the dual identity, namely, the aspect of the estrangement within the unity’.
- 13.
See also Marx (2010c, 10): ‘The transition is thus derived, not from the particular nature of the family, etc., and from the particular nature of the state, but from the general relationship of necessity to freedom’.
- 14.
Marx (2010c, 159): ‘The members of the political state are religious owing to the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious because men treat the political life of the state, an area beyond their real individuality, as if it were their true life. They are religious insofar as religion here is the spirit of civil society, expressing the separation and remoteness of man from man.’
- 15.
See also ibid.: ‘It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself’.
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Rivero, G. (2023). Schiller and Marx on Alienation. 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_35
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