‘The Greenland Wizard’

Abstract

Friedrich Schiller saw man as a duality — on the one hand a sensuous being existing in time and space and therefore constantly subject to change, on the other hand a rational mind which exists independently of time and space and which tends always to unity. The function of culture, in Schiller’s view, was ‘to uphold not only the rational impulse against the sensuous, but also the latter against the former’ (my italics). So, as Schiller continues, the fullest development of man:

will consist of two things: first, providing the receptive faculty with the most multifarious contacts with the world, and as regards feeling, pushing passivity to its fullest extent; secondly, securing for the determining faculty the fullest independence from the receptive, and as regards reason, pushing activity to its fullest extent. Where both qualities are united, Man will combine the greatest fullness of existence with the utmost self-dependence and freedom, and instead of abandoning himself to the world he will rather draw it into himself with the whole infinity of its phenomena, and subject it to the unity of his reason.¹