Analysis of Schiller’s First Letter -5th Letter

The Letter Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794 is about what Schiller felt about degeneration into violence and the failure of successive governments to put its ideal into practice. He wrote the Letter as a philosophical inquiry into what had gone wrong, and how to prevent such tragedies in the future. He also asserts that it is possible to elevate the moral character of a people. Schiller think that the better portion of happiness should not far remove from nobility of human nature. Schiller’s treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man was largely ignored after the initial reactions to its publication. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century the letters were discussed mainly in terms of their political implications. One of the reasons for the sparse critical attention the letters received was that the public’s familiarity with Schiller’s poetic and dramatic works tended to obscure his aesthetic and philosophical writings. The work was seen as Schiller’s failed attempt to “combine Kantian principles with his own terminology, poetic language, and rhetoric.”. In the 1820s, in his lectures on aesthetics at the University of Berlin, Hegel sought to free Schiller’s discourse from the Kantian context in which his work had so far been discussed and compared unfavorably. Hegel went as far as to insist that Schiller had surmounted the limitations inherent in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the most important one being the conception of the aesthetic as performing a merely regulative function in the union of nature and reason. In Hegel’s mind, Schiller had overcome Kantian dualism by getting rid of the Kantian “as if”: the idea that we are to approach nature as if it had a purposiveness of its own, even though in reality that purposiveness is ‘borrowed’ from, or imagined on analogy with, the purposiveness of our own reason. Hegel was not the only one to attempt to disengage Schiller’s work from its Kantian context. Around the same time, Wilhelm von Humboldt became the first commentator to argue that Schiller’s ideas are not merely reworking of Kant but originate in Schiller’s own work from the 1780s. More recently, critics have sought to demonstrate the continuity between Schiller and pre-Kantian German philosophy. Thus, Ernst Cassirer has traced Schiller’s notion of ‘ideal beauty’ back to Leibniz’s Theosophie des Julius, in which Leibniz considers art and nature as analogs of each other. Others ascribe a greater importance to Schiller’s friendship with Goethe than to his readings of Kant. According to this interpretation, Schiller was deeply affected by the consequences of the French Revolution and accepted Goethe’s belief that the poet ought to remain a stranger to his age, that art need not fulfill a moral function. Not everyone subscribed to Hegel’s opinion of Schiller. Hölderlin, among others, refused to credit Schiller with overcoming Kant’s notion of the aesthetic as a regulative idea. Schiller, he believed, failed to acknowledge the ontological or metaphysical status of the aesthetic . He did not remove Kant’s “as if” clause in his interpretation of aesthetic judgment. By stressing the idea of freedom, Schiller subordinated the aesthetic to the moral (like Kant before him) instead of understanding the aesthetic as a means to knowing being itself. These two views—Schiller the moralist, writing in the shadow of Kant, and, on the other hand, Schiller the aesthete. Schiller’s failure to provide a coherent analysis of the relationship between the beautiful and the sublime, can be attributed to his ambivalent relationship to Kant. The point on which there has been most disagreement is the extent to which Schiller merely repeated the Kantian gesture of subsuming the aesthetic under the moral (conceiving the aesthetic merely as a means to a higher end, the moral state) or he actually gave the aesthetic its due (regarding aesthetic education as an end in itself). The idea of the moral as the higher end of the development of aesthetic intuition was by no means new at the end of the eighteenth century. The notion of moral sensibility was prevalent in eighteenth century Germany as part of the more general concept of Sentiment (“Empfindsamkeit”), according to which “properly cultivated emotions are our most reliable moral guides.” The source of Schiller’s concept of nature as ideal should be sought namely in the rise of the sentimental attitude. The ambiguities in Schiller’s treatment of the aesthetic both as an end in itself and as a means to a higher moral end have been attributed to the social structure of eighteenth century Germany, particularly to the process of bourgeois emancipation: “The willingness to assume a guise of equality with the middle class on the part of the nobility was matched by a parallel tendency on the part of the Bürger to aspire to the ethical and cultural ideals of the courtier.” Thus the mixture of progressive and reactionary tendencies in Schiller’s aesthetic should be ascribed to the paradox that while the letters were addressed to a representative of the nobility (whose name was eventually suppressed upon the letters’ publication in Die Horen), and as liberal-minded as their addressee was, what Schiller was trying to do in the letters was precisely to transcend class distinctions in the public sphere. The ambiguity of the aesthetic is, therefore, at least partly due to the diplomatic strategy adopted by Schiller, a strategy “which walks a narrow line between the presentation of democratic ideals and the need to assure Augustenburg that he [Schiller] is not interested in inciting the public to revolutionary action.”