In embodying this kind of perfection, grace provides evidence of a unity of the moral and aesthetic that Kantian philosophy, in the process of making its conceptual distinctions, provisionally disrupts. In addition to better reflecting metaphysical truth, emphasizing the unity of the moral and the aesthetic, Schiller thinks, will produce better results.
Brutally suppressing our sensual side will not be successful in the long run:. The enemy who has been merely laid low can get up again, but the one who is reconciled has been truly overcome. Although Schiller describes the beautiful soul as an ideal of human harmony, he acknowledges that circumstances sometimes make that harmony impossible. Because humans are natural creatures, they are susceptible to pleasure and pain.
But whereas other animals are motivated solely by this susceptibility, humans in addition have reason. In such a moment, harmony is impossible and the person in question cannot achieve moral beauty. The appearance of such a soul, its embodiment in action, is not grace but dignity. As an example, Schiller imagines someone whose extreme physical pain is evident in his body.
In several essays on tragedy, some of which predate his period of intense philosophical engagement, Schiller continued to refine his thoughts on human dignity in the face of suffering.
In answer, Schiller draws on the Kantian distinction between reason and sensibility. The moral law, he continues, is objectively true and autonomously constructed, whereas our senses produce states we passively suffer.
Because we know this, instances in which we respond to conflict by mastering our emotions in deference to the moral law give us pleasure. Struggle against our sensuous natures in order to act autonomously, in other words, allows us to witness what is most impressive about humans, namely our free will. Because we recognize our ability to overcome our sensuous nature as the highest expression of our humanity, observing someone else struggle and triumph over her emotions makes us sympathize with her, and this sympathy also gives us pleasure.
In this early essay, then, Schiller defines tragedy as the art that imitates nature in those actions most apt to arouse sympathy. Schiller similarly reports that we call an object sublime if. Thus, we come up short against a sublime object physically , but we elevate ourselves above it morally , namely, through ideas. The practically sublime, by contrast, concerns nature as an object of feeling, specifically as a source of danger and fear.
But in being confronted by a storm or natural disaster, we also become aware of our power to remain calm in the face of danger. They thus allow us to acknowledge that as sensual beings, we are never safe from disease, loss, and death, but we know that we can face even our own annihilation with dignified calm. Human beings can also be what Schiller calls magnificent: they can, through physical or mental prowess, defeat what they fear.
The sublime, by contrast, shows humans succumbing to the fearful but not fearing it. Counterintuitively, this means accepting the suffering and, in the process, transforming it into voluntary submission. The fact that the sublime can provide this evidence of our autonomy, Schiller continues, means that it offers something beauty cannot.
But such a person, if never tested, may never become aware of her moral powers. Here Schiller reiterates his claim that the beautiful and the sublime together complete human nature:. Only if the sublime is married to the beautiful and our sensitivity to both has been shaped in equal measure, are we complete citizens of nature, without on that account being its slaves, and without squandering our citizenship in the intelligible world.
Achieving this completeness requires practice, and art can provide us with that practice. When we encounter actual misfortune, we may find ourselves defenseless and easily overwhelmed. Once the pathetic becomes sublime by eliciting this response of freedom, it ceases to be merely pathetic and becomes aesthetic. Any display of freedom in the face of suffering, even if that suffering is for an immoral cause, elicits our admiration.
The self-sacrifice of Leonidas at Thermopylae, for instance, elicits both a positive moral and a positive aesthetic judgment:. Judged from a moral perspective, this action portrays for me the moral law being carried out in complete contradiction of instinct.
Judged aesthetically, it portrays to me the moral capability of a human being, independent of all coercion by instinct. The more morally a character acts, in other words, the more she adheres to a law; the more she adheres to a law, the less freely she acts and the less aesthetic interest she generates. It has also generated praise and critique in more contemporary theorizing.
Recent history had shown with painful clarity that if the moral character of the people is not developed, even the most idealistic revolution will fail. A vicious cycle suggests that without the state there can be no morality and without morality there can be no state. The artist, then, is called upon to influence the world for the good, resisting the distractions of the present in the interest of humanity itself. Schiller exhorts his fellow artists to surround their contemporaries with.
At this point, however, Schiller admits a problem: historically speaking, art has often had a corrupting effect. But against what are we to assess historical definitions of art? Such an inquiry would seem to presuppose a concept of beauty; if that concept itself comes from historical examples, the question of how to evaluate art objectively remains unresolved.
Schiller thus begins, in Letter 11, with an examination of human nature. The self Schiller associates with autonomous personhood, independence, and form; our condition he associates with embodiment, dependence, and matter. In Letter 12, Schiller claims that humans are impelled towards the fulfillment of this imperative by two corresponding drives, the form drive [ Formtrieb ] and the sense drive [ Sachtrieb ].
It situates the human within time and so within change:. It wants the real to be necessary and eternal, and the eternal and the necessary to be real. In other words, it insists on truth and on the right. In action, the form drive is concerned with dignity; the sense drive is concerned with self-preservation. In politics, the form drive results in abstract principles; the sense drive results in lawlessness. In holding the first two drives in harmony, the play drive frees humans of the domination of each:.
Forbidden by the duke to continue writing, Schiller abandoned his post as a military doctor and fled to Mannheim. In Schiller accepted a one-year contract to be playwright at the National Theater.
Over the course of the year he wrote two plays, but neither secured Schiller a renewal of his contract. Schiller relocated to Leipzig and then to Dresden. During this time he produced another drama, which he completed in But he had grown tired of drama and frustrated with his own capacity for literary production.
In nature the artist discovers the laws of beauty. For example, in a tree he perceives the form of a pillar, and in the crescent moon the artist becomes aware of the mystery of the universe. For Schiller reality was merely illusion; only in the higher, spiritual realm was truth to be found.
Just as the stage had changed into a tribunal in his famous poem Die Kraniche des Ibykus, so to him true art changes into higher reality. It forms the basis of modern poetry criticism.
In it Schiller points out that the "naive" poet has an advantage over other poets in his powerful, sensitive, and inherent clarity, while the "sentimentalische" poet has an advantage in his power of moral enthusiasm. By now Schiller had reached an artistic maturity incompatible with moralizing.
In his philosophical poem Das Ideal und das Leben the poet presents no clumsy didactic lesson. No mention of reward or recompense for the sufferer, or of moral striving after inner freedom, is made. The subject of this poem is purely the growth of a powerful personality beyond the confines of the self into a higher world. In Schiller completed his great trilogy on Albrecht von Wallenstein, the condottiere of the Thirty Years War. In them he comes nearest to the tragic grandeur of William Shakespeare and Heinrich von Kleist.
The Wallenstein plays stress Schiller's view of man as a creative force, and they exhibit his concept of historical inevitability. Schiller ennobles Wallenstein as a great creative statesman who bows before inexorable fate.
Wallenstein recognizes his guilt and acknowledges the justice of his end because he realizes that every evil deed brings with it its angel of revenge. The famous literary friendship between Goethe and Schiller began in earnest in On July 20, , after a meeting in Jena of a nature society of which both were honorary members, Goethe went to Schiller's house to continue a discussion on the interpretation of natural phenomena, the metamorphosis of plants, and the interrelationship or separation between idea and experience.
Goethe believed he had "observed with his own eyes" tangible truths of nature that Schiller, however, called "ideas. Schiller enjoyed the friendship of Goethe, with whom he began editing the literary journals Horen and Musenalmanach Goethe's residence in Weimar was a main reason for Schiller's move there, from Jena with his family, in During his Weimar years Schiller created many of his finest plays and poems. Schiller wrote his most popular play, Maria Stuart, in He employed tragic irony as an artistic means in the memorable scene between the two queens in which Mary speaks daggers to Elizabeth but is hoist with her own petard.
Mary remains a noble and tragic character right up to the scaffold. As with Elizabeth, the decisive factor in her fate lies in her personality and not in politics. Mary's death is subject not to "poetic justice" but to the justice of human conscience.
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