In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 7 Romantic Ethics No text influenced early Romantic thinkers and poets in Germany more than Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. In that work the philosopher had given a real content to the self, which had been missing in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason the self had appeared as no more than the “unity of apperception,” that is, the synthesizing function that unifies the data presented by sense intuitions and imagination, while in the second half the idea of the self appears as a regulative concept, the real content of which must remain unknown, since the human mind possesses no intellectual intuitions. In the Critique of Practical Reason, however, Kant claimed that in the voice of conscience, the human mind does have an intuitive knowledge of the moral obligation to follow the commands of reason. The individual thereby attains the spiritual level of personhood as free, responsible being. An ethical quality, then, belongs to the very essence of the person.1 When reading the second Critique, the young Schelling had exclaimed : “From Kant’s practical philosophy I expect an intellectual revolution in Germany!” The idea of freedom became the manifesto of a new humanism. It inspired Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Fichte concluded from it that a person’s moral attitude , conceived as the degree of his awareness of freedom, defined his way of thinking and being. The starting point of Fichte’s theory of knowledge is that even to one who had never meditated on his own moral vocation—even for him, his sensuous world and his belief in its reality arise in no other manner than from his ideas of a moral world. 192 Romantic Ethics | 193 The Moral Id eals of Early German Romantics Schiller had been and always remained a fervent supporter of the political principles of the French Revolution. Yet after the human abuses that had accompanied it, he realized that political freedom required a moral education . In On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters he denounced the moral immaturity of the revolutionaries. “Man has roused himself from his long indolence and self-deception and, by an impressive majority, is demanding restitution of his inalienable rights. . . . There seems to be a physical possibility of setting law upon the throne, of honoring man at last as an end in himself, and making true freedom the basis of political association. Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a moment so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it” (V, 2).2 He attributes the failure to the mistake of regarding the principles of abstract reason as the shortest way to human emancipation. “That Enlightenment of the mind, which is the not altogether groundless boast of our refined classes, has had on the whole so little of an ennobling influence on feeling and character that it has tended rather to bolster up depravity by providing it with the support of precepts.” Instead , he argues that a cultivation of the aesthetic sense would be a more effective preparation for moral and civic virtue. Even Kant’s noble philosophy of freedom had failed by neglecting to take our sensuous nature into account. Freedom, Schiller argues, requires the cooperation of the two main drives that move a human being: the sensuous and the spiritual. The instinct of self-preservation inspires the sensuous one. The spiritual drive impels humans to seek eternal truths and permanent values. Rationalist morality sacrifices the sensuous drive to the law of reason. The morally noble person succeeds in holding the two in balance. In the central Letters X–XV, Schiller holds that nothing can teach this balance as effectively as a developed aesthetic sense. Nor, he claims, is that sense difficult to develop. The mind spontaneously attains a momentary balance between the two drives each time it moves from sense perception to intellectual conceptualization or from sensuous desire to rational decision. “The transition from a passive state of feeling to an active one of thinking and willing cannot take place except via a middle state of aesthetic freedom” (XXIII, 2). If the mind lingers in this middle state for the sake of experiencing the balance between sense and reason, it remains in the aesthetic sphere, an essential passage to the ethical. In the final Letters XXVI–XXVII, Schiller returns to the question he had raised...

Share