Aesthetic Education for Morality: Schiller and Kant

Introduction

Kant's Critique of Judgment was published in 1790. Schiller's writings from the 1790s dealing with aesthetics and ethics are intertwined, simultaneously, both with an affirmative reception of Kant's ideas and with critical attitudes against them. This applies to, among other, essays such as On Grace and Dignity (1793), Kallias (Schiller's letters to Gottfried Körner, 1793), On the Sublime (1793/4), On the Risk of Aesthetic Virtues (1795), and especially to the essay On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters, dated 1795, and to the original letters in this matter sent by Schiller one to two years earlier to Herzog Friedrich-Christian von Augustenburg.

In these writings Schiller himself declared his loyalty to Kant's principles, saying that his own ideas are not original but rather committed to the philosopher's basic concepts.¹ This statement, however, like the philosophical concepts that Schiller often used inconsistently,² and, in particular, the main theses introduced in his writings, are highly problematic. Schiller's declarations of loyalty to Kant's principles at times harshly contradict his critical positions regarding these very principles. It seems that Schiller maintained a complex, inconstant, and ambivalent attitude toward philosophy in general and toward Kant in particular.³

The most blatant contradiction in Schiller's philosophy in this context pertains to the main concern of his theory—the affinity between the aesthetic realm and the concept of moral society. The letters of On the Aesthetic Education of Man present two incongruent theses: On the one hand they present the assertion that aesthetic education may psychologically serve the realization of morality (a la Kant) and thus also establish a free society.⁴ Aesthetic education— which in this context should not be distinguished essentially from the unmediated aesthetic experience⁵ —is conceived according to this thesis not as an end in itself but rather as a means for actualizing an external, heteronomous end: realizing the principles of morality and Man's liberty. This view is in line with an assertion found in Kant's writings, implying a possible pedagogical link between aesthetics and ethics.⁶

On the other hand, however, Schiller presented in his essay another argument, according to which it is the constitution of an aesthetic experience within social and interpersonal relations that is the realization of morality and human emancipation.⁷ This, I believe, is one of the most radical notions ever introduced in the history of politology.⁸ The aesthetic experience is conceived here as an end in itself, for even morality and the principle of the free society are formulated in aesthetic terms. Nevertheless, to the best of my understanding, this radical notion is opposed to Kant's conceptions and goes beyond the relations between aesthetics and ethics asserted by the philosopher. "Aesthetic morality"—which is supposed to exist in a free society that does not abide by laws heteronomously enforced on its individuals, nor by ethical, moral maxims determined autonomously and rationally, as it were, that present themselves to the individual as a "duty," but rather a society that operates as a system of unmediated aesthetic interrelations among its members—such "morality," it seems, may be comprehended as contradictio ad adjecto in Kantian terms.⁹

At any rate, Schiller's philosophical preoccupation with aesthetics goes significantly beyond art criticism or a philosophical discussion of the Beautiful, the Sublime, and the conditions for their constitution; essentially it involves a historical, sociopolitical, and moral discussion, which is chiefly concerned with the realization of Man's freedom in his world. Schiller's reflections on aesthetics thus become an all-embracing, philosophical anthropology.

Hegel, who thought highly of Schiller's philosophy (and in the same context saw no important significance in Goethe's philosophical ideas), maintained that "It is Schiller who must be given great credit for breaking through the Kantian subjectivity and abstraction of thinking and venturing on an attempt to get beyond this by intellectually grasping the unity and reconciliation as the truth and by actualizing them in artistic production."¹⁰ Hegel praised the "unity of universal and particular, freedom and necessity, spirit and...