Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (review)

During the recent Schiller bicentennial the celebration of his status as a poet and playwright tended to exclude an assessment of his significance as a philosopher. Frederick Beiser's monograph makes good this deficit, explicitly acknowledging what a number of recent studies – including Steven D. Martinson's Harmonious Tensions (1996), which emphasizes the physiological aspects of Schiller's thought, and David Pugh's Dialectic of Love (1996), which emphasizes the Platonic – have realized: namely, that Schiller's philosophical aesthetics deserve serious scholarly attention. "The point is to study Schiller, not revere him" (4), says Beiser in his introduction, but he is also clear that he has come "not to bury Schiller but to praise him" (viii, 171). Do Schiller's arguments make philosophical sense? The problems in Schiller's thought are, Beiser acknowledges, ultimately such first-order ones as the relation between freedom and determinism (from which, as he points out, no philosophical argument is ever entirely free). Beiser answers therefore in the af-firmative.

Schiller's earliest philosophical writings, the medical dissertations, were written against the background of the Scottish Enlightenment and French materialism in general and the influence of J. F. Abel in particular. Given the strong evidence of Schiller's early dualistic outlook, the importance of G. E. Stahl for his early meta-physics is, Beiser argues, less than it is sometimes said to be. In fact, the distinction between the metaphysical and the transcendental is "one of the most important dividing markers" between the young and the mature Schiller (152), although it is in Schiller's post-1790, Kant-inspired texts that a latent dualism persists, just as it continued to pose a problem for post-Kantian philosophy as a whole (216). Schiller's attempts to come to term with this dualism, through the unity of opposites and "identity-in-difference," are said to anticipate the later German idealism of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel (151).

In the so-called Kallias-Briefe (1793), Schiller developed Kant's insinuation in the third Kritik of a close connection between aesthetic judgment and practical reason, defining beauty as "freedom in appearance" (60), an ambiguous phrase, inasmuch as it can be read, contrary to Schiller's intentions, metaphysically (64). The link between the moral and the aesthetic implied in Schiller's concept of "heautonomy," the idea of an "inner" (not an "outer") necessity according to which an object determines itself, underpins the unjustly neglected (but recently re-translated) treatise Über Anmut und Würde (1793). Beiser's account elucidates how grace(fulness) accompanies the performance or execution of the moral principle, never its justification or constitution, and he draws attention to the work of Wieland, rather than Shaftesbury, as a source of Schiller's account of moral beauty. This attempt, in Beiser's words, to "wed the sensible realm of beauty with the intelligible realm of morality" reveals Schiller's ongoing Auseinandersetzung with Kant (105). And in Schiller's dual presentation of the ideal of humanity as, at one point, residing in grace and, at another, residing in grace and dignity (80, 116), Beiser detects a hint at Schiller's tragic outlook (114), on which he later expands.

In a previous study, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (1992), Beiser had located Schiller's Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) in the liberal tradition. Here, he argues in favour of placing it in the republican tradition. The treatise, he explains, is structured around a series of both empirical (or "genetic") and transcendental (or "speculative") questions, which means that art is considered both as a means to an end and as an end in itself (137). Any charge of inconsistency must take account of this distinction or must itself be dismissed. Equally important, in Beiser's view, is Schiller's differentiation in the footnote to Letter 19 between freedom in a moral sense (of autonomy) and freedom in an anthropological sense (of wholeness), to which, from Über das Pathetische (1793), Beiser adds a third sense of freedom...