Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation (review)

With the publication of Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, its editors Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker have made a significant and noteworthy contribution to the field of German Studies. Curran’s masterful translation renders Schiller’s challenging text into highly readable and eloquent prose. This scholarly volume also includes a reprint of Schiller’s text from the Nationalausgabe and five strong essays that illuminate Schiller’s project from rhetorical, socio-political, philosophical, dramatic, and poetic angles. All quotations are given in both German and English, rendering the apparatus completely accessible to those who do not read German.

As its title indicates, this new edition presents Schiller’s essay in its cultural-historical context, which each of the contributors develops in fruitful ways. In their introduction, Curran and Fricker offer a pithy summary of Schiller’s argument, a discussion of its reception, and a persuasive rationale for this new translation. Their attention to the essay’s creative reception is particularly welcome, underscoring the influence it has enjoyed in the work of Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich Hebbel, and Stefan George; their brisk exploration of the scholarly reception focuses on significant issues successive commentaries have addressed, including the consistency and validity of Schiller’s argument, his rhetorical techniques, the influence of Kant and other philosophers, and the essay as social engagement.

Jane Curran’s fluid examination of Schiller’s essay as “rhetorical philosophy” attends to Schiller’s descriptive language, which she deems the “distinctive feature of his aesthetic writings” (23). Defending Schiller’s rigor despite his apparent conceptual laxity, she considers his choice of genre and endorses Benjamin’s concept of the “esoteric essay” for its “admixture of philosophical, poetic, and rhetorical figures, as well as Schiller’s ability to grant a tight structure to some passages while leaving the outer contours ill-defined” (25). She thus accounts for contrasting stylistic differences with Kant, arguing that Schiller’s promotion of aesthetic education is already present here in his attention to presentation and effect. This is likewise reflected in Schiller’s commitment to publishing (in) journals as a means of proliferating his ideas and of unifying reading with the critique and practice of art.

In his provocative article, David Pugh shrewdly re-evaluates the immediate historical context for Schiller’s essay, tempering both the affirmation bestowed by some post-war critics who have ignored the considerable ambiguity in Schiller’s politics and others’ damnation of Schiller as “an intellectual precursor of Nazism” (42). He insists that Schiller’s turn to the theoretical investigation of aesthetics is grounded in the poet’s commitment to the political aspirations of the Enlightenment, which he believed had been thwarted by the course of the French Revolution. Arguing that Schiller’s interest in politics is, however, “highly abstract . . . consisting almost entirely of an adherence to general moral principles,” Pugh dismisses the conflation of Schiller’s concept of grace with a liberal, Book Reviews that is, representative government committed to establishing and protecting civil rights. He contends that Schiller, ever a man of his time, supported the ends of government envisioned by the Enlightenment, but not its means: for Schiller a liberal government is “a manner in which a monarchy can conduct itself” (47). What emerges is a view of the celebrated poet and aesthetician as a thinker whose response to contemporary strains in society and culture was “unmistakably anti-modern,” (49) and whose attitude toward freedom constituted an ambivalent mix of “devotion and anxiety” (51).

Fritz Heuer’s elegant contribution focuses on the concept of receptivity and its connection to “human Being,” the aesthetic experience, and freedom (55). Firmly rooting Schiller’s essay in the context of Kant’s first and third critiques, Heuer highlights Schiller’s indebtedness to and departure from Kantian transcendental philosophy. Schiller’s achievement, he concludes, consists in “redefin[ing] the concept of grace in such...