Volume 1,
December 2004, http://intertheory.org
ISSN
1552-5112
Schiller’s On
the Aesthetic Education of Man: The Origins of the Postmodern Sublime in
the Ethical Evaluation of the Aesthetic
Schiller’s
treatise On the Aesthetic Education of
Man was largely ignored after the initial reactions to its publication. Up
to the middle of the nineteenth century the letters were discussed mainly in
terms of their political implications. One of the reasons for the sparse
critical attention the letters received was that the public’s familiarity with
Schiller’s poetic and dramatic works tended to obscure his aesthetic and
philosophical writings. The work was seen as Schiller’s failed attempt to
“combine Kantian principles with his own terminology, poetic language, and
rhetoric.”[1] In the
1820s, in his lectures on aesthetics at the
Hegel was
not the only one to attempt to disengage Schiller’s work from its Kantian
context. Around the same time, Wilhelm von Humboldt became the first
commentator to argue that Schiller’s ideas are not merely reworkings of Kant
but originate in Schiller’s own work from the 1780s.[2] More
recently, critics have sought to demonstrate the continuity between Schiller
and pre-Kantian German philosophy. Thus, Ernst Cassirer has traced Schiller’s
notion of ‘ideal beauty’ back to Leibniz’s Theosophie
des Julius, in which Leibniz considers art and nature as analogs of each
other.[3] Others
ascribe a greater importance to Schiller’s friendship with Goethe than to his
readings of Kant. According to this interpretation, Schiller was deeply affected
by the consequences of the French Revolution and accepted Goethe’s belief that
the poet ought to remain a stranger to his age, that art need not fulfill a
moral function. Not everyone subscribed to Hegel’s opinion of Schiller.
Hölderlin, among others, refused to credit Schiller with overcoming Kant’s
notion of the aesthetic as a regulative idea. Schiller, he believed, failed to
acknowledge the ontological or metaphysical status of the aesthetic i.e., he
did not remove Kant’s “as if” clause in his interpretation of aesthetic
judgment. By stressing the idea of freedom, Schiller subordinated the aesthetic
to the moral (like Kant before him) instead of understanding the aesthetic as a
means to knowing being itself.
These two views—Schiller
the moralist, writing in the shadow of Kant, and, on the other hand, Schiller
the aesthete, the last artist of the Sturm
und Drang, the descendent of Spinoza, Leibniz, Lessing, and Herder, rather
than Kant—have dominated Schiller scholarship since the publication of AEM, privileging Schiller’s relationship
to Kant as the focal point of debate. Whatever the degree to which Schiller was
influenced by Kant, it is very likely that the inconsistencies and
contradictions in AEM, and especially
Schiller’s failure to provide a coherent analysis of the relationship between
the beautiful and the sublime, can be attributed to his ambivalent relationship
to Kant. The point on which there has been most disagreement is the extent to
which Schiller merely repeated the Kantian gesture of subsuming the aesthetic
under the moral (conceiving the aesthetic merely as a means to a higher end,
the moral state) or he actually gave the aesthetic its due (regarding aesthetic
education as an end in itself). The idea of the moral as the higher end of the
development of aesthetic intuition was by no means new at the end of the
eighteenth century. The notion of moral sensibility was prevalent in eighteenth
century
As early
as 1892, in his survey of Weimar Classicism entitled Die klassische Ästhetik der Deutschen: Würdigung der kunsttheoretischen
Arbeiten Schiller’s Goethe’s und ihrer Freunde, Otto Harnack argues that
the most important and fascinating aspect of
AEM is Schiller’s failure to integrate the beautiful and the sublime.
Harnack’s argument prefigures the current debate around the relationship
between the aesthetic and the ethical, a debate that foregrounds the sublime as
precisely the obstacle to formulating a unified aesthetic theory. In his 1957
article “Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthetics,”
Dieter Heinrich points to the continuity between Schiller’s treatment of the
sublime and postmodern aesthetic theory by arguing that moral freedom cannot be
symbolized by the beautiful since freedom resists sensibility while the
beautiful requires harmony. More recently, Rolf-Peter Janz has drawn attention
to the relevance of Schiller’s aesthetics to the postmodern debate around the
unrepresentable, arguing that Schiller’s attempt to synthesize the beautiful
and the sublime might be construed as an attempt to reduce (or disguise) the
violence of the sublime. Finally, in his article “Rethinking the Aesthetic:
Kant, Schiller, and Hegel” Stephen Boos summarizes the importance of Schiller’s
aesthetic writings to contemporary debates: “The attempt to rethink the
relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic requires a return to Kant,
Schiller, and Hegel, since it is largely through their efforts that the modern
notion of the aesthetic as the reconciling unity of spirit and nature, duty and
inclination, and reason and feeling was first invented.”[8] Boos
observes, however, that if Schiller and Hegel were concerned with finding a way
to reconcile spirit and nature, the universal and the particular, “[i]t is no
longer so obvious that it is the task of art to seek reconciliation. …Indeed,
it would appear that art has ceased to believe in its ability to provide such
absolute reconciliations but instead now devotes its energies to exposing the
paradoxes and contradictions in the attempt of philosophy to provide such
absolute syntheses. In this sense, art may have attained a self-consciousness
that philosophy still lacks.”[9] Thus, the
debate over the relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic has been
moved to a higher, self-referential plane:
postmodern aesthetics is no longer
concerned with reconciling the ethical and the aesthetic but with judging the
ethical character of such a reconciliation in the first place. Yet it is
precisely in this attempt to present the task of art as exposing the conflicts
between reason and nature and the ideological nature of reconciliation, in this
self-referential gesture of judging itself from an ethical point of view, in
the attainment of self-consciousness Boos praises, that art has gradually allowed
itself to be determined by, and finally subordinated to, ethics.
This shift
has been carried out through an implicit doubling of the category of the
ethical: the ethical now functions as, at one and the same time, the object of the debate (the other object
being the aesthetic) and the criterion
determining the outcome of the debate (since it is namely the ethical
nature of the debate that is put into question). This increasing
self-referentiality or self-awareness of the aesthetic is at the heart of Lyotard’s
reading of the proto-ethical (ontological) aspect of the postmodern sublime. It
is precisely the contradictions the sublime generates in the attempt of
eighteenth century thinkers to establish a unified aesthetic theory that
provoke the increasing concern in postmodern aesthetics with the ethical
evaluation of the aesthetic reconciliation of reason and nature.
Schiller
offers us On the Aesthetic Education of
Man[10] as an
aesthetic object and, with that, places his work in a strange position. Being an aesthetic object by virtue of its
effect on the reader–it invokes feelings and leaves the reader free–it is also
a superfluous object. To claim that it could have any sort of emancipatory or
pedagogical function would contradict its aesthetic nature since the aesthetic
object is not supposed to fulfill a purpose or be useful in any way. The work is, thus, a treaty on aesthetic
education without being itself educational.
Yet, as much as Schiller would like us to perceive his work as an
aesthetic object, we wouldn’t be justified in doing so. In the very last letter, Schiller undermines
his own argument about the ‘innocence’ of the aesthetic object, reducing the
aesthetic to notions of refinement and decorum thereby disclosing the illusory
freedom it offers: “taste throws a veil
of decorum over [naked] physical desires...and, by a delightful illusion of freedom, conceals from us our degrading
kinship with matter”(219 italics added).
This rather cynical passage exposes the ambivalent nature of the
idealistic tone of the letters, and points to Schiller’s failure to distinguish
the aesthetic from any interpretations of it as a veil, as a concealment of and
a threat to Truth.
The work’s
unstable status is a reflection of an instability pervading Schiller’s thought. The question whether the work is a
philosophical treaty or an aesthetic object[11] opens up
the old feud between art and philosophy; it is also a manifestation of the
central dichotomy in Schiller’s writing, that of nature and reason, sense and
form, feeling and thinking, limit and infinity, necessity and freedom. All these oppositions appear in the double
vision of psychological material raised to the status of a transcendental
ground. Schiller is intent on a rigorous
transcendental derivation of beauty, which will pass through a psychological
territory and thus bring closer Idea and Reality, although not in the sense of
showing reality fulfill the idea but in the sense of defending the Idea of the union of Reality and Idea.[12] The goal of this idealistic program is to
unify the sensual and the rational part of human nature, the former governed by
the principle of unity, the latter by the principle of separation. A real union must sublimate the differences
between the two entities without privileging either. However, in the union of
nature (unity) and reason (separation), the principle of nature will be unduly
valorized.[13] Schiller is aware of this danger, and,
throughout the letters, we see him elaborating the relationship between nature
and reason over and over again, reformulating it through various substitute
terms[14]
(matter/spirit, content/form etc.), trying to keep the two sides of the
dichotomy equal. What he accomplishes
instead is a not very craftily disguised valorization of reason--in all its
manifestations--over nature. Trying to make the distinctions clear, he falls
into inconsistencies, which concern not only the relationship between nature
and reason but the very status of the aesthetic as a category i.e., its
relationship to philosophy and, ultimately, to Truth. By the end of AEM, it is no longer certain that Schiller has managed to rescue
the aesthetic as an entity absolutely independent of Truth, as a
non-philosophical category,[15] or that
he ever intended to do so. Indeed, with
his identification of the aesthetic with the essentially human, Schiller does
what he sets out to avoid: he ontologizes the aesthetic.[16] The
question of the aesthetic becomes the question of the being of man, being,
which, Schiller argues, is never fully attained.
This
definition of the human in terms of privation (man does not exist, only the
idea of man does), rather than in terms of perfectibility, is what gives
Schiller’s aesthetic a curious postmodern twist, aligning him with certain
trends in twentieth century aesthetic, particularly Jean-Francois Lyotard’s and
Barnett Newman’s aesthetic of the sublime. This brings us to the question we
have been meaning to ask from the beginning: why is the sublime absent from AEM, or is it really absent?[17] Does not the problem of the union of nature
and reason, in all its versions, as well as Schiller’s persistent interest in
the ontological significance of the aesthetic, lead us back to another
separation, or rather an exclusion, one that precedes, and perhaps explains,
the separation of nature from reason?
Are not the difficulties Schiller faces as he tries to balance nature
and reason so as to create the impression
of a real reciprocity between them, a reflection of the one-sidedness of his
method, a method limiting the aesthetic education of man to the beautiful? Is not the ontologizing of the aesthetic the
form, in which the excluded sublime reasserts itself, claiming the place it has
been denied in Schiller’s ambitious program as a corrective for the Enlightenment
philosophical project? Schiller cannot
exile the sublime; the latter keeps reappearing in the text, often at the very
moment when Schiller is supposedly defining and exemplifying the beautiful. The sublime reasserts itself either directly,
in the cases when Schiller intends to give an example of the beautiful and
instead gives an example of the sublime,[18] and
indirectly, as the reason for the inconsistencies and slippages in Schiller’s
analysis of the relation between nature and reason,[19] in his
preoccupation with the question of freedom (the standard-bearer of the
sublime), and in the ontologizing of the aesthetic, which places Schiller right
at the heart of avant-garde aesthetics.
Although
Schiller claims that semblance is independent from truth and does not threaten
it, he fails to dissociate the two completely.
To begin with, the very ideal which Schiller sets as both the origin of
humanity and the end of aesthetic education[20] —the
Greeks—provides a philosophical conception of the aesthetic, relating the
latter to truth. For the Greeks, poetry and speculation (philosophy) “could,
when need arose, exchange functions, since each in its own fashion paid honor
to truth”(31). Greek art is not praised
for what, supposedly, will be the role of the aesthetic in Schiller’s
project—independence from truth. If
Greek art was capable of preserving its autonomy regardless of the fact that it did not “stop short of truth,” while art in Schiller’s time must “stop short of truth” if it is to
be pure semblance, then the relationship of the aesthetic to truth is not in
itself inadmissible or impossible but rather that relationship has deteriorated
to such an extent that the only way the aesthetic can be preserved is to
separate it completely from the truth it can no longer express. Thus, although Schiller would like us to
believe that his only motive for making the aesthetic autonomous is to reveal
its transcendental ground, we might ask whether his real motive might not be a
certain disappointment or even pessimism, a pessimism that can be withstood
only by a radical gesture such as that, by which art renounces any claims to
truth. This attempt at
self-justification, masked as a triumphant assertion of art’s autonomy,
reappears in the ontological analysis of man in the anxiety underlying
Schiller’s notion of man as pure semblance.
The same gesture is repeated here—just as art is declared autonomous
because it can no longer express truth as it once did (the Greeks), and this is
then disguised as art’s transcendental ground rather than as its failure, man
is declared free because he can imagine himself free, because, as the example
of the statesman-artist shows, he can recognize a dissimulation of freedom when
he sees one, and this fictional freedom is then disguised as a transcendental
ground of freedom. The artist is openly
described as a manipulator who creates the appearance of freedom: “For the
material he is handling he has not a whit more respect than has the artisan;
but the eye which would seek to protect the freedom of the material he will
endeavor to deceive by a show of yielding to the latter”(19). The artist does not make his material appear
as if for the first time (as it is, for example, in Heidegger) but pretends to
be an extension of the material’s freedom. The artist acts as if his material were free when it is he who is free to use the
material and free to pretend that he is not free. Things get even more complicated with the
comparison between the artist and the statesman-artist. For the latter “Man is
at once the material on which he works and the goal towards which he
strives”(19). Man, we know by now, is
man as Idea. Hence, to avoid the
absurdity of having as a goal what has already been achieved (Man as material),
we must assume that Schiller here makes a distinction between Man as potential
and Man as a goal, as a manifestation or actualization of that potential or
archetype. But such a distinction is
impossible in Schiller the idealist, since an ideal split into potentiality and
actualization is a contradiction in terms.
The
impossibility of ever attaining the ideal necessitates the identification of
potential or medium and goal, which means nothing less than their mutual
cancellation: unrealizable potential is not, strictly speaking, a potential,
and a goal that does not stand at the end of a way is not, strictly speaking, a
goal. The goal of the statesman-artist is to ennoble the nature of man. While the statesman-artist’s responsibility
is to make man responsive to beauty, he does not himself create objects of
beauty. On one hand, then, aesthetic
education will set man free but, on the other hand, man will attain this
freedom by making aesthetic judgments about works of art that only give the appearance of freedom.[21] Presumably, by looking at the material of the
artist and finding it free, man, becoming aware of himself as material in the
hands of the statesman-artist will also find himself free. However, Schiller admits that the artist’s
material is not free. To avoid the
disturbing implication that man will also only appear to be free, Schiller must assume that the aesthetically
ennobled man—like Schiller himself—will be aware of the artist’s
dissimulation. Man will feel free not because he identifies with the artist’s material
but because he identifies with the artist’s freedom to simulate unfreedom. Rather than a positive, active force, this
freedom is a mere self-defense against the threat of unfreedom. Its inessential character is hinted at in a
footnote to letter twenty, where Schiller admits that “aesthetic freedom is
distinguishable from logical necessity in thinking, or moral necessity in
willing, only by the fact that the laws according to which the psyche then
behaves do not become apparent as such,
and since they encounter no resistance, never
appear as a constraint”(143 italics added).
The freedom Schiller envisions as a result of the reciprocal action of
the two drives is not transcendental freedom but a secondary, derivative
freedom. This is not the “freedom that
necessarily appertains to man considered as intelligent being, and which can
neither be given unto him nor taken from him, but only that freedom which is
founded upon his mixed nature. By acting rationally at all man displays freedom
of the first order; by acting rationally within the limits of matter, and
materially under the laws of reason, he displays freedom of the second order”
(137).[22]
In the
context of the preceding discussion, Schiller’s motives for insisting on pure
semblance as man’s real nature become an interesting issue. In letter nineteen he argues that negation by
itself cannot produce reality (129) but there must be something positive given a priori, which can then fall
straightway to negation. One wonders what could Schiller’s reason be for defining
the human in terms of privation, as a lack or as something that is yet to come,
but never actually does. Since this view
of humanity is a negation of the common view, which takes man for granted, one
has to look at the particular historical reality that has supported such a view
and find what in that reality makes the negation of the common view of man
desirable. Schiller describes that
reality in letter six, revealing what seems to be an unbridgeable gap between a
technologically progressive civilization and a regressive, fragmented human
nature. Schiller’s task in defining anew
human nature is to restore man’s dignity while preserving the belief that,
despite its adverse effects, modern civilization is not a throwback into a
savage past. The illusion of a
progressive movement must be kept. If
the present is to be preserved, not cancelled out as an error but incorporated
into a necessary development governed by reason, and if, at the same time,
human nature is to be ‘excused’ from the inessentiality this same present
reveals, humanity must be redefined in a radically different way. The surest way to escape the undesirable
implications of the fragmentation and inessentiality of modern man is to
renounce essence itself and define man as what is forever becoming. On one hand, this new notion of humanity
remains within the anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment project as it turns
man into an infinite potential, an openness to the future, a progressive and
praiseworthy movement toward an ideal.
On the other hand, however, man’s identification with semblance and his
proclaimed independence from essence/truth is tainted by something like bad
faith. Once man is no longer conceived
as essence, it becomes easy to invent apologies for him as semblance. It will be objected that the split between
truth and semblance precludes semblance from being judged and found apologetic
insofar as apology depends on a standard, a truth. However, since this split is
never final, Schiller’s notion of the human can be described as apologetic. The apologetic aspect (man is semblance because he cannot be essence) is not the
only discomforting aspect of Schiller’s notion of humanity. The ideal of the fully human demands an
absolute balance, an equipoise, an “equal tempering” of all individual human
functions to produce “happy and complete human beings”(43). This state of equipoise could be easily
confused with a state of apathy or lethargy,[23] and the
image of “happy and complete” man involuntarily calls to mind the image of a
sedate or brainwashed man deprived of any desires and needs.[24] As a state of infinite determinability, the
aesthetic state is extremely vulnerable.
There is no guarantee that its freedom will not be abused, will not be
determined by something other than moral laws, unless the assumption is made
(and it is made) that freedom is
always already rational freedom.
Although
Schiller has been appointed as something of a champion of art for art’s sake,
his attempt to establish semblance’s independence from truth/essence is
repeatedly undermined by his desire to straddle the line separating the
transcendental from the empirical. In
letter eight, he tries to energize
reason[25] by
positing two drives. Although in the
opening letters he has argued vehemently against philosophy and its insistence
on truth, and has, supposedly, adopted a non-philosophical approach, now he
openly talks about Truth and its struggle with the lower elements of human
nature, a struggle from which Truth is to emerge victorious: “If Truth is to be
victorious in her conflict with forces, she must herself become a force and
appoint some drive to be her champion in the realm of phenomena”(51). Truth appoints art or semblance and ‘equips’
it with “divine weapons.” Through this
representative her own “conquering power” is displayed and reasserted. One does not get the impression that truth is
in any way compromised or replaced. The
appointment of semblance to act on behalf of truth is simply the most effective
strategy given that transcendental Reason cannot ‘fight’ in the phenomenal
world except through a mediator, an empirical analog of reason. However, Schiller cannot argue that Reason
merely finds a drive and predicates to it the appropriate moral motivation,
since that would put man’s freedom in question.
Therefore, he must assume that such a drive already exists and Reason
only appoints it. Yet that reason can
appoint a drive for a specific purpose suggests that the drive did not
originally have its own object but was undetermined as a motive force—a rather
strange conception of a drive.
In any
event, Schiller’s relationship to truth is ambivalent at best: just when he
wishes to withdraw the aesthetic from truth/essence, truth looms in the
background as the real power, in whose name all the battles are fought.[26] What Schiller wants to overcome is not truth
as such but that “which stands in the way of the acceptance of truth”(51),
overcome it or replace it with something more easily palatable, semblance.
Semblance will never be anything more than the sugar cube that makes the bitter
pill go down easily.[27]
Accordingly, Schiller’s advice to the artist urges him to be something of a
trickster, to catch his audience at the moment when they are most vulnerable,
when their usual defenses (skepticism, fear of the law) are down. The ontologizing of semblance, the insistence
on its autonomy from truth, has only one aim--the creation of the illusion of
choice.
To make
truth appear less intimidating, less overbearing, it is necessary to invent and
place alongside it another realm (semblance) so that truth will appear (but not
actually be) less authoritarian under the created conditions of
relativity. The Platonic light of truth
continues to shine in Schiller’s text despite all his protestations to the
contrary, and “the rays of truth [continue to] put to flight the fond delusions
of [man’s] dreams”(51). Art and Truth
never part ways and what is said of one holds true of the other, as for example
in letter nine, where Schiller talks of Truth that will prevail as an analog to
Art that cannot be falsified. Art is
conceived in agreement with the Platonic model, as a copy of truth, though a
copy powerful enough to serve as a legitimate substitute for truth: “Truth
lives on in the illusion of Art, and
it is from this copy, or after-image, that the original image
will once again be restored”(57 italics added).
On one hand, art is the preparation for truth: it goes before nature
“preparing the shape of things to come”(57).
This is not merely a preparatory role for it is suggested that art might
be the very possibility of “things to come,” of truth. On the other hand, art’s
merely preparatory mission suddenly acquires a special aura as Schiller argues
that it is in this preparatory realm of art, before truth is reached, that the essentially human reveals itself:
“ Even before Truth’s triumphant light can penetrate the recesses of the human
heart, the poet’s imagination will intercept its rays and the peaks of humanity
will be radiant while the dews of night still linger in the valley”(57). Schiller does not bother reconciling these
two opposite claims: first, that truth can and must be restored from its copy
(art), and, second, that the fully human emerges in the copy of truth, in the
aesthetic. The aesthetic is thus
alternatively conceived as a means to an end and as an end in itself, depending
on whether Schiller’s major concern is truth or humanity. Letter nine tries to
fuse these two in an almost mystic image of glorious reason, from whose point
of view everything is a tautology, and all has already been accomplished: “In
the eyes of a Reason which knows no limits, the Direction is at once a
Destination, and the way is completed from the moment it is trodden”(59). Even Schiller’s language betrays a
valorization of philosophy, truth, the good, the form drive. Schiller speaks of
“the divine principle to form” and
advises the young artist to “[i]mpart to the world...a Direction towards the good,” “to rear [in his heart] victorious truth and project it out of
[himself] in the form of beauty”(61 italics added). On the other hand, he implies that nothing is
lost in this externalization of truth, the
appearance of truth (beauty) being equivalent to the truth that has been
thus left concealed. Schiller’s task
–“to apprehend the necessary conditions of man’s existence”(71)—requires a
“firm basis...which nothing shall shake”(71).
As much as he does not want to admit openly that only philosophy can
provide such a firm basis, he cannot hide the fact that aesthetic education
aims for “the prize of truth”(71), for a transcendental grounding of the
aesthetic. Only philosophy can show that
art is independent from philosophy. Only
by ontologizing semblance—and thus compromising it—can Schiller show pure
semblance to be independent from truth.
Art must become a truth in its own right in order not to be identified
with truth.
The
speculative spirit of Schiller’s aesthetic project comes to the forefront in
letter six with Schiller’s criticism of “the spirit of speculation” and “the
practical spirit.” The spirit of
speculation is criticized for exalting the subjective conditions of its own
perceptual and conceptual faculty into laws constitutive of the existence of
things”(39). However, Schiller is guilty
of the same error. In his desire to
familiarize the transcendental, he psychologizes it[28], turning
Form and Matter/Reality into psychological drives, and, as he busies himself
with a detailed analysis of the birth of consciousness and the act of perception,
he implies that these psychological drives are themselves responsible for the
construction of reality. With this, he
repeats the speculative gesture of deriving the objective world from the
subject’s subjective “perceptual and conceptual faculty.” Thus, although Schiller wishes to distinguish
himself from philosophers, who, in reflecting on beauty, are guided by feeling,
fearing that they might otherwise “destroy the dynamic of beauty,” as well as
from philosophers, who are guided by their intellect, fearing that otherwise
they will the destroy “the logic of beauty,” beauty as concept (125), his
method repeats the ‘mistake’ of the second class of philosophers. Despite the fact that he focuses his work around
the central distinction between the two aspects of beauty—the dynamic and the
logic of beauty—Schiller only makes this distinction to define better the concept of beauty, the concept of semblance. He is more concerned with the origin of
beauty than with its effects on man, even though the nature of his project—an
educational project—ought to have made him more concerned with effects rather
than origins. Ultimately, the letters
deal with the truth of beauty, rather
than with the work of beauty.
Although the
truth of beauty is Schiller’s real concern, he declares the goal of the
aesthetic letters to be the overcoming of the inability of “supreme
intelligence” to “stop short of truth”(193).
Beauty must not be reduced to an object of the understanding; its mystery
must be preserved. The discomfort
Schiller feels with respect to the understanding is the same discomfort Plato
feels with respect to mimesis. Just as
Plato considers mimesis removed from truth and yet powerful enough to threaten
it, Schiller claims that the understanding cannot account for the aesthetic (it
is powerless) at the same time fearing the real power of the understanding to
destroy the very essence of the aesthetic, to which it, supposedly, has no
access. The understanding has the power
of “dissolving the essential amalgam of [Beauty’s] elements [thus dissolving]
its very being”(5). The essence of
Beauty is both beyond the understanding and a potential victim of it. The question of the intellect’s relationship
to beauty opens up a series of problems that Schiller does not really take into
account. First, if the intellect is
criticized for its inability to “stop short of truth” and, accordingly,
Schiller’s method tries to avoid this error by not taking the topic of the
letters out of the reach of the senses, does this mean that whatever
conclusions Schiller comes to in his analysis of the aesthetic state should not
be considered truthful? Second, in
letter twenty-six, Schiller makes the point that while “supreme stupidity” and
‘supreme intelligence” “seek only the real and are completely insensitive to
mere semblance”(193), free human nature delights in pure semblance. However, Schiller makes a distinction between
the idea of Beauty and its phenomenal instances. A strange reversal takes place: insofar as
phenomenal instances of beauty are not ideal beauty, they are semblances of the
idea of Beauty, which, in turn, becomes ‘true’ Beauty. It could be objected that these are merely
logical semblances rather than pure semblance.
However, since Schiller insists that noumenal beauty is absolutely
unattainable, the phenomenal manifestations of the noumenal cannot really be
seen as a threat to the latter. Thus, to
the extent that phenomenal beauty cannot make any claims for being ideal and cannot
be a threat to ideal beauty, it becomes autonomous. The relationship of pure semblance (the idea
of beauty) to truth is thus replicated in the relationship, within beauty, between phenomenal and noumenal beauty. In the latter relationship an odd displacement
takes place: Beauty takes the place of Truth and phenomenal beauty takes the
place of Beauty. As a result, phenomenal
beauty becomes pure semblance and all the marvelous qualities that have been
predicated to Beauty are now transferred to beauty, which means that now
phenomenal beauty is identified with play, whereas Beauty tends toward the
burdensome earnestness typically associated with Truth.[29] The more Beauty draws back from phenomenal
beauty, the more the latter pushes the former in the direction of earnestness
and Truth. This becomes evident in
Schiller’s comparison of the artist to the statesman-artist. While the aesthetic object is allowed to
remain “an illusion for the senses”(21), aesthetic man must not merely seem aesthetic: he will be free to
delight in semblance but he himself must not merely appear as semblance. If he
plays he must really play. Schiller
makes a very subtle distinction here between the aesthetic object as semblance
and humanity as semblance or, rather, between aesthetic man’s play (the objects
of play) and aesthetic man as play.[30] Semblance splits into ‘authentic’ semblance
and another kind of semblance, a semblance that would be, like the aesthetic
object, “an illusion for the sense” (something like playing in bad faith). Man’s delight in semblance must itself be earnest.
In making semblance earnest, Schiller goes as far as to define man’s
delight in it as a “sovereign human right”(197
italics added), an “undisputed right of
ownership”(195 italics added) over that which is his work only. From the question of sovereign human rights
it is just one step to the question of freedom, and with that, to the
impossibility of ‘innocent’ or ‘natural’ play.
If
Schiller is consistent in at least one respect in his discussion of the
relationship between nature and reason, it is in his inconsistency. Often, having defined one of his two basic
terms, he makes a sudden turn and redefines it in exactly the terms he used to
define the other basic term. In letter four, for instance, nature is associated with variety
(hence, the distortion resulting from the domination of nature over reason is
characterized as “confusion”), whereas reason
is associated with unity (hence,
the distortion resulting from reason’s domination is characterized as
“uniformity”)(23). Accordingly, form is
defined as a balance between unity and variety. In letter six, however,
speaking of the Greek ideal, Schiller associates nature with unity and reason with separation: “[...]it was from all-unifying Nature [that the Greek],
and from all-dividing Intellect that [modern man] received their respective
forms”(33). Another instance, in which
nature is associated with unity, is when nature is juxtaposed with truth and
identified with art. In this sense, nature is said to remain faithful to the
thing in itself whereas, by extension, truth betrays the object. When the poetic faculty is praised for being
“faithful to the object” (as opposed to pure intellect) it is Nature who sets
the limits to philosophy (43). This is
not the debased “mere nature” that must be transcended but nature as unity, the
unity of the perceiving mind with the object of perception, a unity not
reducible to mere truth. Thus, when
nature occupies the place of the Ideal, it represents the principle of unity,
but when it occupies the place of mere nature or the state of nature, it
represents sheer multiplicity and variety.
Similarly, when reason is associated with the Ideal, with the “triumph
of form”(23), it represents the principle of unity, but when it is associated
merely with man’s thinking abilities, it represents the principle of
separation. It is clear that Schiller is
not particularly systematic in his use of terms: in the last example, for
instance, he does not bother to justify his confusion of Reason with the
Intellect, principles or laws of thinking with thinking itself. Slippages like this one are quickly brushed
aside, sacrificed to the general impulse toward maintaining the symmetrical
relationship of reason and nature at all cost.
In
passages where nature is not associated with unity, it is represented by the
development of individual faculties at the expense of others, and man is called
upon to perform a necessary “sacrifice” of nature’s tendency to
“sacrifice...wholeness”(43). So,
whenever Schiller thinks nature as that which is outside man (for example, in
man’s pre-cognitive relationship to the object which remains faithful to its
reality), nature is exalted as a principle of harmony and unity, but whenever
he speaks of nature specifically as human
nature, nature is identified and criticized as a principle of multiplicity,
variety, individuality, on which form must be imposed. These two faces of nature can be shown to
correspond to the two drives. The first
side of nature that Schiller distinguishes—nature as that which is outside
man—is linked to the sense drive insofar as this drive aims at the
externalization of subjectivity. From
this point of view, what is outside man is what he has externalized. However, this ‘good’ nature which must be
preserved (as opposed to the other side
of nature which must be transcended) as a principle of unity with what is not
man but supposedly outside him, this ‘good’ nature which is best exemplified by
the poet’s faithfulness to the thing in itself “innocent from
preconceptions”(43), this ‘good’ nature is nothing other than man’s identity as
a coincidence with himself. This unity
is a tautology, the mere correspondence between inside and outside, the success
rate of the process of externalization of subjectivity. Although the sense drive appears to establish
a relationship between man and reality, and not just any relationship but a
relationship of unity, this is in fact a relationship of man to himself. The poet can remain faithful to the object
because the object is just an aspect of his externalized subjectivity. On one hand, then, nature tends towards
diversity, and thus, supposedly, toward the “sacrifice of wholeness.” On the other hand, Schiller talks of this
natural diversity as a split, as a wound that needs to be healed: “the split
within man [must be] healed, and his nature so restored to wholeness”(45). The implication is that there was a state,
prior to the natural state, which is a state of being split or wounded, a state
of wholeness that can and must be restored.
But since it would be absurd to claim that there is a state more natural
than the natural state, the only state, to which man can be restored is an
ideal state, or rather, since the ideal state can never be attained and has
never existed in reality, it is not man
that must be restored to wholeness, but the ideal of wholeness must be restored
to man. A rhetorical gesture. Man will not be restored to freedom but the
idea of freedom will be restored to him--he will learn to believe in the idea of freedom.
Man could not have been whole in the natural state since then he was
merely existing (this is inevitable: to postulate a natural state is precisely
to externalize, alienate matter, feeling), but neither could he have been whole
once he had emerged from the natural state to society. The Greeks are an exception, of course, but
then again Schiller never really explains how the transition was made from the
natural state to the ‘good’ organic Greek polis.[31]
Supposedly,
the dual vision of nature proceeds from Schiller’s desire to strengthen man’s
connection to nature, to make him more responsive. However, both aspects of nature exist only as
proofs of man’s complete self-control, and of his control over what is not
he. What seems like an attempt at a
romantic communion with nature is actually another solipsistic system in the
tradition of Kant.[32] In letter seven Schiller argues that man must
“on one hand, emancipate [himself] from the blind forces of Nature; on the
other, return to her simplicity, truth and fullness”(47). But how does one distinguish between nature’s
blind forces and her “simplicity, truth and fullness”? To do that, man must be able to determine
what in nature bounds him and what leaves him free. He must be able to understand or predict the
ways, in which nature will affect him.
But if he can do that he can also manipulate nature’s effects on
him. He will be the one to determine if
in one of its particular effects on him nature is not a force of blind necessity
but only simplicity. Once he emancipates
himself from Nature as a blind force, the only way he can return to nature as
simplicity is to realize that what
has seemed to him, as necessity in nature is not really a necessity. Nature will appear simple to him now that he
is no longer bound by her. Nature itself
will not change, only his attitude toward her.
Thus, aesthetic education has the structure of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Man becomes aware of a purpose and then searches for a state such that this
purpose can be predicated to it and simultaneously projected into the future:
“[he] attributes to himself in this idealized natural state a purpose of which
in his actual natural state he was entirely ignorant”(11). This double function of nature as both an
origin and a means to an end unmasks the essentially tautological nature of the
transition from a natural to a moral state.
Reason must overcome the natural state but insofar as Reason itself
produced the natural state (as a fiction), aesthetic education is merely a
matter of substituting one hypothesis (what man must have been: natural man)
with another hypothesis (what man ought to be: moral man), a purely
tautological movement.[33]
Schiller’s
aim is to distinguish the legitimate territory of nature from that of reason
and to prevent any infringement of one on the other. However, such preventive strategies are
possible only through a displacement or rather a mutual exchange of roles and
territories, which in itself would be meaningless since it would be absurd for
feeling to become thought (and vice versa) and still continue to be called
feeling. Because such an exchange is
absurd, and because the concept of union itself is meaningful only insofar as
it preserves the original distinction and does not sublimate it completely,
there always remains the danger of one of the terms dominating the other. This threat is intensified by Schiller’s
preoccupation with questions of history (hence of origins and ends), which
leads him to consider the nature-reason relationship in teleological[34] or
narrative terms. The generally unstable
status of the origin destabilizes further this relationship making nature
oscillate between an effect of man’s
Personality and an origin that man
cannot account for. In the fifth letter,
for instance, nature is thought only as that, which affects us but not as that,
from which our ability to be affected proceeds: “We disown nature in her
rightful sphere only to submit to her tyranny in the moral; and while resisting
the impact she makes upon our senses
are content to take over her principles”(27
italics added). Nature has two faces and it is, supposedly, within man’s power
to distinguish between them, indeed to categorize them as effects and
principles. In the fourth letter, Schiller
claims that if man is to attain the state of reason and still preserve his
freedom, “this can be brought about through both these motive forces,
inclination and duty, producing
completely identical results in the
world of phenomena; through the content of his volition remaining the same
whatever the difference in form; that is to say, through impulse being
sufficiently in harmony with reason to qualify as universal legislator”(17
italics added). There is no talk here of
changing the nature of man but merely of achieving an identity in terms of
concrete results, not changing the
absolute or ideal nature of man but only its phenomenal, visible, measurable
manifestations. The possibility remains
of leaving the original division between inclination and duty intact and merely
disguising it better. It appears that
for Schiller the difference between inclination and duty, between sense and
reason, is merely formal. To say that the
content of volition must stay the same whatever its form is to suggest that
inclination and duty are merely different forms of volition with the same
content, that the will does not change except externally, in its
appearance. The problem is further
complicated by a strange reversal of the matter/form dichotomy because now it appears
that form is the manifestation of content, that inclination (nature) and duty
(reason) are manifestations—or forms—of one and the same content, whereas in
some of the later letters Schiller will try to define the relationship between
matter and form in precisely the opposite way, assigning to matter the role of
a manifesting agency and to form the role of potential to be manifested. What is unique about Schiller’s notions of
matter and form (and of the two drives) is that, contrary to common sense, which
thinks content as that which is to be expressed, and form as the particular
manner of expression—i.e. content is the potential awaiting form to make it
manifest—Schiller thinks form as the potential and matter as its manifestation.
This
reversal is just one example of a general tendency in Schiller to move
disparate or completely conflicting elements toward union by making each term
take the place of the other. Because the
fusion of nature and reason will be a victory of the principle of nature (union),
the aesthetic is always in danger of being merely a hypostatization of nature
and the moral merely a cosmetic surgery performed on inclination’s not
sufficiently presentable form. But if we
remind ourselves that for Schiller form is the invisible and content the
manifestation of form, it turns out that the difference between form and
content that has to be transcended is the difference between their phenomenal
manifestations, which implies that their form is already, a priori, identical. What
needs to be changed is just their contingent objects in the world. Inclination
and duty are one will, which happens to be split into sensuous and moral objects.
All that is needed to overthrow the illusion that they are, as it were,
two separate wills, is to regard the objects of inclination as objects of duty
and vice versa: “The most frivolous theme must be so treated that it leaves us
ready to proceed directly from it to some matter of the utmost import; the most
serious material must be so treated that we remain capable of exchanging it
forthwith for the lightest play” (157).
With this, the privileging of nature over reason is offset by an equally
well-disguised privileging of the principle of form over that of content[35]: in
positing a priori the unity of inclination
and duty, Schiller privileges the principle of form inasmuch as this unity
exists as a potential, hence as form, that only needs to be restored or
unconcealed. The valorization of form
is, in fact, necessitated by the project of aesthetic education. Since the goal of the project is to make the
law more human, Schiller must move upward rather than downward. Rather than
bringing the law down to nature—which is in itself inadmissible since the law
must remain the law, its transcendental ground must not be compromised—Schiller
has to raise nature, find the law as already given, as potential, in nature
itself. The transcendental must be
psychologized only to prove that the psychic is transcendental.
The only
way to overcome the opposition of the sense to the form drive is to create the
illusion[36] of the
two drives exchanging their respective functions: “The play-drive...will
endeavour to receive as if it had
itself brought forth, and so to bring forth as the intuitive sense aspires to
receive”(97 italics added). The question
is if, as Schiller says, the two drives are “not by nature opposed”(85) and
have different objects, how could they be in need of reconciliation? If that reconciliation takes the form of
mutually agreed upon exchange of territories—in
the aesthetic state one senses Being
and reflects on his perception (though the former is
clearly privileged by Schiller)—then the problem beauty is called upon to fix
is not a territorial struggle but the
undue intensification of either of the two drives. Thus, the basic separation of nature from
reason is never seriously questioned.
The problem becomes one of proportions or limits only: it is a question
of limiting nature with respect to what she does, and not with respect to
reason, and limiting reason with respect to what it does, and not with respect
to nature. The final balance between
nature and reason is achieved through the ‘normalization’ of reason and nature within their respective territories.
It is precisely because the split between nature and reason is not
seriously challenged that the domination of the form-drive is so difficult to
conceal. The valorization of the form
drive is evident in the distinction Schiller draws between two orders of
freedom. Freedom of the first order is
defined as man’s ability to act rationally at all, while freedom of the second
order is based on the limitation by either reason or the senses. The form drive thus operates on two
levels—noumenal and phenomenal—whereas the sense drive is limited to the
phenomenal realm.
The
position from which Schiller thinks thought and sensation reveals his
formalism. In letter nineteen he identifies the work of the senses as a work of
exclusion or negation (in contrast to the more common identification of thought
with negation). The senses perform a
negating function insofar as they make the infinite finite, establishing limits
and thus creating reality. But, says
Schiller, “mere exclusion would never...produce reality...unless something
existed from which to exclude”(129).
This positive entity, through the negation of which reality is
constructed, is form. In place of the
usual argument that thinking annuls the reality of its objects while the senses
remain faithful to that reality, Schiller proposes that the senses are a
negation of form as infinity, a negation which is itself a proof of something
existing prior to that negation (form).
We recognize the Kantian gesture here.
Just as in the Kantian sublime the failure of the imagination to provide
a sensible representation of the object only points to man’s supersensible
vocation (Reason), so in Schiller’s account the limits imposed by the senses
only point to infinity (form) as their very possibility. Schiller follows Kant
in his description of beauty (rather, sublimity) as a negative representation:
“in its actual manifestation [the absolute faculty, Reason] is so little
dependent upon the senses that...it makes
itself felt only when it is at odds with them”(131 italics added).
Nowhere
does the valorization of the form-drive become so obvious as in Schiller’s
account of perception[37]. In letter eleven he acknowledges that the
“material of activity...man has first to receive...by way of perception, as
something existing outside of him in space, and as something changing within
him in time”(75). But in passing through
the phase of receptiveness (perception) man is already exercising his impulse
to form inasmuch as in the act of perception man distinguishes himself as an intentional
consciousness and thus creates the
material of his perception. Through
perception difference comes into the world and, through difference,
self-consciousness becomes possible.
Even if there is an element of receptiveness in perception, it is easily
cancelled since as soon as difference comes into play, pure perceptiveness is
no longer possible. Thus the “twofold
task” Schiller talks about—the task “of giving reality to the necessity within,
and subjecting to the law of necessity the reality without”(79)—is the single
task of making the externalization of internal necessity equally necessary,
revealing the law of necessity already given in form rather than inventing the
law, pretending that something exists outside us. Schiller does not try to hide his belief
that, indeed, the second reality is only an extension of the first and defines
the knowledge of an object as “attributing objective validity to a condition of
our subject”(81), echoing Kant’s definition of a reflexive judgment. Once Schiller reaches the point where the
impulse to form is already strong and active, he never goes back to the
receptive-passive aspect of the aesthetic.
He talks sparingly about the aesthetic state as a contemplative one and
he remains highly suspicious of the “melting power of beauty”(69).
The rhetorical
nature of aesthetic education[38] is
unavoidable given that this is the education of already self-conscious man[39]. The factor of self-consciousness makes
Schiller’s definition of the aesthetic state as one of infinite determinability
problematic. Schiller argues that before the mind is determined by sense
impressions, it is in a state of “unlimited determinability”(129). In this originary state nothing “has yet been
posited, and consequently nothing yet excluded either”(129). This plenitude or rather this lack of
selectivity resembles too close Shiller’s notion of the “exactitude of beauty”
as an “absolute inclusion of all realities”(125). Schiller fails to draw a convincing
distinction between the state of empty infinity and the aesthetic state, both of
which are described as an infinity uninterrupted by any determination or
selection. The only difference is that
the inclusiveness of the aesthetic is not infinite but determined, conscious. Through perception “reality [comes] into
being but infinity [is] lost”(129). Man
becomes a subject through the loss of form as infinity and his mission is to
recuperate that loss through the conscious creation of infinity. Since Schiller’s project is aimed at the
aesthetic education of his contemporaries—the civilized “barbarians”—and not of
man in the natural state, the famous “step backward” must be taken from the
civilized state, not from the natural one.
Yet Schiller wants to argue that the step is taken from the natural
state, which is why he must distinguish between empty infinity (the state preceding man’s determination by the
senses) and “infinity filled with content”(145), the state man attains as a
result of having stepped back to empty
infinity through this determination by the senses, the state acquiring
reality precisely because it has gone through the territory of the senses. Thus, limit (sense determination) is used to
restore (or create) infinity.[40] A lack of independence (sense determination)
is turned into freedom (the aesthetic state). However, only thought can turn
determination into infinite determinability; only the self-conscious man can
make use of his determination and turn it into the ground of his freedom. The sheer rhetoric of the reciprocity of the
two drives is unmasked in the violence in Schiller’s description of the
original work of art, in which the material is consumed, not merely sublimated,
by the form (157). The violence[41] is also
explicit in Schiller’s explanation of why the step from the aesthetic to the
moral is easier than that from the natural to the aesthetic. The former step is described as man “merely
taking from himself, not giving to himself, fragmenting
his nature, not enlarging it”(163 italics added). ‘Man is free’ means man is free to be his own
tyrant, to fragment his own nature and suppress a part of it. The movement Schiller has followed so far now
seems absurd: matter has been ‘liberated’ from form and set alongside it only
to be suppressed again. The
objectification of humanity demands a scapegoat so that the tautological nature
of the process of objectification (its rhetorical nature, its violence) can be
disguised. Humanity is first enlarged (matter, which has been subsumed under
form, is set apart from it), then fragmented (matter is suppressed again), and,
finally, this fragmentation is supposed to enlarge man to a representative of
the species. Form is purified of content
and offered as the ground for universally valid judgments.
Although
at the end of letter sixteen Schiller promises to examine both melting and
energizing beauty, he examines only the former and excludes the sublime
(energizing beauty). The exclusion
becomes explicit when Schiller points out the role melting beauty fulfills for
natural and for civilized moral man. The
former she “leads from sensation to thought”, the latter she leads from
“concept back to intuition, and [from] law back to feeling”(121). What melting beauty does, she does for a
fictional man insofar as both natural man and the moral man are fictions. Melting beauty—beauty in general, as opposed
to the sublime (energizing beauty)—deals with the normalization of
deviations. Thus, she can only deal with
the reduction or increase of feeling or thinking. Beauty does the ‘manual’ work, so to speak:
stabilizing, normalizing, refining, and polishing the rough edges. Something else will be necessary to create in
man a sense of Being and that something is energizing beauty, which Schiller is
reluctant to call by its real name, the sublime. Schiller’s modernity lies precisely in this
preoccupation with Being and its relationship to art. At the end of letter fifteen Schiller gives
the feeling of the Greeks for their gods as an example of play, defining play
as “the freest, most sublime state of
being”(109 italics added). Schiller’s
other example, Juno Ludovisi, is supposed to be an example of beauty, but
Schiller’s description here is clearly one of a sublime experience. There is the Kantian attraction to and
repulsion from the sublime object—“we abandon ourselves in ecstasy to her heavenly grace,
her celestial self-sufficiency makes us recoil in terror”(109 italics added)—there is the solitude of the sublime
object—“a creation completely self-contained”—there are Heidegger’s and Maurice
Blanchot’s analogous notions of the nothing, the obscure, the neuter as that,
which calls without imposing any demands on us, that which calls precisely by
not calling—“neither yielding, nor resisting”—there is Barnett Newman’s notion
of the happening of time—“no frailty
where temporality might break in”—and, finally, the Kantian motif of the
quickening of the spirit—“[a] wondrous stirring of the heart.” This is a state of mind, “for which mind has
no concept nor speech any name”(109).
This ecstatic abandonment of
oneself,[42] this
mixture of “utter repose and supreme agitation”(109) have nothing to do with
the quiet, peaceful contemplation the beautiful object evokes. The experience of “lofty equanimity and freedom of the
spirit”(153), as a state which is not
itself contemplative, but offering a choice between abstract thought and
direct contemplation”(153) is clearly a sublime experience.
Schiller’s
focus on freedom in his definition of the aesthetic already hints at the
tendency of his aesthetic to slip into the sublime insofar as freedom is typically
associated with the sublime rather than with the beautiful object. Despite Schiller’s claims that play is never
earnest, the association of play with freedom necessarily adds weight to what
Schiller wants to present as something of “little weight” and of “small
account”(105). The concept of freedom is
inseparable from dignity and earnestness.
By insisting that “freedom is itself an effect of Nature...and not the
work of Man”(139), Schiller affirms the dignified image of freedom (an, by
extension, play) as he suggests that man did not have to work for his freedom,
but found it already within him. But the
fact that he did not have to toil for his freedom makes it even more dignified. The master is more dignified than the slave
precisely because he already is who he is and does not need to work to become
something else. What is given a priori
is always more ‘respectful’ than what must be worked for. On the other hand, however, Schiller’s
definition of reason, which affirms the idea that Freedom is not an
accomplishment for which man ought to be given credit, brings reason down to
the level of sensation. Schiller’s definition of reason is narrow so as to
establish common ground with feeling and to bring closer together the
transcendental and the empirical realms.
Reason is defined as the mere consistency of consciousness,
consciousness being the basic common denominator, what all people share. The life of sensation is involuntary but so
is the original manifestation of Personality or our coming to self-awareness.
This undermines the transcendental derivation of reason since it cannot account
for the original awakening of self-awareness, which, Schiller admits, is not
something man ought to be given credit for (135). Man cannot claim as his accomplishment the
emergence of self-consciousness, and by extension, of reason: “Thus sensation
and self-consciousness both arise entirely without any effort on our
part”(137). Provided that both reason
and sensation arise involuntarily and that it is not possible to argue for a
transcendental ground of reason only, Schiller has no other choice but to make
both sensation and reason transcendental.
Schiller’s
triad[43]
(nature—aesthetic nature—moral nature), in which the aesthetic is a bridge to
the moral, keeps sliding into a different configuration where the aesthetic is
defined as an unlimited determinability preceding mere nature (which is already
a state of determination itself). But if
the natural state is just a fiction, the necessary step backward, of which Schiller
speaks, does not even have to be made in reality. Once man is in the natural state—once he
conceives of it—he is self-conscious; the natural state exists only as the
object of consciousness. From this point
he cannot go back to a state of pure determinability since that would require
him to forget his self-consciousness, an act that can only be conscious and
thus suspect. All that he needs to do then, all that he can do, under these circumstances, to achieve the aesthetic state
of infinite determinability is to conceive of such a state just as he conceived
of the natural state. The step backward can only be a rhetorical
figure because the step man takes as he conceives of a natural state can only
be parallel to that he takes as he conceives of an aesthetic state. Self-conscious man—the only real man in the
letters—thinks analogically, and if he thinks chronologically the histories he
conceives are concealed analogues, metaphors of historicity. Schiller’s thought itself provides a clear
example of analogical thinking with its proliferation of comparisons and
contrasts. The authenticity of the
aesthetic state (or of any state for that matter) and of the freedom it is
supposed to guarantee depends not upon whether it can be proven to be
originary—transcendental—but simply upon man’s power to imagine such a state
well or at least as well as other states. He will be free if he imagines
himself free.
Schiller
slips from a description of the beautiful to one of the sublime when he tries to
exemplify the state of pure disinterestedness, in which the beautiful,
supposedly, leaves us. He argues that
since a pure aesthetic experience is impossible, a beautiful work of art is
bound to leave us “in a particular mood and with some definite bias”(153). Yet “the more general the mood and the more
limited the bias produced in us by any particular art...the nobler that
art”(153). The nobler the art, the more
intense will be the shock we feel if, after our aesthetic experience, someone
tries to distract us to some other activity.
Interestingly enough, the examples Schiller chooses to illustrate that
shock are experiences of sublimity (153).
The implication is that sublime objects represent higher approximations
to the ideal aesthetic experience than beautiful objects. Freedom is sublimated
to a lesser degree in the experience of the sublime. Art is at its highest when it manages to
overcome the limitations its own material (medium) imposes on it, when music becomes
“sheer form,” when the plastic arts “move us by the immediacy of their sensuous
presence”(155) i.e., when art is sublime.
With this Schiller comes close to Newman’s idea that what is at stake in
art is art itself. The aesthetic
(sublime) object for Schiller transcends “the specific limitations of the art
in question”(155) and becomes “ever more like [the other arts] in [its] effect
upon the psyche”(155). Schiller’s
formalism comes to the surface in his description of the original work of art:
“In a truly successful work of art the contents should effect nothing....
Subject-matter...always has a limiting effect upon the spirit, and it is only
from form that true aesthetic freedom can be looked for”(155). Subject-matter or the actualization of form
affects only parts of man while form affects the whole of man. The sense drive for Schiller remains an
outgrowth of the form drive; its recognition is just a matter of recognizing
the structure of the form drive, which is still assumed to constitute the whole
of man.
The task
of sublime modern art, as theorized by Barnett Newman and Jean-Francois
Lyotard, is to make man be. For this purpose, man has to be made passable
to the unthought or to what Lyotard, after Heidegger, calls the event. Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic state as
a state, in which man senses his own being[44] suggests
the proximity of Schillerian aesthetic to the typically modern preoccupation
with the sublime, although in Schiller’s text that interest is consciously
disguised because of its traditional (Kantian) ‘guilty’ associations with a
human nature dominated by reason. There
is a certain continuity between Schiller’s notion of the human as semblance, as
something never really attaining essence, on one hand, and Lyotard’s notion of
the sublime, developed in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time,[45] as the Is it happening? The difference is that while for Schiller the
aesthetic (what he calls the beautiful but what cannot really exclude the
sublime) is a bridge closing the gap between one state of inhumanity and
another (where states of inhumanity are marked by the arbitrary domination of
either one of the two drives), for Lyotard the sublime is the inhuman itself.
It is important, however, to distinguish between Lyotard’s two types of the
inhuman. He defines humanity as a horizon,
a coming into being, a lack. That which
makes man’s insufficiency makes him human insofar as it is an openness to the
event of being. Humanity is not a given
(essence) but waits to give itself (semblance).
The first inhuman Lyotard distinguishes is man’s belief in his own
emancipation as a finite process yielding a final Resultat. One could easily
see the continuity between Schiller’s pessimistic analysis of modern
civilization (in letter six) and Lyotard’s analysis, in The Inhuman, of the dehumanization the megalopolis inflicts upon the domus. The second inhuman, of which Lyotard speaks
is a resistance to the first inhuman; it is our dept to humanity that “needs no
finality” (7). The second inhuman, which
is what makes us human, echoes Schiller’s criticism of the maniacal inability
of intelligence to stop short of truth.
Just as Schiller tries to preserve humanity’s independence from truth,
Lyotard warns against the danger of man’s slavery to determinate thought with
its devotion to truth, effectiveness, and productiveness.
What is the difference then between
Lyotard’s notion of the human as the second inhuman and Schiller’s notion of
the human as semblance? It would seem
that Lyotard is still indebted to a certain notion of truth inasmuch as lack
presupposes an essence and thus a failure or ‘a fall from grace’, whereas
Schiller’s semblance is argued to be completely independent from truth. However, as was already suggested earlier,
Schillerian semblance is not completely dissociated from truth/essence.
Inasmuch as it is a form of self-determination, it shares common ground with
Lyotard’s Is it happening? Both are driven by an impulse toward
objectification of the highest form of subjectivity. Both Schiller’s and Lyotard’s definitions of
the human are indebted to Kant’s notion of negative representation but depart
significantly from it. Kant argues that only through the failure of the
imagination does man become aware of his supersensible destiny (reason) and
that this is sublime. (However, Kant
does not make it clear what exactly is sublime: the realization that we have a supersensible destiny or reason itself.) Schiller and Lyotard also base their notions
of humanity on a certain notion of failure or insufficiency—on one hand, Schiller’s
semblance as insufficiency inasmuch as essence is constitutive of semblance’s
autonomy through an odd reversal of the logic of the supplement whereby essence
becomes the supplement of semblance, and, on the other hand, Lyotard’s second
inhuman as a sort of ‘beneficial’ insufficiency or protection against final
self-determination. Yet, although the
Kantian structure of negative representation is preserved—a certain lack points
toward the very essence or destiny of man—Schiller and Lyotard attribute a
larger psychological or anthropological significance to what, for Kant, is
mainly a question of the structure of the mind and the interaction between its
faculties[46]. In this sense, Schiller’s aesthetic and
Lyotard’s sublime—and their notions of the human––appear somewhat melodramatic
compared to the Kantian sublime. One
might say that they are a bit too ‘literary’: they remind one of the classical
definition of the tragic hero as a man essentially good but doomed to fail
through an inherent personal insufficiency.
For Schiller and Lyotard the aesthetic is still a way of affirming man’s
dignity but no longer in the self-congratulatory, almost smug way in which Kant
does it; instead, there is a sense, in which man is humbled and if this is not
so obvious in Schiller, who is still torn between the demand of nature—the
demand for contemplation—and the demand of reason—the demand for active
transformation of reality—it becomes especially obvious in Lyotard’s notion of
passability to the event.
Although
Schiller’s tendency to privilege the form drive over the sense drive points to
the Kantian sublime as the triumphant self-assertion of reason in man,
Schiller’s interest is not limited to the free self-determination of man
(Kant’s concern) in his independence from nature’s blind forces, but extends to
man’s ontological justification. In this
sense, Lyotard’s interest in the occurrence or the event as the site of
recovery of man’s identity[47]
parallels Schiller’s concern with semblance (the human) as a sort of passage
from one state of determination to another,[48]
a passage, in which the very being of man is at stake inasmuch as the passage
represents man’s free self-determination and permanence.
Schiller’s
view of the life of the psyche is surprisingly atomistic given the overall
tendency of his thought. For Schiller,
states of mind are completely isolated and autonomous and only the aesthetic
manages to offset the shock of passing from one state to another. Not only is the passage difficult but also
man’s identity is at stake every time such a passage becomes necessary. Nothing guarantees the continuity of the
human; instead, it risks dissolving into Nought with every such passage. Each state of mind is just another danger for
the human since it determines man and thus destroys his freedom. Humanity, it appears, exists only in the
transition from one state to another: “True, he [man] possesses this humanity in potentia before every determinate
condition into which he can conceivably enter.
But he loses it in practice with every determinate condition into which
he does enter. And if he is to pass into
a condition of an opposite nature, this
humanity must be restored to him each time anew through the life of the
aesthetic”(147 italics added). Yet,
later Schiller claims that the aesthetic state is not a transition but the only
purely autonomous state: “Every other state into which we can enter refers us
back to a preceding one, and requires for its termination a subsequent one; the
aesthetic alone is a whole in itself, since it comprises within itself all the
conditions of both its origin and its continuance”(151). Schiller is aware of
the fragility of the human: the power of becoming human, granted us by nature,
has been squandered and beauty, our “second creatress”(147) must give us a
second chance. For him, it is a mistake
to posit the law of Reason as “a positive origin”(179), a mistake to posit an
origin of the human since the human never is but only returns as the link between what would have otherwise been unfreely
determined states of mind.
Just as
Schiller thinks man’s ontological justification—reason—as the consistency of
consciousness or the continuity between acts of perception, Lyotard, in The Differend,[49] thinks
legitimation in terms of a necessary linking of one phrase to another in a
discourse without a final phrase.
Whereas Kant’s sublime fulfills an epistemological function—we discover
that reason is our destiny—Schiller’s aesthetic (inasmuch as it cannot expel
the sublime) and Lyotard’s sublime have an ontological role. Kant is still concerned with determining the
nature of the human, its quid, while
Schiller and Lyotard are interested in the very possibility of the human, in
its quod. Much more is at stake in their aesthetic than
in Kant’s. Man himself is at stake and
the question now is: Is man? What makes this project difficult is that
both Schiller and Lyotard intend to apply it to ennoble the already civilized
(read ‘already corrupted’) modern man, whose intellect is already developed.
Thus, when Schiller insists that modern man must “stop short of truth” and when
Lyotard says that man must preserve the unthought or what he calls an “initial
reception”(50), “an empirical or transcendental mode whereby the mind is
affected by a ‘matter’ which it does not fully control”(50), we are faced with
the absurd task of demanding from self-conscious modern man to be spontaneously
uninterested in truth and to make himself spontaneously powerless. Just as for Lyotard man’s freedom consists in
his absolute surrender of control over that which affects him, for Schiller
freedom is man’s infinite, and conscious,
determinability, the inclusion of all realities (as opposed to empty infinity,
which, too, is a lack of selectivity in one’s self-determination but a purely unconscious lack). Both Schiller and Lyotard run the risk of
reducing their notion of freedom to a self-fulfilling prophecy: man is free
because, or to the extent that, he decides that he is free. He is free since he chooses (thinks) not to
be selective but open to all kinds of determination. He is free because he can decide to be free,
presumably even under the most unfree circumstances. Lyotard’s project of saving man from the
danger of solipsism inherent in Kantian aesthetic fails like a circular
argument. The formulation of the problem
of passability (in Schiller’s case, semblance as a passage between different
states of determination) in terms of a project
(the project of saving the honor of thinking, the honor of modern man) makes the
result suspect. When Lyotard asks the
mind to make itself passable to, to make room for the remainder, he is already
implying that there is no remainder but the mind must create it: the mind takes
something out of itself in order to give it back to itself under the mask of
the unthought. Instead of revealing
being as the “donation”(Lyotard 111), the mind is asked to become its own
donor, to donate the remainder, which it has extracted from itself, back to
itself. The problem is whether the mind
can deceive itself that what it becomes passable to is not its own creation:
“[I]f what we are passable to has first been plotted conceptually how can it
seize us?”(111)
Similarly,
if, as Schiller suggests, the aesthetic is already given in us as a part of our
nature, how can we deceive ourselves that aesthetic education is necessary,
given that this education requires us to fragment our nature? After all, Schiller openly declares that the
transition from the aesthetic to the moral requires man to “merely [take] from
himself...fragmenting his nature, not
enlarging it”(163 italics added). There
is an inherent violence in the organic or living form that gives itself the law
inasmuch as the act of giving oneself the law presupposes voluntary
fragmentation: one fragments oneself in order to unify oneself.[50] The natural law requires an initial
denaturalization for the sake of autonomy and unity. Both Schiller’s aesthetic and Lyotard’s
sublime respond to a threat, the threat of not happening, of not linking onto
the next phrase (Lyotard), of not passing from one state of determination to
another (Schiller). In the first case,
possibility itself is conceived as man’s freedom; in the second case, Schiller
wants to argue that it is only because man is free that he is able to be
determined, but this freedom is not merely the opposite of determination: man
is free insofar as he chooses to be determined.
Inasmuch
as Schiller’s project aims at the transcendence of nature as a way back to
nature, his ideas share a lot with those of Barnett Newman. Newman talks of the transcendence of nature
as a transcendence of an attitude of sensibility toward nature: “Communion with
nature is confused with love of nature...a concern with nature, instead of
doing what it was supposed to do—give man some insight into himself as an
object of nature—accomplished the opposite and excluded man, setting him apart
to make nature the object of romantic contemplation”(109). In Newman’s aesthetic, nature is transcended
so that man can be brought back to a communion with it. This is the meaning of ‘making man present’
(which is what Newman’s art was supposed to do) and of the reduction of nature
to its quod. The command Be!—or in Schiller’s terms, the command Be free!—supposedly puts man back in the
primitive state of “totemic affinity”(Newman 109)[51] or, in
Schiller’s terms, in the state of complete objectification of the subject.
Nature is transcended so that man can be included. Nowhere does Schiller sound
as modern as he does in his discussion of form and content and his advise to
the artist. Newman underscores the
importance of taking the artistic medium for granted, the main question being
what to do with the plastic elements (145).
Similarly, Schiller’s claim that the artist must renounce subject
matter, letting form consume content, takes the material for granted and does
no longer conceive of it as a means of
expression. Whatever the artist
accomplishes—both for Lyotard and for Schiller—is beyond the medium/material, not through
it. The problem with this notion of the
nature of the work of art is that the mere consumption or transcendence of
matter does not by itself, automatically, result in pure form or the plasmic,
to use Newman’s term, which is, supposedly, the artist’s only ‘subject matter’
(Newman 143). There is a ‘limbo’ between
the absence of matter (its consumption) and the presence of form, between the
absence of nature and the presence of reason.
Schiller tries to identify the aesthetic as precisely this limbo but, as
we saw, he cannot preserve its purity and self-sufficiency and keeps
overstepping the boundary that is supposed to separate it from the realm of
form and reason.[52]
Trying to
defend the independence of modern American art from the classical roots of
European art, Newman makes the claim that “the European artist has been
continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the
desire for sublimity”(171). Schiller’s
notion of semblance, as we saw, is rooted in the tension between the beautiful
and the sublime. Thus, it makes sense to
look at Schiller’s (European) aesthetic in the context of Newman’s. Although Schiller recognizes both the savage
and the civilized barbarians as deviations from the human as pure semblance,
his more immediate, practical concern lies with the latter, with his
contemporaries, and thus with the task of bringing thought back to intuition
and feeling. This task requires a
certain privileging of the senses over reason for the sake of restoring the
lost balance. From this perspective,
then, what modern man needs are the effects of “melting beauty” (which
privileges matter) rather than those of “energizing beauty” (which privileges
form). This might explain why the sublime, disguised as “energizing beauty,” is
excluded from modern man’s aesthetic education, which turns into a nostalgic
glorification of Greek art. Newman
rightly points out that European aesthetics has been an aesthetics of “memory,
association, nostalgia, legend, myth”(173)[53];
Schiller’s invocation of the Greeks is evidence of that. However, even though Schiller looks at art
with “the nostalgic glasses of history” (Newman 173), and thus inscribes
himself in the European tradition, from which Newman wants so desperately to
dissociate American modern art, the goal of Schiller’s aesthetic project is
very close to that of Newman’s. While
Newman argues that new (American) art transcends the abstract realm to make that realm real (163), Schiller
contends that aesthetic education transcends nature only to bring us back to
nature i.e., that the task of the aesthetic is to make Reason real. That
Schiller’s nostalgia for the Greeks actually distances his notion of art from
that of the Greeks, placing it closer to certain modern trends in aesthetics,
becomes obvious in Schiller’s own writing and thinking on the place of the
Greeks in aesthetics, specifically in On
Naive and Sentimental Poetry, where he defines the moderns’ sentimental
attitude toward the Greeks: “The feeling of which we here speak is therefore
not that which the ancients had; it is rather identical with that which we have for the ancients. They felt naturally; we feel the
natural”(qtd. in Behler 147). Schiller’s
education cannot make modern man into a Greek, who feels naturally but can only
ennoble him to feeling the natural or, in more general terms, it cannot make
man feel the abstract (reason, the moral law) but can only make the abstract appear real or natural. Whereas feeling naturally presupposes a
direct relationship, an intimacy with nature, feeling the natural signifies
man’s relationship with himself, a relationship with one of the faculties of
his mind. Insofar as Newman argues that art concerns man’s relation with
himself, a relation defining man’s religious feeling (93), Schiller’s project has
a certain religious impulse behind it.[54] After all, he aims at the absolute
objectification of subjectivity, which certainly comes close to the end of the
religious impulse: the sacrifice of subjectivity, particularity in the name of
a higher, absolute power. On the other
hand, this self-objectification in no way disparages man; on the contrary, it
only underscores his dignity. Schiller
is as concerned with asserting man’s dignity (freedom) as Newman, for whom the
defense of that dignity is the ultimate subject matter of art (105).
Although
Schiller begins AEM with the
intention of discovering the nature of beauty and proposing it as a bridge to
the moral state, by the end of the work his focus has shifted as he becomes
increasingly concerned with the possibility of the human itself, the aesthetic
turning into an end in itself.[55] As long as the aesthetic is conceived as
merely a transition to another, higher state, Schiller’s emphasis falls on the
rehabilitation of the senses and the goal of his project is what Newman defines
as the typically European preoccupation with the question "“whether beauty
[is] in nature or could be found without nature”(173). As soon as the aesthetic becomes an end in
itself, the question of beauty is replaced by the question of the being of man,
and with that, the excluded sublime claims the place that it has been
denied. This tension in Schiller’s
thought can be viewed in terms of what Newman perceives as the main difference
between European and modern American art. European art, he says, is concerned
with the transcendence of objects (making the objective subjective) while
American art is concerned with the reality of the transcendental experience
(making the subjective objective) (164), and, we might add, with the sublime, with
“absolute emotions”(173) such as the sense of Being or, in Schiller’s terms,
man’s sense of freedom, the sense of a unified consciousness, which passes from
one state to another without being destroyed.
Not only does Schiller’s interest in the human as such reveal his modernity; his ideas about art foreshadow some
of the central claims Newman makes about abstract expressionism. Schiller’s belief that the noblest art would
be that which transcends the limitations of its own medium and tends towards a
certain synesthesia, dissolving into the other arts until it is purified of any
content, echoes in Newman’s exaltation at the modern impulse toward precisely
such a fusion of the arts and an overcoming of mimesis: “Modern painting is an
attempt to change painting into a poetic language, to make pigment expressive
rather that representational.... The whole drive of poetry...and in recent
times of painting and prose, has been in the direction of music, to divorce the
languages of literature and painting from the confusing dichotomy inherent in
their media so that they would function purely and abstractly in the manner of
musical notes”(88-89). Schiller’s
insistence on the consumption of content by form foreshadows Newman’s
distinction between the plastic and the plasmic element in art. Newman points
at the ‘primitive’ artist, for whom beauty transcends the “surface qualities of
the art medium” (143) as a model for the modern artist, who, too, must not
reduce his work to “the mere manipulation of the tools of the given
medium”(144). The artist must give the
plastic elements a plasmic function (144) and should express nothing else but
the human condition (130). It might seem
that in glorifying the Greeks Schiller is guilty of what Newman condemns as the
error of Greek and European aesthetic, the reduction of the beautiful to
perfect form: “To us today there is no doubt that Greek art is an insistence
that the sense of exaltation is to be found in perfect form, that exaltation is
the same as ideal sensibility”(Newman 171).
Newman criticizes the Greeks for making purity as a “poetic metaphor”
“the geometrical equivalent of material perfection,” thus creating “an art of
self-conscious sensibility” and a notion of beauty as “the love of ideal
sensations”(167). Although Schiller’s
examples of phenomenal beauty often border on the merely decorative (for
example, in passages where he talks of refined manners as an instance of
beauty), his definition of the play-drive owes nothing to the “Greek fanaticism
of refinement”(Newman 167) but is much more akin to Newman’s descriptions of
sublimity. The play-drive, Schiller
notes, annuls time within time “reconciling becoming with absolute
being”(97). Newman describes his sublime
experience of the Indian mounds in the Ohio valley, a hundred and fifty years
after Schiller, in strikingly similar terms: “Suddenly one realizes that the
sensation is not one of space or [of] an object in space.... The sensation is
one of time.... I insist on my sensations in time—not the sense of time but the physical sensation
of time”(175). The sensation of
time, to which Newman refers here is the happening of time, time as a quod,
which is nothing but Schiller’s annulment of time within time, an absolute
sensation, the sensation of Being: “Where then the form drive holds sway, and
the pure objects acts within us, we experience the greatest enlargement of being; all limitations
disappear...we are no longer in time;
time...is in us”(Schiller 83, italics added).
A lot has
been written about the social and political significance of Schiller’s
aesthetic program and although scholars have not failed to point out the
curious mixture of psychic and transcendental material in that program,
Schiller’s aesthetic has not been, as far as I know, approached as an
ontology. Perhaps the reason for this is
the same reason we suggested as an explanation for the instability and
inconsistency in Schiller’s thought. The
exclusion of the sublime from the aesthetic education of man might have found
its equivalent in the exclusion of the question of the being as such from Schiller scholarship. It is precisely this question, however, that
makes Schiller modern inasmuch as modern man, preoccupied as he is with his
self-justification, discovers the elusive sense of being in the experience of
the sublime, an experience, which modern art, abstract expressionism in
particular, tries to evoke. The question
of being does not seem to be Schiller’s primary concern in AEM; yet, the final goal of aesthetic education—the creation of the
moral state—hinges on the ontological justification of man as a free,
self-determined subject. What makes
Schiller interesting to modern readers is the irresolvable tension between a
genuinely idealistic intention—the establishment of the autonomy of art—and the
difficulty or impossibility of purifying the aesthetic of its historical or
philosophical content. Ultimately, Schiller’s modernity lies not in the
ideological (rhetorical) nature of his aesthetic—that would be a gross
simplification of Schiller’s thought—but rather in the aesthetic nature of that
ideology, in the attempt to restore to man the belief in freedom (beauty) even if that freedom, like everything
else, has been negated by the ideology of the aesthetic.
[1] Sharpe 7-9. See also Kooy for an
explication of Schiller’s diversion from Kant’s method. While admitting the
great influence Kant had on Schiller’s aesthetic reflections, Kooy underscores
Schiller’s modification of “both the substance and the method of Kant”(13) by
attempting a transcendental deduction of beauty with a view to finding an
objective ground for the aesthetic while drawing on empirical psychology for
evidence.
[2] Sharpe 12-13.
[3] Ibid., 40.
[4] Duncan 62.
[5] Kontje 125.
[6] Kontje
133. Kontje observes,
however, that although Schiller suppressed the name of the original addressee,
his popularist intentions were not entirely fulfilled since the readers of Die Horen constituted a rather small,
elitist group made up of highly educated Bürger.
[7] Kontje 140.
[8] Boos 15.
[9] Ibid., 25-26.
[10] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, ed. and
trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1982).
[11] See David Pugh’s Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996) 317-325 on the dialectical relationship
between art and philosophy in AEM.
Also see S. S. Kerry’s Schiller’s
Writings on Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1961), 140. Kerry
considers Schiller’s philosophical deduction of beauty a failure.
[12] See Pugh 334. Pugh makes a similar point,
arguing that Schiller’s paradoxical definition of beauty as a methexis of the transcendental and the
empirical realms, which must nevertheless be validated as a concept of Reason, turns the synthesis
of idea and nature into an idea. Kerry also draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic state: on one
hand, it is “a zero point” insofar as it is free of any particular determination
but, on the other hand, it represents the fully human, “the total
self”(156-57).
[13] Pugh examines in detail the duality of
Schiller’s thought, tracing it back to the aporias of Platonism. Schiller’s
dualism is examined in terms of the two opposite impulses toward methexis
(unity or participation) and chorismos (separation). Pugh argues that Schiller
regards nature as “the lower term of the polarity”(70) suggesting, I think,
that Schiller has no other choice but to privilege reason in order to offset
the privileging of nature (methexis) inherent in the very nature of Schiller’s
project.
[14] On the way, in which Schiller’s analogies
(what I call his mania for symmetry) modify
his theory instead of being themselves determined by the theory, see Kerry
123-4.
[15] See Constantin Behler’s Nostalgic Teleology: Friedrich Schiller and
the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995).
[16] See Pugh 343-52 for an explanation of Schiller’s
reworking of the Platonic ‘theory’ of Forms into a “meta-Platonic dualism.”
Pugh claims that Schiller replaces the Platonic realm of Intelligible Ideas
with the realm of pure semblance thus elevating methexis (the synthesis of
nature and reason) to the position formerly occupied by Pure Ideas.
[17] See Pugh 304-17. Pugh compares the Augustenburger Briefe, Schiller’s draft
letters of 1793 from which AEM was
composed in 1794-5, to show that the question of the sublime was purposefully
excluded by Schiller from the final draft.
[18] According to Pugh, Schiller’s dual
psycho-transcendental vision of beauty—as a ‘tool’ for moral self-determination
and a transcendental idea—subjects
beauty to the “dangers of illusion and corruption to which the purer ideas are
not subject”(73). The sublime, Pugh argues, is then “invoked as a corrective to
beauty”(73). Whenever Schiller leaves the world of “barren abstraction” to
descend into the world of experience, thus running the risk of
over-psychologizing beauty, his examples of beauty tend to be examples of
sublimity. The impulse toward the psychologization of beauty is associated with
“melting beauty” while the impulse toward the transcendental grounding of
beauty is associated with “energizing beauty.”
[19] Pugh attributes the fragility of Schiller’s
ideal synthesis of nature and reason to what he calls Schiller’s “residual
commitment to Aristotelian notions of natural teleology and organicism”(167).
By arguing that Schiller’s ideal “fragments into cataphatic beauty and
apophatic sublimity”(167), Pugh associates, and rightfully so, beauty with
nature (methexis) and sublimity with reason (chorismos).
[20] Behler invents a special name to describe
the dual status of the Schillerian aesthetic (as both an origin and an end). He
calls it “nostalgic teleology”: both a “remembrance and...a prefiguration of
the individual and social utopia towards which human existence and history is
meant to move”(19).
[21] See Leonard P. Wessell’s The Philosophical Background to Friedrich
Schiller’s Aesthetics of Living Form (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1982),
150-2 for an interpretation of the
beautiful object as an analogy to man’s subjective freedom.
[22] See Pugh 154-61 for an analysis of the
potential despotic implications of Schiller’s aesthetic ideal. Also see 132-67
for a discussion of the role of illusion in Schiller’s notion of beauty as the
appearance of freedom. Pugh claims that the only way for Schiller to evoke “the
appearance of an impossible internal determination [is] by an illusion that
external determination is absent”(133).
[23] Kerry also notes “the flattening effect” of
Schiller’s notion of aesthetic harmony, observing that it cannot account for
“the diversity of genius”(126).
[24] Behler offers a brief account of Terry
Eagleton’s critique of Schiller’s aesthetics in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990). Eagleton reads Schiller’s
project of sensualizing the moral law as a disguised attempt “to make power
infiltrate the very texture of lived experience” and turn it into “a principle
of spontaneous consensus”(qtd. in Behler 74). Eagleton goes as far as to claim
that Schiller’s “bourgeois aesthetic” constitutes “the very paradigm of the
ideological”(qtd. in Behler 75).
[25] Behler draws attention to Schiller’s use of
physiological concepts to support his essentially idealist model, finding this
problematic terminology one of the reasons for the contradictions in Schiller’s
thought (213).
[26] Schiller believes that his project of
aesthetic education challenges the one-sidedness of the philosophical project
by considering the totality of the human psyche and not privileging the
form-drive as the law governing psychic development. Glossing Schiller’s Grace and Dignity, Behler notes that,
from Schiller’s point of view “[w]hat philosophy construes as a necessary and
ultimately irreconcilable opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘reason’, between
‘sensuality’ and ‘the moral law’ is the result of its own conceptual and
pedagogical limitations,” “a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy”(96). Schiller
does not seriously challenge the philosophical project: after all, his own
project cannot escape privileging form/reason/truth as the highest ends.
[27] Reacting against a prevalent tendency in Schiller
scholarship to overemphasize Schiller’s abandonment of the aesthetic as a
political ideal and his increasing concern with the aesthetic as an end in
itself, Behler insists on the necessity “to recognize the politically
overdetermined nature of [Schiller’s] aesthetic theory, [as well as] the
aesthetically overdetermined nature of his political ideal”(81). He claims that
Schiller’s “moral-pedagogical” project is already a political one i.e. “a
program in Foucault’s sense of the term, namely, the invention of a strategy
and a technology of productive power and discipline”(86-7).
[28] Kerry explains that Schiller needs to
derive the principles of Reason and Nature from the morally empirical fact of
psychic unity in order to make the historical
transition from Nature to Reason (115).
[29] Pugh identifies the central question in
Schiller’s aesthetics as that of the possibility of transcending “the Platonic
prejudice [what I would call Platonic earnestness] against the material world”(85),
implying that for Schiller the sublime belongs to the intelligible realm while
the beautiful is part of the material realm. The question that Schiller faces
is this: can he offer a transcendental grounding of the beautiful and still
continue calling the beautiful beautiful rather than sublime? Pugh’s argument
shares common ground with my argument about the displacement that occurs within
beauty. Pugh proposes that the role Schiller ascribes to beauty—the role of
overcoming the dualism of Platonic thought—“causes beauty to incur a dualistic
structure of its own; that is, it comes to comprise a synthesis of sensible and
non-sensible beauty”(78). Pugh discusses Schiller’s example of Juno Ludovisi as
an example of this replication, within beauty, of the very dualism beauty was
supposed to overcome. See 81-82.
[30] Gadamer’s reading of Schiller’s concept of
play makes play “the mode of being of the work of art itself” (Gadamer qtd. in
Behler 29), rather than man’s subjective experience of the work of art. Gadamer
insists on “the primacy of play over the consciousness of the player.”
[31] Behler, too, notes that the “‘organic’
character of ‘the Greek states’...remains mostly a undeveloped projection and a
simple rhetorical contrast to the civilizational ills of the modern
world”(143).
[32] Behler claims that for Schiller aesthetic
contemplation is “ ‘pure’ self-referentiality”(163). Kerry, too, is aware of
the tautological tendencies in Schiller. See particularly his analysis of
Schiller’s circular reasoning in the definitions of “Person” and “Condition.”
See also 134-39 for Kerry’s analysis of Schiller’s argument about the
relationship between Person and Condition as an argument “from linguistic
form,” which is not logically supported but is a mere intuition or “a premise
of faith.”
[33] Behler notes Fichte’s reaction, in “On the
Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy” (1795), against the circularity of
Schiller’s argument which results from Schiller’s dual notion of the aesthetic
as both a means and a goal of his project: “When, on the one hand, it is not
advisable to let men be free before their aesthetic sense is developed, it is,
on the other hand, impossible to develop this sense before they are free”(Fiche
qtd. in Behler 84).
[34] See Pugh 101-32 for a discussion of
Schiller’s relationship to Kant with respect to the question of a teleology of
reason i.e. of a certain inclination or interest in reason toward its own
objectification (through beauty).
[35] Pugh rightly observes that in the ideal
synthesis of matter and form, form—as the metaphysical concept—is always
privileged (144).
[36] See Pugh 150-54 for an insightful analysis
of Schiller’s “dual form argument,” which concludes that Schiller’s synesthesia
of methexis and chorismos through beauty is merely “a conjuring trick.” The
illusion of methexis is so complete, claims Pugh, that the suppression of
matter cannot be detected.
[37] See Pugh 161-64 on the nature of aesthetic
contemplation as a process comprised of two steps, an initial cataphatic stage,
at which the visual apprehension of freedom in the phenomenal world is a direct
representation of freedom based on the principle of methexis, followed by a
second stage, at which the initial image of freedom is ‘corrected’ by a
reflection on the apophatic nature of that freedom, as a result of which
freedom becomes merely the appearance of the pure idea of freedom, an indirect
representation based on the principle of chorismos.
[38] According to Behler, Schiller is able to
hide the potential violence (the rhetorical nature) of his disciplinary project
by masking that project as a “restoration,” a return to an originally unified
human nature, which philosophy has wrongfully posited as fragmented a priori. Schiller manages to present
the division of the psyche—which must be transcended—as a product of modern
civilization and thus make the claim that aesthetic education will not actually
change or re-invent human nature but will merely recuperate a lost ‘true
nature’. Behler observes that Schiller’s seemingly emancipatory project in fact
“aims at a thorough submission of the senses and the body to reason”(108-109)
and at “an actual refashioning of the ‘drives’ [Triebe] taking place at the unconscious level of ‘desire’ “(111).
[39] See Wessell 140 on Schillerian form as an
“existential imperative” of the Person. Also see Anthony Saville’s Aesthetic Reconstructions: the Seminal
Writings of Lessing, Kant and Schiller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987),
200-202 on the connection of the form-drive to self-consciousness. Saville
interprets Schiller’s ideal of man as a maximization of self-consciousness
(208). Although this might seem a little far-fetched, given Schiller’s
glorification of the Greeks’ naive and
simple humanity, it points to a real problem in Schiller’s thought—the
impossibility of reducing modern man’s self-consciousness naturally.
[40] It would be interesting to compare
Schiller’s notions of Gestalt and Leben to Heidegger’s world and earth. Schiller’s account of the determination of the infinite by the
finite seems to foreshadow Heidegger’s account of the Greek temple in “The
Origin of the Work of Art.”
[41] Behler juxtaposes Schiller’s “productive
model” of political and moral education with ‘repressive models,” suggesting
that this distinction might have been the reason why Schiller scholars have
generally remained blind to “the disciplinary character of Schiller’s
aesthetics. Behler recalls Foucault’s understanding of power in order to
undermine the stereotypical notion of power in terms of repression only: “Power
would be a fragile thing if its only power were to repress....If...power is
strong it is because...it produces effects at the level of desire”(Foucault
qtd. in Behler 90).
[42] Examining Schiller’s traces in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Behler notes that, for
Gadamer, Schiller’s “aesthetic abstraction” in fact (and contrary to my
argument ) destroys “the mode of being” of the actual “truth-event” of art.
Gadamer believes that Schiller’s aesthetic experience leaves man unchanged, and
is not “transformative” enough. The real task of art, argues Gadamer, is to
make man present. Aesthetic experience is of an “ecstatic” nature: “In
distinction from the ‘abstraction’ of ‘aesthetic consciousness,’ ‘being present
has the character of being outside oneself’” (Behler 27). Schiller’s
description of Juno Ludovisi, however, is precisely the description of an
ecstatic experience.
[43] For a discussion of the three-stage schema
in Schiller, see M. H. Abrams’s Natural
Supernaturalism, in which Abrams argues that one of the major contributions
of the German and English Romantics, and of Schiller in particular, was the
fact they shifted the location of the highest truth from the first stage (the
pure origin) to the third stage (a synthesis higher than the original unity)
and thus emancipated the fallen second stage (occupied by man) to an
“indispensable stage in the ascent towards perfection” (Abrams qtd. in Behler
54).
[44] Behler finds the greatest difference
between Kant and Schiller in terms of “the determination of the ethical
substance” (115). Whereas for Kant “the prime material of moral
self-constitution is ‘practical reason’ (i.e. Kant is concerned with questions
of moral deliberation and action only), Schiller makes desire itself the
“ethical substance” (i.e. he is concerned with the very being of the moral subject, not just with the subject’s moral conduct) (116).
[45] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity P, 1988).
[46] Behler agrees with Marcuse that one of
Schiller’s major contributions is that he attributes an “anthropological
significance” to Kant’s transcendental philosophy: what Kant has analyzed only
as “processes of the mind,” Schiller analyzes as models of social development thus
straddling the line between the transcendental and the empirical.
[47] For Gadamer the aesthetic experience is
always transformative insofar as it is conceived as “an encounter with oneself”
or a “recognition” of one’s identity (Gadamer qtd. in Behler 32). Behler traces
the similarities between Gadamer’s and Schiller’s notions of play as “the
privileged site for the recovery of human identity” (34), arguing that the only
difference between them is that, in Gadamer’s case, identity is conceived in
cultural-historical terms (35).
[48] Behler fails to see the high stakes in
Schiller’s notion of play. Rather than reading Schiller’s play as the
continuous questioning of the very being of man, Behler sees it as “merely a
re-affirmation of a human essence that is always already present and is merely
being re-awakened”(221).
[49] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988).
[50] For an account of de Man’s analysis, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, of the
potentially totalitarian implications of Schiller’s aesthetic, see Behler’s
chapter on de Man and aesthetic ideology. Behler agrees with de Man and argues
that for Schiller an object will appear
beautiful and free if it is both self-determining and self-determined, if it
gives the appearance of a natural
form.
[51]
Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1990).
[52] Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) approaches Schiller’s work as a
manifestation of “the dominant bourgeois ideology of art”(Behler 39), trying to
show the similarities between, on one hand, Schiller’s notion of the autonomy
of art as precisely that, which guarantees its important social role and, on
the other hand, the avant-garde’s renunciation of the institution of art as
such and their attempt to reintegrate art in “the praxis of life” (41).
[53] The nostalgic aspect of the beautiful points
to a dangerous tendency within beauty, a tendency of which Marcuse, in his
reading of Schiller, is well aware. Marcuse notes that the beautiful exhibits a
certain dangerous tendency toward normalization and that it is less capable
than the sublime to perform “a radical break with the terror of
normality”(Behler 21). Unlike the sublime, the beautiful can both “recall the
repressed...[only] to repress it again—‘purified’ ”(Marcuse qtd. in Behler 21).
[54] The ‘religious’ impulse is always
symptomatic of a certain crisis. In his discussion of Schiller’s significance
in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization,
Behler calls both Marcuse’s and Schiller’s discourses “narratives of
emancipation” or “crisis-theories of modernity.” There is indeed a continuity
between Schiller’s critique of “the retrograde moment of the Enlightenment” (9)
and Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional man in the world of advanced
industrial capitalism.
[55] Behler summarizes Gadamer’s critique of
Schiller’s project, particularly Gadamer’s observation that Schiller’s initial
project of using the aesthetic as a bridge to the moral changes in the course
of the work so that Schiller ends up justifying what Gadamer indicts as “a
ruling ideology of ‘aesthetic abstraction’, a sterile and ‘leveling’ ‘aesthetic
consciousness’ that is the fitting expression of ‘the age of science’ and
‘technocracy’”(Gadamer qtd. in Behler 25).
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Volume 1,
December 2004, http://intertheory.org
ISSN
1552-5112