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In Search of Play

Schiller’s Drive Theory as a Turn Away from Kant
À la recherche du jeu. La théorie schillérienne des pulsions : une mise à distance de Kant
Cody Staton
p. 69-95

Résumés

L’article étudie le traitement par Schiller de la pulsion de jeu (Spieltrieb) comme d’une troisième pulsion suspendant et transcendant dans le plaisir esthétique nos deux tendances sensible et raisonnable. Puisque la pulsion de jeu schillérienne transforme des inclinations matérielles en un plaisir pris à la forme, créant un amour de la beauté et du sublime, et puisqu’elle est l’indice du progrès moral au sein de la société, elle excède – telle est ma thèse – le domaine kantien de l’expérience esthétique. Mais surtout, Schiller considère que la liberté humaine est le produit de l’expérience esthétique, par où l’individu surmonte, moyennant le jeu, l’oppression exercée par les contraintes sociales.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Two exceptions that spring to mind are Epicureanism in the Greek tradition of philosophy and, to so (...)
  • 2 F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 13 and 14. Hereafter cited as Briefe in the body (...)

1It is somewhat of a platitude in the history of western philosophy to consider the human individual as being divided between the forces of the intellect and the forces of nature, and almost every philosopher has speculated about ways in which a bridge between the two can be forged.1 Most classical German philosophers held that the power of reason could dominate nature, thereby freeing humans from their mere animality, while some argued that the emotions lead to a religious awakening. But to be isolated from nature and bound to the demands of reason or satisfying physical needs alone largely describes the suffering of humans, or so Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) argues. Individuals suffer because they are incessantly pulled by a formal drive (reason) to destroy all demands of physical necessity, rendering the attraction to meet those needs all the more alluring. Schiller’s diagnosis of this problem in Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1795) calls for the suspension of these drives through “a new drive” (einen neuen Trieb), a “third fundamental drive” (Grundtrieb) that he nominates the play-drive (Spieltrieb).2 The play-drive seeks that which is irreal (Schein) in its effort to redirect human energy away from the oppressive reality established by physical and formal necessities.

  • 3 Idem, Letter 15, 131.

2This leads Schiller to his rather famous maxim in the Fifteenth Brief that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”3 Suspending the formal and material drives, which are then brought into reciprocal action (Wechselwirkung) by means of the play-drive (Spieltrieb), renders the purest product of human activity: beauty. Since beauty captures an object as appearing free to us, aesthetic experience provides the fundamental access point to human freedom. My aim in this paper will be to disclose the ways in which Schiller describes the play-drive as creating an aesthetic condition that invents a new reality, an attitude toward life generated by imaginative play.

  • 4 In his investigation of Laocoön, Lessing contends that the sculptor’s intent was to bring all the (...)
  • 5 See I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 22, AA V: 241 and 240. On these varying descriptions of t (...)

3Schiller was by no means the first philosopher to discuss a harmonious free play with beauty. Both Lessing and Herder describe free play in their accounts of aesthetic enjoyment.4 But Kant certainly developed the concept of the free play the furthest, giving it a central role in his Critique of Judgment (1790). While the first Critique (1781-1787) broadcasts the harmony of the cognitive powers (understanding and imagination) to be about bringing the categories to bear on sensible intuition by way of the imagination’s schemata—thus making possible determinative judgment on the basis of the understanding’s lawfulness—the third Critique describes this harmony as a free play of imagination and understanding in aesthetic judgment.5

  • 6 As much as I appreciate her work, this seems to be the interpretation that Martha Woodmansee offe (...)
  • 7 Katerina Deligiorgi argues that Schiller is unclear about the play-drive, while I think that his (...)

4For both Kant and Schiller, free play is an indeterminate aesthetic activity that energizes both the mental powers and the body. For Schiller, this involves a playful transformation in our animality—such as when sexual desire is recast as love. At the next level in the aesthetic sphere, play operates by taking delight in mere form by destroying all that is material in an effort to elevate the sensuous and rational in works of art. Finally, at the moral stage, play serves human individuals by producing culture. For Schiller, it is only by means of semblance that reality itself becomes bearable. Semblance awakens the drive to play in all instances of life. This activity promotes what Schiller refers to as an aesthetic condition of the individual and an aesthetic state for society. For many readers, the latter shows Schiller to abandon his goal of describing political emancipation in favor of fetishizing art.6 Readers have viewed this as an elitist turn in Schiller’s argument, as he supposedly aborts his argument for social transformation and instead closes the Briefe by discussing the play-drive as an escape from the tedium of life through works of art. Aesthetic education as Schiller crafts it in the Briefe is then considered even less clear if, like some, his account of the play-drive is seen to vacillate between different ideas regarding what kind of role it performs in human activity.7 As I see it, Schiller views the play-drive as producing the consummate person, who indeed flees from the oppressive forces of society through the beauty of art, but having discovered freedom in play transforms civilization by sublimating the drives.

  • 8 This seems to be the point emphasized by Dieter Henrich and many other Kantians. See F. Beiser, S (...)

5Though Kant has been mined as a source for better understanding Schiller, many have downplayed the novelty of Schiller’s approach to aesthetics.8 I take it that, for Schiller, play is both the means and the end to achieve meaning in life; the means is the end. Play allows us to achieve our highest efficacy in life—which is also the highest level of play: political emancipation. What I propose is that, while Kant conceives of play as an effect of the powers of the mind that improves both cognition in general and one’s moral judgment, Schiller rather locates play as being the fundamental driving force of humanity.

Kant on the Free Play of the Faculties

  • 9 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 9, AA V: 216.
  • 10 I cannot resolve this issue here, as many commentators have devoted much effort to this discussio (...)
  • 11 See I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 8, AA V: 215. This seems to be a source of widespread con (...)
  • 12 Idem, § 9, AA V: 217-218.

6One of the most pressing dilemmas that Kant approaches in the third Critique appears rather early in the text, where he claims that he will resolve the “key to the whole critique of taste.”9 The problem concerns whether the judgment of taste precedes the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful or the other way around.10 In the course of that argument, he introduces his account of the free play of the cognitive powers to explain how the faculties harmonize without determinate concepts. As is well-known, Kant describes an aesthetic judgment as one in which everyone would agree with that judgment.11 Here, the imagination frees itself from the determinacy of the understanding and acts purposively, but without a purpose (concept of the object). He writes: “this subjective universal communicability can be nothing but [that of] the mental state in which we are when imagination and understanding are in free play (insofar as they harmonize with each other as required for cognition in general).”12 When we say that a rose is beautiful, we are only reflecting on our feeling for the representation and not making any claim about the function of the rose itself. Harmony in the case of aesthetic judgment results from the universal communicability of the beautiful made possible by the agreement of our representational powers (imagination and understanding) in their free play.

  • 13 Idem, § 16, AA V: 229-230.
  • 14 See idem, § 54, AA V: 331.
  • 15 Idem, § 54, AA V: 332.
  • 16 Ibid.

7Kant considers this to be paramount for his purposes of establishing judgments of taste as grounding subjective purposiveness on mere feelings of pleasure—that is, on a purposive activity of the faculties that plays without determining the purpose of the object. The critical difference in determinative and aesthetic judgment is that, in the former the imagination synthesizes according to the lawfulness of the understanding, while in the latter the “imagination is playing, as it were, while it contemplates the shape” of the representation.13 Kant ascribes various types of play to the imagination: the play involved in games of chance, the play of tones in music, and the play of wit.14 In the second and third kinds of play, he argues that the pleasure we feel derives entirely from the imagination’s play with aesthetic ideas, a kind of play that produces a bodily enjoyment, such as in a joke, where “the understanding, failing to find what it expected, suddenly relaxes, so that we feel the effect of this slackening in the body by the vibration of our organs.”15 Here, Kant makes it quite evident that, although in the understanding “nothing is thought” in aesthetic ideas, they produce a “quickening” of our cognitive powers stimulated entirely by the body.16

8For Kant, the free play of the imagination concerns itself only with the shape or design of the representation. In the case of the joke:

  • 17 Ibid. This might serve as an example to Herder’s criticism that Kant neglects the physiological a (...)

“In everything that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something nonsensical (in which, therefore, the understanding in itself can take no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”17

  • 18 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 54, AA V: 334.
  • 19 Idem, § 49, AA V: 317.
  • 20 See Kant’s description (Kritik der Urteilskraft, AA V: 242) of dull landscape gardens that employ (...)
  • 21 See idem, AA V: 243. See I. Kant, Kants gesammelte Schriften, AA VII: 173; Anthropology, History, (...)
  • 22 R. Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 285. Thus, Zuckert characterizes the argument as a free p (...)

9Imaginative play operates by means of shifts in motion between diverse elements that animate the movement of the play. Hearing a joke, the imagination plays along with the movement communicated in the telling, while the understanding instead plays freely with concepts in search of a meaning. Kant adds that it is “noteworthy that in all such cases the joke must always contain something that can deceive for a moment: hence, when the illusion disappears into nothing, the mind looks back again in order to try to find it once more.”18 The imagination then communicates a “rapidly passing play” (schnell vorübergehendes Spiel) with the representation, as when a melody or line changes and imagination seizes upon this change in direction, and this adds more to the understanding than any concept can ever provide.19 Or in the case of rolling landscapes, the imagination plays with the changing shape of the land that constantly indicates movement: serpentine ponds, winding paths, twisting trees, hidden grottoes of rock and flora, and so on.20 Imaginative play with shapes, however, is not reducible to a mere play of sensations.21 Enjoying the charms of rhythmic sensations, such as in the sounds of a rippling mountain stream flowing over rocks or the flickering light of a fire, is quite different than the imaginative play of tones or wit, in that the latter involve the imagination’s play with nature, whereas the former plays with the imagination.22 The former we find beautiful, whereas the latter is merely agreeable.

  • 23 Idem, 279-293.
  • 24 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, AA V: 229-230; cf. 242.
  • 25 Ibid.
  • 26 Idem, § 57, AA V: 341. See R. Zuckert, 288.
  • 27 See idem, § 23, 244 and First Introduction 20: 220, where Kant compares the beautiful to an indet (...)

10As Rachel Zuckert has argued, in addition to the free play of the imagination, Kant also claims that the imagination plays freely with the understanding, in which case judgment finds the representation to be independent and free of a concept of the object’s purpose.23 Examples that he cites include “designs à la grecque, the foliage on borders or on wallpaper,” since they “represent nothing, no object under a determinate concept, and are free beauties.”24 Kant also describes a free play of imagination and understanding when the latter exhibits concepts that present a purpose of the object. For instance, the “the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely dependent [adhärierende] beauty.”25 So, the understanding can employ an “indeterminate concept of the beautiful” as a result of the free play.26 An artist’s work presupposes a determinate concept of the product that she works on, e.g., stone, but only an indeterminate concept of the representation of the work that she aims to create.27

  • 28 See idem, § 9, AA V: 219.

11The free play of the imagination with the understanding releases a free play of concepts. When listening to a joke, it is not merely that the understanding must undergo a selective process of concepts, but that the imagination must assist the understanding in finding or producing a concept—even though the imagination plays freely with the representation as if it represented the object with a concept all along.28 When judgment selects a concept of the representation, the felt pleasure refers to an indeterminate concept, whereas judgment indicates a determinate concept of the representation (not of the object itself) in instances when beauty is said to be dependent on the concept of the representation’s purpose.

12Free play then becomes an interchange between the imagination and understanding, where the free play of concepts is set into motion by the imagination’s play with the representation’s shape. To this end, Kant certainly makes overtures to a kind of imaginative play with the understanding that incorporates both the intellectual and bodily contributions to aesthetic experience. As is well-known, he closes his investigation of aesthetic judgment with a description of beauty as symbolizing the morally good. This paves the way for Schiller and the early romantics to consider the beautiful in art as itself an instantiation of morality.

Schiller and the Fundamental Drives

  • 29 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 13; quoted from 118, 119, and 120, respectively. As Beis (...)

13Though Schiller’s critical replies to Kant’s notions of beauty in Kallias (1793) and “Über Anmut und Würde” (1793) are considered by many to be incomplete, his approach to human freedom as an endeavor of the aesthetic experiences that constitute the whole of the individual are there from the beginning. The Briefe on aesthetic education add another layer to the argument, wherein Schiller characterizes the sensuous drive (sinnlicher Trieb) as that which alone “awakens and develops the potentialities of man” by pressing always for change, toward that which is concerned with reality in time. By contrast, the formal drive (Formtrieb) “annuls time” and “annuls change,” for it “wants the real to be necessary and eternal and the eternal and necessary to be real.”29 The notion of drives is, to my mind, nowhere to be found in Kant, but both Fichte and Reinhold experimented with this idea in the early 1790s.

  • 30 See J.G. Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre, SW IV, 212.
  • 31 See J.G. Fichte, Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie, SW VIII, 277; On this, see F. Beise (...)
  • 32 See idem, 279; F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 147.
  • 33 See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 146-147.

14Fichte argues that nature provides the individual with natural drives (Naturtriebe) that make possible all the necessary biological functions related to vitality.30 To quell the feeling of hunger, for instance, an organism consumes food, thus promoting a feeling of pleasure in his or her ability to secure that need. Fichte develops this argument in his essay, “Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie” (1794), where he describes the basic drives of human psychology, though he ultimately reduces all of them to one basic function.31 He argues that there are various drives that comprise human striving that all seem to emerge from a fundamental drive toward knowing, a drive to make objects “conform” to our representations. Fichte also points to an aesthetic drive that takes an interest in an object in the most general way. These varying drives, however, are all motivated by the efforts of our drive to be self-determining.32 As Beiser points out, for Fichte, aesthetic pleasure emerges from our striving toward self-determination and the capacity to reconcile the actual world in a harmonious way with that striving.33 It brings us pleasure to find agreement with the will and the world.

  • 34 See ibid.
  • 35 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 14, 125; see also Letter 15, 128-129.
  • 36 I disagree with Klaus Disselbeck, who so neatly sees Schiller borrowing (or at least, modifying) (...)

15Apart from this account of drives, Schiller might have also been motivated to adopt Fichte’s argument regarding the Wechselwirkung, whereby, for Schiller, reason and sensibility would harmonize and the human being would lift herself to a higher status of creativity via the activity of Spiel.34 In the opening paragraph of the Fourteenth Brief, Schiller indeed waxes Fichtean when describing the “reciprocal action [Wechsel-Wirkung] between the two drives,” an action that makes possible, “sets limits to,” and allows each drive to achieve “its highest manifestation.”35 Of course, Fichte’s argument concerning the interaction or reciprocity (Wechselwirkung) necessary for human freedom refers to the I as being the force that combines the finite and the infinite, and, as is well-known, he assigns the imagination a significant role in that activity. For Schiller, however, the Spieltrieb that aims at beauty, making possible the interaction between form and matter, is neither reducible to some kind of identity (whether transcendental or empirical) nor to consciousness.36

  • 37 F. Schiller, NA XXVIII, 200-203 (June 23rd and 24th, 1795). As Beiser has indicated, Schiller, as (...)
  • 38 See B. von Wiese, Friedrich Schiller, 487.
  • 39 On this, see F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 147.

16Schiller acknowledges that his discussion of the interaction (Wechselwirkung) of the two drives owes to Fichte’s account given in the Wissenschaftlehre, but notes in his letters to Fichte in June of 1795 that he finds Fichte’s discussion of the drives to be “vacillating and impure” (schwankend und unrein).37 Moreover, Schiller contends that Fichte fails to account for the sensuous life drives, that Fichte’s description of the first two drives are not clearly distinguished, and while he appreciates some of Fichte’s comments on the aesthetic drive, it is unclear what place or role the aesthetic drive plays in experience, since this drive supposedly derives from the first two, but is also somehow independent from them. Thus, the adaptation of the power of the Wechselwirkung was in name only. He aims instead to demonstrate how the two basic drives can be reconciled and brought to higher unities through their conflict. Schiller argues that Fichte’s account is too superficial, especially as regards the most important drive in the Briefe, the sensible drive, which was neglected completely by Fichte.38 So, he does not merely criticize Fichte’s argument, but entirely rejects his pedestrian account of aesthetic experience as being a mere scion of practical reason.39 Yet the idea regarding fundamental drives had been around at least since Reinhold’s earliest writings on Kantian philosophy.

  • 40 K.L. Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, 165.
  • 41 In a way, Reinhold pulls the will apart from its Kantian rootedness in practical reason. See S. R (...)

17In Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (1790), Reinhold argues that “two wholly different drives for pleasure have to be assumed in human nature – a self-interested one, which has an individual’s own well-being as its object, and an unselfish one, which has the well-being of others as its object.”40 By designating the selfish drive as that which strives for sensual satisfaction and the unselfish drive as springing from practical reason, Reinhold essentially collapses all human creativity and goodness into one faculty of the mind. Freedom emerges from the interplay of these two faculties as a kind of contradiction. The will directs the power of freedom to operate between these two limits or extremes.41

  • 42 On the debate between Fichte and Reinhold, see C. Piché, “Fichte’s Debate With Reinhold in 1793: (...)

18Reinhold claims that the will feels gratification in self-determining responses to the Naturtriebe. Given that the will acts on the basis of mere natural drives, he introduces a circular problem that he seeks to cover up by arguing that such acts derive from the freedom of the will alone. The begging question as to which comes first remains: the will or the natural causes? While Fichte views this as problematic, since the freedom of the will (reason) has thus been reduced to determinations on the basis of mere empirical effects (natural causes), his own solution to this, for Schiller, was no less problematic.42

  • 43 Roehr sees this as the product of Reinhold’s influence, but Schiller could have simply modified t (...)

19In “Über Anmut und Würde” (1793) and other essays, Schiller describes the will similarly as being somewhat independent from practical reason such that it can act according to either the demands of reason or nature.43 But Reinhold’s account of the selfish drive hardly resembles Schiller’s description of the basic human drives. Moreover, Schiller does not place any normative value on the role of the drives, as being good for something or other, but construes them rather as fulfilling the demands of necessity, whether material or formal. Schiller sets his description of the fundamental drives apart from Reinhold and Fichte by describing the two fundamental drives as being cancelled and elevated by a third drive, namely, the play-drive (Spieltrieb) that reflects on semblance.

  • 44 Beiser notes that the evidence of Schiller having read Aristotle in the early 1790s cannot determ (...)
  • 45 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX.6 1048a30-1048b: “Now being at work is something’s being-present n (...)
  • 46 Idem, VIII.6 1045b18.
  • 47 R. Bernet, Force, Drive, Desire. A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, 5.

20It could be that, in some ways, Schiller’s drive theory draws more from Aristotle’s concept of dunamis than from his contemporaries.44 For instance, Aristotle discusses potentiality or potency (dunamis) in the context of producing change (kinesis) and also as the activity (energeia) that brings that change to completion. In Metaphysics IX (θ), he argues that dunamis refers not only to the force that produces change, but also to that which makes a thing what it is, namely, the drive or potency at work in a thing (the being-at-work).45 The potentiality toward a structure becoming a completed house requires both the drive toward completion and the essential quality of the house becoming a house. And since dunamis is depicted as being opposed to the lack of force (steresis), dunamis as life-drive implies an activity of striving toward a yet to be realized outcome. In fact, Aristotle writes that “the highest level of material and form are one and the same thing, the former potentially, the latter actively. . . and what is in potency and what is in activity are in a certain way the same thing.” 46Rudolf Bernet characterizes dunamis as the “pressing presence of a yet-to-be realized power,” a drive inhibited from reaching its aim, but nonetheless thrusting toward that goal.47

  • 48 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 5, 103.
  • 49 Idem, Letter 6, 106.
  • 50 Idem, Letter 14, 127.

21Similarly, Schiller describes the sensuous drive as “pressing for change,” which is always in conflict with the desire for the changeless (the formal). Late in the Sixth Brief, Schiller indicates that, as the two fundamental drives necessarily isolated themselves in order to achieve their potential, the imagination worked on reason in that isolation, compelling it “to rise to the ultimate sources of knowing, and invoke the law of necessity against her.”48 What is not made evident until the Eighth Brief is that Schiller has yet to appoint a drive that would act in the name of reason in the domain of the sensible, such that reason “must first herself become a force and appoint some drive to be her champion in the realm of phenomena.”49 Reason seeks to annihilate the sensuous, but it must find a drive to operate on its behalf in the domain of reality. Here, the Spieltrieb operates not unlike dunamis, in that it transforms both form and matter. However, Schiller argues that the play with semblance brings to reality that which is purely imaginary. Since the play-drive will “introduce form into matter and reality into form,” thereby stripping mere feelings of their compulsive power and rational ideas of their weighted morality, the play-drive makes affections and esteem themselves playful.50

The Play-Drive (Spieltrieb): From the Natural to the Aesthetic

  • 51 Idem, Letter 19, 143.
  • 52 See idem, Letter 20, 145.
  • 53 Idem, Letter 23, 153.
  • 54 Idem, Letter 20, 145.
  • 55 Ibid.

22Natural drives emerging from the sensuous drive are sunk deep in our impulses, rendering our ordinary condition to be oriented to satisfying physical demands. The formal drive, by contrast, seeks to destroy all that is sensuous and real about the individual. But rather than viewing this opposition negatively, Schiller argues that they in fact establish “the basis of man’s humanity.”51 In the Twentieth Brief, he defines the limiting and delimiting roles that form and matter play with one another as the aesthetic condition of human life.52 Overcoming the grip of the fundamental drives, however, requires nothing less than an “aesthetic modulation of the psyche.”53 Bringing feeling and thinking, sense and reason, activity and passivity, together in a suspended moment of beauty can only come about by way of a “real and active determinability” (aktive Bestimmbarkeit) assigned to the Spieltrieb.54 Aesthetic determinability activates both the rational and sensuous drives while also canceling them as “determining forces,” sublimating them in a state of aesthetic determination.55 In what follows, I will discuss some of Schiller’s arguments regarding the genesis of the play-drive.

  • 56 Idem, Letter 25, 165. See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 159.
  • 57 Idem, Letter 23, 154.

23Schiller describes life according to three domains: the natural, the aesthetic, and the moral. He contends that it is much easier for one to ascend to the moral from the aesthetic because the Spieltrieb in the individual has already found pleasure in the contemplation of form over the pleasure of matter. Having discovered beauty, the path to truth and morality is already forged, but the question to be asked is how one is “to clear a way for himself from common reality to aesthetic reality, from mere life-serving to feelings of beauty.”56 At the lowest level, naturalistic play requires the discovery of entirely new personae in the individual: “Aesthetic man often needs no more than the challenge of a sublime situation (which is what acts most directly upon our willpower) to make him a hero or a sage. Sensuous man must first be transported beneath another clime.”57

  • 58 Schiller to von Augustenberg, November 21, 1793. Der Geschlechtstrieb war das einzige Band, das (...)

24In his letters to Friedrich Christian von Augustenberg in 1793—the original drafts for what would become the published Briefe in 1795—Schiller provides the prince with examples of how one’s love for semblance is ignited, such as in the transformation of sexual lust into care and love. He writes that “the sexual drive was the only bond that tied a man to his wife and the satisfaction of the drive was the only demand that he made of her.”58 Schiller comments in those letters that play releases the “savage” (der Wilde) from the bonds of physical necessity, which satisfies his mere “animalistic drive” (thierischen Trieb) for sexual satisfaction. Love, gifted by way of the admiration of form, compels him to think instead of his future. Of course, the last two Briefe indicate that initiates in the pleasure of semblance will not immediately discard physical desires, but can nonetheless redirect sexual motivations.

  • 59 Schiller to von Augustenberg, November 21, 1793.
  • 60 Schiller an von Augustenberg, November 21, 1793.
  • 61 See F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 26, 166.

25While the individual in the natural mode has hardly given up all the qualities of physical satisfaction, he or she critically transforms away from finding joy in content to finding pleasure in mere reflection of the form and not the matter of the object. So, “even the ugly, judged as beautiful,” indicates a free capacity to transform taste, which is still a “grotesque taste” (groteske[s] Geschmack), but is not influenced by sensual interests.59 Schiller writes to Augustenburg about the kinds of things that the savage “taste” finds pleasing—grotesque figures, bright colors, loud music (groteske Figuren, grille Farben, gellende Musik), but since these merely formal pleasures do not contribute to the individual’s material conditions they nonetheless allow the power of thought (Denkkraft) to emerge. The desire for trinkets, ornaments on the body, and fine clothes contribute to an “awakened drive [erwachten Trieb] for free enjoyment.”60 Or as Schiller argues in the Twenty-sixth Brief, ornamentation, semblance, and play all signal a transition toward an aesthetic condition of life.61

  • 62 Idem, Letter 26, 167.
  • 63 Idem, Letter 26, 169.
  • 64 Idem, Letter 15, 128.

26In that Brief, Schiller describes this transition toward aesthetic play as the moment that the eye begins to reign over the senses, pursuing mere semblance instead of what the hands and body can grasp in reality: “Once he does begin to enjoy through the eye, and seeing acquires for him a value of its own [selbständigen], he is already aesthetically free and the play drive [Spieltrieb] has started to develop.”62 This is immediately followed by the love for imitation and the joy expressed in imitative art, as the eyes desire to mimic the form of pleasing objects. But Schiller warns that aesthetic semblance can only be honest when it “renounces all claims to reality” and autonomous insofar as it “dispenses with all support from reality.”63 Playing with semblance can never serve as a substitute for reality. Rather, reality must itself be transformed in pursuit of semblance. Schiller, therefore, designates the Spieltrieb as a “living form” (lebende Form) that combines the “aesthetic qualities of phenomena.”64

  • 65 Idem, Letter 15, 130

27Critical here, for Schiller, is that the presence of the beautiful triggers the capacity of reason to merge its lawful activity with the free play of phantasy (willkührliches Spiel der Phantasie). Imagination and sensation then become interested in the higher activities of the mind, while the beautiful also serves to bring reason down to the level of the senses and imagination, thus transforming “play into earnestness” (Spiel in Ernst zu verwandeln). The Fifteenth Brief shows Schiller contrasting the Spieltrieb with the drive for earnestness (Ernst). While the former aims always to produce beauty, the latter consists of rendering the agreeable, the perfect, and the good.65 Recall Schiller’s maxim that an individual is only ever human when he or she plays:

  • 66 Idem, Letter 15, 131.

“This proposition, which at the moment may sound like a paradox, will take on both weight and depth of meaning once we have got as far as applying it to the twofold earnestness of duty and of destiny. It will, I promise you, prove capable of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful [aesthetische Kunst], and of the still more difficult art of living [noch schwürige Lebenskunst].”66

  • 67 Idem, Letter 27, 172.

28The gods on Olympus banished all earnestness involved in material necessity, making idleness and indifference the supreme necessities of life. He notes that the Greek Olympic games are perfect examples of play, as they live on in our desire for the ideal of beauty in contests of strength. The natural world displays vestiges of play everywhere: the lion “fills the echoing desert with a roaring that speaks defiance, and his exuberant energy enjoys its self in purposeless display. With what enjoyment of life do insects swarm in the sunbeam; and it is certainly not the cry of desire that we hear in the melodious warbling of the songbird.”67

  • 68 Ibid. Letter 17 also describes relaxing and tense kinds of beauty that offer bodily relief from a (...)
  • 69 Idem, Letter 22, 149.
  • 70 Idem, Letter 27, 173.
  • 71 Ibid.
  • 72 Idem, Letter 27, 174.
  • 73 See ibid.

29Play welcomes freedom into the domain of the natural by formalizing life, by way of relaxing the tension involved in seeking to fulfill and sustain necessary ends such that “a breach has been effected in the cycle of his animal behavior.”68 At first, the individual merely finds pleasure in the power of her imaginative freedom to move her limbs, to find excitement in new and pleasing tones, or in flashy appearances—all without satisfying a physical necessity. Schiller in the Twenty-second Brief describes “lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with the power and vigor” as setting the mood for “aesthetic excellence.”69 As such, “nature, even in her material kingdom,” Schiller argues, provides a kind of “prelude of the illimitable, and even here remove in part the chains that, in the realm of form, she casts away entirely.”70 Thus, “from the compulsion of want, or physical earnestness, she makes the transition via the compulsion of superfluity, or physical play, to aesthetic play.”71 Even prior to the introduction of form into our purely physical mode of living, we find material necessity giving way to physical play, the access point to aesthetic play. Imagination then finds enjoyment not in physical needs, but in satisfying “a law that speaks” for aesthetic play.72 Seeking to live by the aesthetic law transforms the individual from pleasure in the things she owns toward pleasure in who she is, a condition fully realized only through aesthetic semblance.73 Schiller certainly holds that that this transformation that one takes requires a passage through art.

  • 74 Idem, Letter 22, 150.
  • 75 Beiser identifies three different notions of freedom in the Briefe: moral, which is entirely rati (...)
  • 76 Adorno criticizes this aspect of Schiller’s concept of play, claiming that modernity increasingly (...)
  • 77 M.R. Acosta López, “Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own,” 192-194.

30Though we rarely experience an ideal emotion communicated in works of art, the greatest of poems, Schiller writes, “partakes more of the arbitrary and casual play of the imagination, as the medium through which it works, than the inner lawfulness of the truly beautiful.”74 Turning away from the mere material content of art and allowing the imagination to play opens up indeterminate modes of enjoyment.75 Thus emerges the desire for works of art to exceedingly drift into the realm of the sublime, where music and poetry escape any determinacy.76 Here, I think that Maria del Rosario Acosta López is right to argue that the condition promoting the Spieltrieb with the beautiful is the sublime, the force driving the antagonism between play and earnestness.77

  • 78 F. Schiller, “Concerning the Sublime,” 77.
  • 79 Idem, 84.

31In his further development of Kant’s notion of the sublime, Schiller claims that it prepares our feeling for the beautiful, making it possible to share in the feelings of others. Mere natural play finds delight in the beautiful, but still flees “from the sublime.”78 To bring about the aesthetic condition, Schiller argues that “the sublime must come to the assistance of the beautiful in order to make the aesthetic education a complete whole and expand the human heart’s sensitivity to the entire scope of our calling.”79 The sublime in art develops our personality, keeping us in rhythm with the beauty of nature that informs our entire personhood, especially with regard to our social orientation to others.

32At the same, we have to think that Schiller regards the beautiful to be more fundamental than the sublime, that it makes possible sublime feelings, and most importantly, that the beautiful provides the fundamental access point to freedom. This becomes evident, I believe, in Schiller’s essay on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795):

  • 80 F. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 179-181.

“There are moments in our lives when we extend a kind of love and tender respect toward nature in plants, minerals, animals, and landscapes […] We do this not because it makes us feel good and not even because it satisfies our intellect or taste (in both cases the reverse can often occur), but merely because it is nature. […] What else is it about a humble flower, a brook, a mossy rock, the chirping of birds, the humming of bees, and the like, that by itself pleases us so much? What else could even give them a claim to our love? It is not these objects, it is an idea portrayed by them that we cherish in them. We treasure the silent creativity of life in them, the fact that they act serenely on their own, being there according to their own laws; we cherish that inner necessity, that eternal oneness with themselves. They are what we were; they are what we should become once more [Sie sind, was wir waren; sie sind, was wir wieder werdern sollen].”80

  • 81 On this, see Laure Cahen-Maurel’s contribution in this issue. (Cf. L. Cahen-Maurel, “Fichte avec (...)

33When Schiller points to the love that we extend in our encounters with the wild, he is there describing a feeling of admiration because we desire to become what they are, what we once were: free. This is motivated by the beautiful in nature. The beautiful not only makes possible the sublimation of repressive drives, but also opens the way for human freedom. Schiller overcomes the Kantian dualistic framework of the human individual by describing the play-drive’s encounter with the beautiful as containing both the rational and sensible.81

The Play-Drive (Spieltrieb) from the Aesthetic to the Moral

34The Twenty-seventh and final Brief on aesthetic education announces the possibility of an aesthetic state developed by the activity of the play-drive. This state would ground sociality entirely on the semblance created by play. In the closing lines of the text, Schiller questions the likelihood of realizing such a state:

  • 82 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 178 (NA XX: 412).

“But does such a state of aesthetic semblance really exist? And if so, where is it to be found? As a need, it exists in every finely attuned soul [feingestimmte Seele]; as a realized fact, we are likely to find it, like the pure church or the pure republic, only in some few chosen circles, where conduct is governed […] by the aesthetic nature we have made our own.”82

  • 83 See idem, 176. See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 162.
  • 84 F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 163. The three governing principles of power, morality, and t (...)
  • 85 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 176.

35In line with his account of the three modes of life, Schiller distinguishes between three types of states. The dynamic state is concerned with what individuals do, while the ethical state governs the laws that ensure individual rights.83 Schiller considers the latter to be the lowest form of a governing society. As Beiser comments, power constitutes the governing principle of the dynamic state, whereas the moral law regulates the ethical state, but it is taste that breathes life into the aesthetic state.84 In his Eighth Brief, for example, Schiller argues that both reason and feeling are co-constitutive aspects of executing the moral law, a necessary propaedeutic to the transformation of taste. Yet, in the aesthetic state, the governing principle of action is taste for the beautiful, where the individual becomes “an object of free play.”85 It is not merely that we are spurred to seek the beautiful and act on it, but that the captivating light of the beautiful shines upon us. The aesthetic state grants freedom to individuals not by way of a restrictive moral law, but by way of the beautiful that allows us access to freedom. In fact, the aesthetic makes possible the moral.

  • 86 H.S. Reiss, “The Concept of the Aesthetic State in the Work of Schiller and Novalis,” 39-40. Will (...)
  • 87 Cf. S. D. Martinson, Harmonious Tension: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller, 191-192; P. de Man, (...)

36Yet some have argued that, as much as he supports republicanism, Schiller could not have intended for the aesthetic state to be interpreted literally, as a serious proposal for actual socio-political organization.86 In that case, the aesthetic state is only a fiction that can, at best, encourage individuals to become more poetic. While Schiller’s comments on the aesthetic state are often read as opaque or stillborn, even worse as a kind of manifesto for social elites, his assignation of the aesthetic state as already residing in the souls of all humanity, at least as an ideal, argues differently.87 A closer reading of the Second Brief argues that social organization requires development through the aesthetic:

  • 88 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 2, 90.

“I hope to convince you that the theme I have chosen is far less alien to the needs of our age than to its taste. More than this: if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.”88

  • 89 See idem, Letter 8, 107.
  • 90 Idem, Letter 27, 176.

37This pairs well with Schiller’s declaration that the way to understanding is through imagination, that the way to the head is through the heart, and that the path to the moral is through the aesthetic.89 The aesthetic state is indeed an ideal arrangement for society, which would be organized according to the aesthetic principles inscribed by the beautiful in every person. But Schiller argues that the “aesthetic state alone can make [society] real, because it consummates the will of the whole through the nature of the individual.”90 Recalling that Schiller considers beauty to be the product of play, and that beauty alone incorporates the whole of a person’s life through which feelings and rationality are cultivated with one another: the aesthetic state is one in which the progress of society requires the cultivation of the beautiful, as it liberates individuals from the dominion of the will and thereby promotes universal human happiness as an ideal.

  • 91 See M.R. Acosta López, “Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own,” 193.
  • 92 See idem, 190.
  • 93 F. Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 68.

38This is not to say, however, that Schiller advocates for each and every individual to extend his or her feelings and rationality outward, into the polis, as though every other person should universalize their particular will. The beautiful makes us more attuned to the feelings of others, which is especially the case in encounters with the sublime.91 According to Acosta López, Schiller claims that to harmonize one’s faculties and to thereby develop character on the basis of reflections on the beautiful is already an interpersonal activity developed by sublime encounters with art.92 Of course, Schiller adds that, in works of sublime art (e.g., tragedy), “we would rather watch power and freedom expressed at the cost of lawfulness [of morality] than watch lawfulness expressed at the cost of power and freedom.”93

  • 94 Idem, 61. See Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 207.
  • 95 F. Schiller, “Kallias or Letters Concerning Beauty,” 173. Jena, February 23, 1793. (NA XXVI, 216)

39This is not to say that the aesthetic law violates the moral law. Schiller clarifies in “Ueber das Pathetische” (1793) that works of art should indeed remain free from the external constraint of moral demands, but they should also allow for both “forms of judgment” (Beurtheilungsweise), the aesthetic and the moral.94 The aesthetic law rather forges new paths in the frontiers of freedom: “Hence the realm of taste is a realm of freedom—the beautiful sensible world the happiest symbol of how the moral ought to be, and every beautiful natural being outside me is a happy witness, who proclaims to me: Be free as I am.”95

40Schiller gives the example of Medea’s passionate revenge that leads to the murder of her children, and though her act incites moral outrage, we are able discover an aesthetically sublime moment in her sacrifice. But his comments on tragedy are less about theater as they are a:

  • 96 F. Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” 4.

“philosophy of life that weakens the feeling for our individuality by constantly referring to universal laws, that teaches us to lose our minuscule selves in the context of a larger whole, and that thereby puts us in the position of treating ourselves as we do others. This sublime spiritual disposition is the lot of strong and philosophical minds who, through assiduous work on themselves, have learned to control the selfish drive [Triebe]. Even the most painful loss does not drive them beyond the sort of composed melancholy that is always capable of being combined with a noticeable degree of pleasure. Only such minds, who alone are capable of separating themselves from themselves, enjoy the privilege of taking part in themselves and feeling their own suffering in the gentle reflection of sympathy.”96

  • 97 F. Schiller, “Concerning the Sublime,” 83.
  • 98 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 24, 157-158.

41And because “the capacity to feel the sublime is thus one of the most glorious dispositions in human nature,” the compassion felt in that instance informs our sociability as a whole.97 The modus operandi for “communal life” then, as he describes it in the Twenty-fourth Brief, is to allow the play-drive to reflect the thoughts and feelings of others discovered in sublime works of art.98 On this basis, we cultivate a posture of symphathy for humanity as a whole.

42Schiller’s program for aesthetic education describes how the person becomes moral through the aesthetic:

  • 99 F. Schiller, Kallias, 170 (February 23, 1793).

“Beauty, or rather taste, regards all things as ends in themselves and will not permit one to serve as the purpose of another, or to be under its control. Everyone is a free citizen and has the same rights as the most noble in the world of aesthetics, coercion may not take place even for the sake of the whole—everyone must consent. […] this aesthetic world […] is quite different from the most perfect Platonic republic.”99

  • 100 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 176.
  • 101 Idem, 172.

43Unlike the aspirations of the Platonic republic, where the law imposes upon individuals, in the aesthetic state individuals give the law that they derive from their aesthetic experiences to themselves. More importantly, we exchange the aesthetic law, as “to bestow freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law of this kingdom.”100 I take it that Schiller views the moral obligation to others through duty as constraining aesthetic play. For Schiller, the constitution of the aesthetic law by means of play is also a constitution of freedom for others. It is not enough to rely on moral character; one must develop a “social character” conferred by the beautiful and the sublime.101

  • 102 F. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181.
  • 103 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 23, 154.
  • 104 F. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181.
  • 105 Ibid.

44In his essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795–96), Schiller contends that the natural beauty of nonhuman animals also elevates our feeling for humanity, as “they transport us into a state of sublime emotion.”102 And “aesthetic man often needs no more than the challenge of a sublime situation.”103 He gives examples of these natural encounters with the sublime in the beauty of humming bees, fluttering butterflies, or a mossy rock in a mountain stream. That he views our engagement with natural beauty as a call to return “back to nature,” however, does not show him to endorse a return to primitive life.104 Rather, his point is that “they afford us the sweetest sort of delight in the idea of our humanity, although they necessarily humble us as far as any specific state of our humanity is concerned.”105 Cultures have almost entirely subjugated the sensuous drive under the dominion of rationality—having crushed the imagination in pursuit of economic gains, leaving only the ability to satisfy physical needs. Schiller thus views the liberation of society through the play-drive not as an escape from humanity, but as the only means to reinvent society itself.

  • 106 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 23, 152.
  • 107 See H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: An Inquiry Into Freud, 187-190.

45In the Twenty-third Brief, Schiller claims that the “transition from a passive state of feeling to an active state of thinking and willing cannot, then, take place except via a middle state of aesthetic freedom.”106 Schiller sought to resolve the problems of political oppression by emphasizing the play-drive as creating an aesthetic state, a means of transforming society on the basis of the compassion that we feel for others, feelings communicated in works of art, and in the beauty of nature that sublimate our fundamental drives. Beyond that, the fact that nature itself is no longer an object either to dominate (as in the physical) or for domination (in the rational), but now merely a realm for reflection, our nature itself changes in relation to the natural world. Instead of returning to nature as slaves to physical needs or as masters to destroy it, we recuperate a sense of belonging with nature through the play-drive.107

  • 108 Or, as Beiser claims: “Kant subordinates humanity to morality whereas Schiller subordinates moral (...)
  • 109 See D. Henrich, “Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthetics,” 254. For a resp (...)
  • 110 Acosta López takes Schiller’s turn away from Kant to be present already in the Kallias Briefe, wh (...)

46Like Kant, Schiller argues that the aesthetic demand must obtain universal validity. However, Schiller assesses the play-drive as not merely communicating the beautiful in a way that symbolizes moral duties for individuals (as does Kant), but instead characterizes the antagonism between life and form drives being overcome by the freedom achieved in the play-drive. Schiller overturns the assumption of the Aufklärer (Kant included) that moral freedom (reason) is superior to sensibility; for Schiller, the play-drive enacts a reversal by grounding morality on the sensuous.108 However, Dieter Henrich has argued that, precisely by separating the moral from the aesthetic, Schiller fails to reconcile the freedom and autonomy of the individual—which is achieved in aesthetic play—with the moral sphere (identified by Schiller as the political).109 Yet, as I see it, political emancipation and moral progress presuppose aesthetic resistance, that we have sublimated the destructive (rational) and energetic (life) drives.110 Aesthetic freedom denotes the movement of imaginative play toward becoming socially more energized. At this level, we may need to wield more destructiveness in order to overcome the psycho-social power of the drives manifested in society that turn out be harmful. This is the third level of play that I think that Schiller sought to describe in the Briefe.

  • 111 See H. Marcuse’s insightful interpretation of the play-drive in Eros and Civilization, 187-190.
  • 112 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 178.
  • 113 See idem, Letter 14, 126. For an account of aesthetic experience overcoming the “tyranny of the w (...)

47Of course, Schiller seems wildly optimistic about the capacity of most individuals to commit to an aestheticization of life. But unlike some utopian dream, the aesthetic state restores freedom by giving back to us what we ought to have—the “freedom to play.”111 This rehabilitates freedom for all: “In the realm of aesthetic semblance” alone, Schiller argues, do we “find that ideal of equality fulfilled.”112 Play generates the aesthetic state by “annulling time within time,” by cancelling the repressive socio-political forces generated by the formal drive while also eliminating the tyranny of the will, thereby sublimating the sensuous and rational in a free play of imagination with semblance.113

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Bibliographie

Acosta López Maria del Rosario, “Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own: From the Aesthetic to the Political in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters,” in: High Jeffrey L., Martin Nicholas, Oellers Norbert (eds.), Who is this Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, Rochester: Camden House, 2011, p. 187-201.

Acosta López Maria del Rosario, “The Resistance of Beauty: On Schiller’s Kallias Briefe in Response to Kant’s Aesthetics,” Epoché 21, no 1, 2016, p. 235-249.

Adorno Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by Joe Sachs, Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999.

Beiser Frederick C., Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination, Oxford: OUP, 2005.

Bernet Rudolf, Force, Drive, Desire. A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, translated by Sarah Allen, reprint edition, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020.

Deligiorgi Katerina, “The Proper Telos of Life: Schiller, Kant, and Having Autonomy as an End,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54, n5, 2011, p. 494-511.

de Man Paul, “Kant and Schiller,” in: Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Disselbeck Klaus, Geschmack und Kunst. Eine systemtheoretische Untersuchung zu Schillers Briefen, „Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen,” Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987.

Gauthier Jeffrey A., “Schiller’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Psychology,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27, 1997, p. 513-544.

Gingsborg Hannah, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72, n4, 1991, p. 290-313.

Guyer Paul, Kant and the Claims of Taste, Cambridge: CUP, 2nd edition 1997.

Henrich Dieter, “Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthetics,” in: Guyer Paul, Cohen Ted (eds.), Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 237-257.

Kant Immanuel, Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

Kant Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.

Kant Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Lessing Gotthold Ephraim, “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting,” in: Bernstein J.M., Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge: CUP, 2003.

Marcuse Herbert, Eros and Civilization. Philosophical Inquiry Into Fred, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Martinson Steven D., Harmonious Tension: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

McQuillan Colin, “Baumgarten, Meier, and Kant on Aesthetic Perfection,” in: Dahlstrom Daniel (ed.), Kant and His German Contemporaries, volume II: Aesthetics, History, Politics, and Religion, Cambridge: CUP, 2018, p. 13-27.

Piché Claude, “Fichte’s Debate With Reinhold in 1793: The Doctrine of Drives and the Problem of Freedom,” in: Ahlers Rolf (ed.), System and Context: Early Romantic and Early Idealistic Constellations, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, p. 263-285.

Reinhold K.L., Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, edited by Karl Ameriks, Cambridge: CUP, 2005.

Reiss H.S., “The Concept of the Aesthetic State in the Work of Schiller and Novalis,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 26, n1, 1959, p. 26-51.

Roehr Sabine, “Freedom and Autonomy in Schiller,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, n1, 2003, p. 119-134.

Savile Anthony, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant and Schiller, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

Schiller Friedrich, “Concerning the Sublime,” translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in: Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Friedrich Schiller: Essays, New York: Continuum, 1993, p. 70-85.

Schiller Friedrich, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner,” in: J.M. Bernstein, Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge: CUP, 2003, p. 145-183.

Schiller Friedrich, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, in: Hinderer Walter, Dahlstrom Daniel O. (eds.), Friedrich Schiller: Essays, New York: Continuum, 1993, p. 86-178.

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Woodmansee Martha, “Aesthetic Autonomy as a Weapon in Cultural Politics: Rereading Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters,” in: The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 57-86.

Zuckert Rachel, Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

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Notes

1 Two exceptions that spring to mind are Epicureanism in the Greek tradition of philosophy and, to some extent, Daoism in the classical Chinese tradition.

2 F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 13 and 14. Hereafter cited as Briefe in the body of the text. All English translations of the Briefe are from Wilkinson and Willoughby.

3 Idem, Letter 15, 131.

4 In his investigation of Laocoön, Lessing contends that the sculptor’s intent was to bring all the elements of the work of art together into a single point of focus; namely, that single moment of shrieking in Laocoön that can be heard by the free play of imagination. The artist then gives the viewer’s imagination the capacity to think beyond what the mere sensuous impressions afford. The parts of the work of art must be depicted as being free; constraint will “weaken” the play of the imagination. See G. E. Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, III, 56.

5 See I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 22, AA V: 241 and 240. On these varying descriptions of the free play, see R. Zuckert, Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, 279-320.

6 As much as I appreciate her work, this seems to be the interpretation that Martha Woodmansee offers, as she and many others identify Schiller’s shift at the end of the Briefe as abandoning an argument for political freedom in favor of collapsing freedom and the beauty of art into one experience of freedom (See M. Woodmansee, “Aesthetic Autonomy as a Weapon in Cultural Politics: Rereading Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters”). That Schiller crafts the letters on aesthetic education during la Terreur of 1793 without explicitly commenting on those events also gives some readers pause about the revolutionary spirit of Schiller’s program. I will argue, however, that political freedom, for Schiller, can only be secured by way of the aesthetic.

7 Katerina Deligiorgi argues that Schiller is unclear about the play-drive, while I think that his various descriptions of the play-drive are not competing with one another, but offer different accounts of one and the same activity. Cf. K. Deligiorgi, “The Proper Telos of Life: Schiller, Kant, and Having Autonomy as an End”; J. A. Gauthier, “Schiller’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Psychology”; A. Saville, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant and Schiller.

8 This seems to be the point emphasized by Dieter Henrich and many other Kantians. See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Reexamination, 2. This view is also evident in many commentaries on Schiller and post-Kantian idealism, where Schiller is portrayed as someone needing to borrow from Fichte and Reinhold in order to resolve problems with his interpretation of Kant.

9 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 9, AA V: 216.

10 I cannot resolve this issue here, as many commentators have devoted much effort to this discussion with seemingly little consensus produced. My take is that the act of judging the representation to be beautiful is itself what pleases us. Yet, many who respond to Kant’s theory of taste argue that a problem of two steps in one judgment remains. For a sample of the main problems raised, see P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste and H. Gingsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste.”

11 See I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 8, AA V: 215. This seems to be a source of widespread confusion. Kant, in my opinion, does not claim that, just because I judge this rose to be beautiful that everyone must find this particular representation so pleasing. The universality in the judgment of the beautiful rather refers to the universal harmony of the cognitive powers (imagination and understanding) in their free play.

12 Idem, § 9, AA V: 217-218.

13 Idem, § 16, AA V: 229-230.

14 See idem, § 54, AA V: 331.

15 Idem, § 54, AA V: 332.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid. This might serve as an example to Herder’s criticism that Kant neglects the physiological aspect of aesthetic judgment, though it seems to me that laughter necessarily implies a visceral participation in the free play. On this, see C. McQuillan, “Baumgarten, Meier, and Kant on Aesthetic Perfection,” 31–32. For a defense of Kant’s consideration of embodiment, see R. Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 285n.

18 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 54, AA V: 334.

19 Idem, § 49, AA V: 317.

20 See Kant’s description (Kritik der Urteilskraft, AA V: 242) of dull landscape gardens that employ the parterre and geometrical patterns in comparison to English landscape gardens that resemble the natural. Schiller takes a similar viewpoint in “Über das Erhabene” (1801), where he writes: “Is there anyone who would not rather linger amidst the inspiring disorder of a natural landscape than pass time in the insipid regularity of a French garden? […] No one will deny that people are physically better cared for in Batavia’s pastures than under Vesuvius’s treacherous crater or that the intellect that wants to comprehend things […] is far better served by an inn’s orderly garden than by a natural landscape in the wild. People have, however, need of something more than merely to live and enjoy themselves” (Concerning the Sublime, 79).

21 See idem, AA V: 243. See I. Kant, Kants gesammelte Schriften, AA VII: 173; Anthropology, History, and Education, 283. As Kant writes in the Anthropology: “We play with the imagination frequently and gladly, but imagination (as fantasy) plays just as frequently with us, and sometimes very inconveniently” (AA VII: 175; Anthropology, History, and Education, 285).

22 R. Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 285. Thus, Zuckert characterizes the argument as a free play of the imagination and / with the understanding, as free lawfulness, and lawfulness without a law.

23 Idem, 279-293.

24 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, AA V: 229-230; cf. 242.

25 Ibid.

26 Idem, § 57, AA V: 341. See R. Zuckert, 288.

27 See idem, § 23, 244 and First Introduction 20: 220, where Kant compares the beautiful to an indeterminate concept of the understanding and the sublime to an indeterminate concept or idea of reason.

28 See idem, § 9, AA V: 219.

29 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 13; quoted from 118, 119, and 120, respectively. As Beiser points out, Schiller’s notion of the form drive from Letter 13 onwards takes on a moral notion. See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 142.

30 See J.G. Fichte, Das System der Sittenlehre, SW IV, 212.

31 See J.G. Fichte, Ueber Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie, SW VIII, 277; On this, see F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 147.

32 See idem, 279; F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 147.

33 See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 146-147.

34 See ibid.

35 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 14, 125; see also Letter 15, 128-129.

36 I disagree with Klaus Disselbeck, who so neatly sees Schiller borrowing (or at least, modifying) his concept of the reciprocal action from Fichte; namely, by inserting the concept of play in place of Fichte’s account of the role of the imagination. See K. Disselbeck, Geschmack und Kunst. Eine systemtheoretische Untersuchung zu Schillers Briefen, “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen,” 25-27.

37 F. Schiller, NA XXVIII, 200-203 (June 23rd and 24th, 1795). As Beiser has indicated, Schiller, as editor of the collected essays to be published, would not have wanted Fichte’s discussion to be included, since their essays dealt with the same subject. Cf. F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 146-147.

38 See B. von Wiese, Friedrich Schiller, 487.

39 On this, see F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 147.

40 K.L. Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, 165.

41 In a way, Reinhold pulls the will apart from its Kantian rootedness in practical reason. See S. Roehr, “Freedom and Autonomy in Schiller,” 125.

42 On the debate between Fichte and Reinhold, see C. Piché, “Fichte’s Debate With Reinhold in 1793: The Doctrine of Drives and the Problem of Freedom.”

43 Roehr sees this as the product of Reinhold’s influence, but Schiller could have simply modified the Kantian distinction between the will (Wille) and the power of choice (Willkür) as spelled out in the Critique of Pure Reason; between an activity springing from pure practical reason and the empirical act of making decisions. Moreover, Schiller clearly criticizes the long-held argument of the Aufklärer that all (meaningful) human activity is reducible to reason.

44 Beiser notes that the evidence of Schiller having read Aristotle in the early 1790s cannot determine whether or not he knew much of Aristotle from direct sources (cf. F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 248 and 251). Of course, Schiller would have been at least marginally acquainted with Aristotle from his reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I assume that he would have been familiar with Salomon Maimon’s 1794 work on Aristotle, as Maimon was well-known at that time. Moreover, in a letter from September of 1794, Schiller informs Goethe that he intends to show him a treatise by Maimon on the beautiful. That the two most famous literary giants in German history discuss Maimon’s work on aesthetics demonstrates how much Maimon has been neglected by contemporary readers.

45 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX.6 1048a30-1048b: “Now being at work is something’s being-present not in the way that we speak of as in potency; and we speak of being in potency, for example, Hermes in a block of wood or half line in the whole, because they can be separated out […] The other way these things are present is in activity.”

46 Idem, VIII.6 1045b18.

47 R. Bernet, Force, Drive, Desire. A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, 5.

48 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 5, 103.

49 Idem, Letter 6, 106.

50 Idem, Letter 14, 127.

51 Idem, Letter 19, 143.

52 See idem, Letter 20, 145.

53 Idem, Letter 23, 153.

54 Idem, Letter 20, 145.

55 Ibid.

56 Idem, Letter 25, 165. See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 159.

57 Idem, Letter 23, 154.

58 Schiller to von Augustenberg, November 21, 1793. Der Geschlechtstrieb war das einzige Band, das ihn an seine Gattin fesselte, und die Befriedigung dieses Triebes die einzige Forderung, die er an sie machte.

59 Schiller to von Augustenberg, November 21, 1793.

60 Schiller an von Augustenberg, November 21, 1793.

61 See F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 26, 166.

62 Idem, Letter 26, 167.

63 Idem, Letter 26, 169.

64 Idem, Letter 15, 128.

65 Idem, Letter 15, 130

66 Idem, Letter 15, 131.

67 Idem, Letter 27, 172.

68 Ibid. Letter 17 also describes relaxing and tense kinds of beauty that offer bodily relief from ailments. The two kinds of beauty offset one another by not allowing either the sensuous or rational to become overpowered by the affects and effects of either kind of beauty. On this, see F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 148.

69 Idem, Letter 22, 149.

70 Idem, Letter 27, 173.

71 Ibid.

72 Idem, Letter 27, 174.

73 See ibid.

74 Idem, Letter 22, 150.

75 Beiser identifies three different notions of freedom in the Briefe: moral, which is entirely rational; anthropological, which concerns the capacity for self-determination in the full harnessing of our drives; determinability or choice, which allows us to navigate between different options of action, both sensible and rational. See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 156.

76 Adorno criticizes this aspect of Schiller’s concept of play, claiming that modernity increasingly excluded all forms of art that were not also sublime. See T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 197.

77 M.R. Acosta López, “Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own,” 192-194.

78 F. Schiller, “Concerning the Sublime,” 77.

79 Idem, 84.

80 F. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 179-181.

81 On this, see Laure Cahen-Maurel’s contribution in this issue. (Cf. L. Cahen-Maurel, “Fichte avec Schiller. La querelle des Heures à la lumière de Grâce et Dignité.”) I’m grateful to her for encouraging me to reconsider the relationship between the sublime and the beautiful on this point.

82 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 178 (NA XX: 412).

83 See idem, 176. See F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 162.

84 F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 163. The three governing principles of power, morality, and taste in the three states are effects of the three drives: sensuous, rational, and aesthetic.

85 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 176.

86 H.S. Reiss, “The Concept of the Aesthetic State in the Work of Schiller and Novalis,” 39-40. Willoughby correctly, I think, assesses the aesthetic state as being a transformative process motivated by an imaginative awakening of the whole person. See L.A. Willoughby, “Schiller on Man’s Education to Freedom through Knowledge,” 172.

87 Cf. S. D. Martinson, Harmonious Tension: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller, 191-192; P. de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” 154-155; and T. Adorno, who associates Schiller’s supposed “elitism” with Kant’s “fetishization of the concept of genius,” in: Aesthetic Theory, 171.

88 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 2, 90.

89 See idem, Letter 8, 107.

90 Idem, Letter 27, 176.

91 See M.R. Acosta López, “Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own,” 193.

92 See idem, 190.

93 F. Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 68.

94 Idem, 61. See Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 207.

95 F. Schiller, “Kallias or Letters Concerning Beauty,” 173. Jena, February 23, 1793. (NA XXVI, 216)

96 F. Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” 4.

97 F. Schiller, “Concerning the Sublime,” 83.

98 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 24, 157-158.

99 F. Schiller, Kallias, 170 (February 23, 1793).

100 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 176.

101 Idem, 172.

102 F. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181.

103 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 23, 154.

104 F. Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 181.

105 Ibid.

106 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 23, 152.

107 See H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: An Inquiry Into Freud, 187-190.

108 Or, as Beiser claims: “Kant subordinates humanity to morality whereas Schiller subordinates morality to humanity” (F. Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 184).

109 See D. Henrich, “Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthetics,” 254. For a response to this, see S. Roehr, “Freedom and Autonomy in Kant and Schiller,” 133-134.

110 Acosta López takes Schiller’s turn away from Kant to be present already in the Kallias Briefe, where he is said to transform the “critique of aesthetics to the idea of aesthetics as critique”. See M.R. Acosta López, “The Resistance of Beauty: On Schiller’s Kallias Briefe in Response to Kant’s Aesthetics,” 235–49. I think this lends support to the argument that Schiller’s project of aesthetics was more about developing a method of doing philosophy itself, a standpoint, than merely offering a theory of beauty in the narrow sense.

111 See H. Marcuse’s insightful interpretation of the play-drive in Eros and Civilization, 187-190.

112 F. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 27, 178.

113 See idem, Letter 14, 126. For an account of aesthetic experience overcoming the “tyranny of the will-drive,” see R. Bernet, Force, Drive, Desire, 307.

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Cody Staton, « In Search of Play »Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg [En ligne], 52 | 2022, mis en ligne le 12 décembre 2022, consulté le 14 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cps/5963 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cps.5963

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Cody Staton

Assistant Research Professor, Kennesaw State University (USA).

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