The Paideia of Freedom: Beauty and the Politics of Sensually Recognized Freedom in the Works of

Joshua Johnson for

Canadian Political Science Association Annual General Meeting, Calgary, 2016

(Rough Draft)

Introduction

Before he murders his fiancé, and before he kills his father, and still before he levels an entire city in a blaze of fire, before all of this, Karl of Schiller’s is a romantic. He is, one is entitled to say, the consummate romantic. He is physically beautiful. He is charismatic. He ignites the passions of petty criminals and the virtuous alike, as he effortlessly evokes love from the both. He nourishes himself on the ballads of ancient heroes while lamenting the loss of an era of grandeur. He is adventurous, dynamic, and passionate. He speaks in high flown rhetoric for justice, freedom, and fraternity. And Karl, the consummate romantic, is a murderer of monstrous proportions. By treating Schiller’s play the Robbers as a companion piece to his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” (herein referred to as the “Aesthetic Letters,”) this paper seeks to clarify the sometimes frustratingly ambiguous function of aesthetics by suggesting a perennial problem facing the pursuit of freedom on the stage of modernity: the emergence of a character doubly capable of extraordinary moral dignity and extraordinary evil. Seeking a philosophic and psychological account of this problem in the “Aesthetic Letters,” this paper highlights Schiller’s treatment of human as tragically complicit in a crisis wherein the promising emergence of Kantian humanism finds an unexpected doppelganger in the political impulse towards self-actualization through self- negation. It is against this problem that Schiller’s own aesthetic project is presented as an attempt to redirect our longing for freedom towards sensually positive and expressive forms of becoming. The aesthetic is therefore treated primarily as an attempt to correct through beautification an overly rationalistic concept of freedom, rather than offering any direct cause- and-effect relationship between beauty and freedom. This paper begins with a brief treatment of the central protagonists of the Robbers, Karl and Franz, in order to bring to view the disquieting potential implicit in the dynamic and (in the case of Karl) inspired rhetoric of freedom. From the terrible outcome of Karl’s attempt to liberate himself from his humiliating subjugation to an often imperfect world, this paper then touches briefly on Schiller’s own relationship with the French Revolution before engaging an exegesis on the “Aesthetic Letters.” Here, reason is cast as something of a tragic hero in its own right, articulating humanity as an end in itself while simultaneously, through the interplay of Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 our dynamic drives, opening the way to a character type who seeks self-mastery through self- negation. With this depiction of the moral fanatic in view, Schiller’s “aesthetic turn” is then considered as an attempt to rectify this problem through the reconfiguring of our concept of freedom to correspond to an idea of beauty wherein sensual longing is given proper place within a rationally acceptable ideal of perfection. The character anticipated by this ideal is seen to relate to human beings as fully anthropological (that is, moral and sensual) subjects rather than merely moral objects. Finally, this paper will touch upon the manner in which fine art may be considered a necessary (though hardly sufficient) aid in bringing about and securing this form of relationship to the world.

Freedom Staged: A Dramatis Personae in The Robbers

We are introduced to the beautiful and terrible Karl through his younger brother Franz, who waits upon his ailing father, the Count Moor, bringing him news of the former’s scandalous exploits abroad. The Count is duly heartbroken upon hearing the news, but from Franz’s asides we learn that the news has been fabricated with the intention of moving the father’s hand towards disowning Karl.1 Confident of his plan’s success, Franz explains his motives in soliloquy. He is, assumedly, doing it for the money; he stands to gain a great deal of power and fortune by assuming the role of direct heir to the Count. But Franz’s antipathy towards his older brother goes deeper, for it is not simply that Franz wishes he had been born before Karl so much that he wishes Karl had never been born.2 Karl, we learn, is beautiful. He is charismatic and loveable, and the virtuous and the rogue alike are drawn to his presence. Franz, on the other hand, is fully aware of his own ugliness. Physically, he is hideous. He doubts his father’s love at all when compared to the doting he bestows upon Karl, and Karl himself seems largely indifferent to his younger brother. His physical defects are accompanied with an impotence of character, and in short, nature has humiliated Franz in proportion that it has blessed Karl.3 But while this has left Franz “resentful of nature,” it has by no means made him vengeful towards nature. Quite the contrary since, by giving Karl everything and Franz nothing, nature has provided Franz an unexpected insight: a man’s worth is not determined by what nature gives but in what he can take. Thus he declares, “each man has the same right to the greatest and the least; claim destroys claim, impulse destroys impulse, force destroys force. Might is right and the limits of our strength our only law.”4 Rather than, say, lament the arbitrariness of the convention of primogeniture, Franz celebrates his own cleverness for having recognized the fact that all conventions are arbitrary insofar as they serve the interests of the stronger. He pushes this observation to its most radical conclusion, asserting that all relationships that bind human beings with one another must be based in convention, even those that appear rooted in human feeling. Thus, just as an honourable reputation is merely “valuable coin,” so too is human conscience reduced to “an excellent scarecrow, to keep sparrows from the cherry-trees.”5

1 Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. F.J. Lamport, (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 1:1, 25-32. 2 Ibid., 1:1, 33 3 Ibid., 1:13, 2-34. 4 Ibid., 1:1,33. 5 Ibid., 1:1, 33.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016

Most significant to Franz’s purposes, of course, is how this insight penetrates the moral obscurity of filial love. Fraternity is simply a misleading term that designates accidental proximity, and paternal love is, at bottom, the vanity of a father, a sort of self-love extended to the inevitable product of a carnal act itself unworthy of any specifically moral celebration.6 Subjected to this unrelentingly materialistic logic, natural right is reduced to an empty void into which Franz is free to assert his own will, a will that has no legitimate authority outside of its own self-referential desires. Ourselves privy to Franz’s plan, we are perhaps surprised to find in the following scene that Karl is, in fact, mired in a life of scandal. Franz’s rendition of events has been greatly exaggerated, Karl being no womanizer, and certainly no murderer. But he has been squandering his father’s money, racking up debts, and is precariously veering towards the wrong side of the law by trying his hand at pranks that border on criminal scams.7 We meet a man who has been living for pleasure and for the moment, and like Franz, a man who sets himself against convention. But for Karl, the counterpoint to convention is not self-interest and cunning, but rather the sincerity of nature and freedom. It is as though Rousseau himself has assumed a stage persona as he trumpets his love for Plutarch and the ancients in general, while decrying his as an age of petty hypocrites, whose spirits are so sapped that “the dregs of a beer- barrel must help to propagate mankind.”8 The grandeur of his spirit and imagination cannot abide the confinements of his surroundings:

...the law has cramped the flight of eagles to a snail’s pace. The law never yet made a great man, but freedom will breed a giant, a colossus... Give me an army of fellows like me to command, and I’ll turn Germany into a republic that will make Rome and Sparta look like nunneries.9

Karl’s bitterness towards “the law” in general is rendered slightly comical when he lets slip that his frustrations originate from the sternness of debt collectors who have not been moved by tearful pleas for leniency and patience. Karl, contra Franz, has learned to expect compassion when he needs it; he is owed kindness and decency, fairness is his right. A sort of personal tantrum this may be, but it is a tantrum that lacks hypocrisy. From what we learn through others, especially Amalia, Karl is a kind and compassionate man himself. He is far from being a saint, but he is a fair man. He therefore expects from the world only to the same degree that he gives to the world. This is Karl’s frame of mind when he expresses shame at his wayward exploits and commits to returning to his father’s home and his fiancés embrace. Thus we also find Karl in a transition towards maturity. He acknowledges his sins committed in the heat of moment, not helped by the heat of wine, but is certain that the sincerity of his repentance, in form of confession, itself assures his forgiveness: “I did not conceal the slightest detail from him, and where there is honesty, there too is compassion and a helping hand.”10 He is prepared to make and honour new commitments in life, to assume his proper role as dutiful son and loving husband, and far from embracing the lawlessness previously hinted, Karl submits rather to a different order of law. Like the prodigal son, he humbly submits to the laws of

6 Ibid., 1:1,33. 7 Ibid., 1:2, 37-38. 8 Ibid., 1:2,36. 9 Ibid., 1:2, 37. 10 Ibid., 1:2, 41.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 humanity which reciprocally bind penitence and forgiveness. However murky Karl’s motives, therefore, it is essential to understand him as making an essentially moral commitment to his father and, indirectly, his fiancé, in begging the former’s forgiveness and blessing for return. His vulnerability is real insofar as his father’s refusal would leave him to the mercy of his debtors. Ethically speaking, this is unthinkable. Except that this is exactly what happens; in his father’s counterfeited response through the hand of Franz, Karl is disowned and banished from his home on threat of lifelong imprisonment. Karl’s reaction is extreme:

It is unbelievable, it is a dream, a delusion – such moving pleas, such keen representation of my misery and my melting repentance – a brute beast would have wept in compassion! Stones would have shed tears, and yet – it would be thought a wicked slur on all mankind to say to say so - and yet, and yet – oh, would that I could blow the trumpet of rebellion throughout the realm of nature, to stir up earth, sky and sea to battle against this brood of hyenas.11

And thus we have Karl’s “turn.” It is a rapid and jarring transition from a man who begs clemency in the name of humanity to a self-proclaimed victim who stands in accusation of humanity. “Men showed me no humanity, when to humanity I appealed,” he proclaims, “so let me forget sympathy and human feeling!”12 It is in this fit of rage, and one should not forget panic at his situation, that his dodgy friends, themselves working out a means of escaping punishment for their own crimes, present Karl the pretense for exacting his revenge upon this world that allows such injustice by offering him captaincy of their newly formed gang of robbers who are to take to forests of bohemia.13 This is a transaction serves both parties. The robber’s crimes are converted into moral actions insofar as they will only pillage and murder “the unjust.” Karl, in return, is assured a fraternity of reciprocal commitments that includes loyalty unto death; his dependency upon others need no longer humiliate him, since his personal obligations are absorbed into those of the greater whole through a sort of sinister general will. The motives of Franz and Karl therefore converge in their desire to liberate themselves from dependent relations at which they have suffered humiliation; both, in their own way, belong to the struggle for freedom. But while Franz can only do this by renouncing all claims to natural or moral obligation, Karl transforms his commitment to the principles of humanity into a vendetta against humankind itself. Though he stylizes this violence as a righteous form of bloodletting, the cognitive dissonance between his moral purpose and the actions themselves become increasingly strained. In a pivotal scene, Karl learns that a plan he set in motion to save a fellow robber from the gallows has had unintended, but severe consequences. Barrels of gunpowder are set off, effectively levelling a town to create the necessary diversion at the place of the hanging, just outside the town itself. The plan works, but Karl is afterward informed by his comrades that children, the pregnant, the old, and the infirm had by necessity remained in the town, and thus what was intended to be merely the destruction of so much property has in fact consumed the lives of the town’s most vulnerable inhabitants, eighty three in all.14 This finally proves all too much to handle, and Karl descends into spiral of self-loathing and regret,

11 Ibid., 1:2,48 12 Ibid, 1:2, 49. 13 Ibid., 1:2, 49-50. 14 Ibid., 2:3, 80-84.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 occasionally broken by spastic fits of reactive violence. He is reduced to recollecting his days as a child, chiding his “foolish boy’s wish” of wanting to live and die like the glorious rising and setting of the sun, while nostalgically mourning those days when “I could not sleep at night if I had not said my prayers.”15 Unsurprisingly, the story ends well for neither Karl nor Franz. Franz dies by his own hand to avoid capture, despised by everyone around him.16 Karl proves his fidelity to the band of robbers by shooting his fiancé Amalia before promptly turning himself over the authorities on the assumption that he will be hanged for his crimes.17 As Karl leaves the stage, he reflects on his decisions:

Oh, fool that I was to suppose that I could make the world a fairer place through terror, and uphold the cause of justice through lawlessness. I called it revenge and right – I took it upon myself, O Providence, to smooth the jagged edges of your sword and make good your partiality – but – oh, childish vanity – here I stand at the limit of a life of horror, and see now with weeping and gnashing of teeth that two men such as I would destroy the whole moral order of creation.18

Only in retrospect does the horrific fully dawn on Karl that what he had allowed himself to believe a righteous commitment to justice and fairness was in fact so much rationalization for taking revenge on the world for the humiliations it had imposed upon him. And only in the end does Franz learn... well nothing. He dies entirely unrepentant. Schiller will later criticize himself for not having made Franz at least a little more sympathetic a character.19 But what is especially striking about The Robbers is just how sympathetic a character Karl is. He is a monster, no doubt. But in his sincerity, dynamism, and instincts towards justice, he strikes a nerve that makes him a properly tragic figure. He appears, as H.B. Garland describes, “himself one of the great characters with immense capacities for good or evil of whom Plutarch wrote.”20 This, his first play, was enthusiastically received and made Schiller an overnight sensation, with people reportedly leaving the theatre at its first performances holding each other in tears.21 This was due, in no small part, to a chord Karl strikes in his audience. He is at once grand and terrible, seductive and pathetic, profound and evil. In all of this, we have seen, Karl is clothed in the language of right and freedom.

Onto the Stage of History: A Psychology of Terror

Had The Robbers been published after the French Revolution, we would almost certainly receive the play as a not-so-subtle commentary of the very real tragedy of the French Terror, and view the character of Karl as a possible stand-in for the likes of a Maximilien Robespierre or a Louis Antoine de Saint-Just. The fact that the play was first published in May 1781 and first staged in January 1782 makes this thematic point of contact curiously accidental.22 Actually, it was largely through the popularity of this

15 Ibid., 3:2, 98. 16 Ibid., 5:1, 150. 17 Ibid., 5:2, 158. 18 Ibid., 5:2, 159. Italics in Original. 19 Friedrich Schiller, “On the Art of Tragedy,” in Friedrich Schiller: Essays, trans. Daniel Dohlstrom, (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1993) 8. 20 H.B. Garland, Schiller, (London: George Harrap & co, 1949), 33. 21 Buchwald, Reiner, Schiller Vol.1, (Leipzig:Insel, 1937), 352. 22 Garland, Schiller, 22, 41.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 play in France that Schiller was awarded an honorary citizenship to the French Republic in 1792.23 This would have been an honour of dubious merit for Schiller since he regarded the Revolution as largely negative, fearing continental war, and expressing difficulty reading French newspapers by 1973, so exacerbated was he with hearing of the exploits of so many “butchers.”24 A certain degree of pathos must have also struck him upon receiving the diploma of citizenship, when he saw three of signatories had been put to death by the very revolutionary regime they had helped create.25 This coincidence of a mind who could so compellingly and even sympathetically call to the stage a character such as Karl while recoiling at the reality of a state driven terror offers an interesting point of entry to the “Aesthetic Letters.” Given that the letters were penned at the height of the Jacobin ascendency, and taking stock of Schiller’s own repugnance at the political scene in neighbouring France, the complete absence of any explicit reference to the French Revolution seems strange for work directing itself towards the “tribunal of reason” and the great political upheavals of the day.26 But it is precisely against this backdrop that one might better appreciate one particular dimension of Schiller’s critique of modernity. For while it is common practice to point to his valorization of sentiment alongside reason (to suggest over reason would be to miss the point) along with a seemingly ancient taste for harmony over Kantian dualism, the problem posed by reason must first be adequately framed if the former observations are to be given their proper consideration. To grapple with the problem of reason is to come to terms with the problem of freedom, which the “Aesthetic Letters” not only directs itself towards, but also justifies itself against. It is, after all, “only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom,” so that if he is “ever to solve that problem of politics in practice, he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic.”27 The necessity of an aesthetic turn already points to the insufficiency of reason’s “tribunal,” and so it is to this insufficiency we turn. Reason is, to be sure, a great protagonist of the “Aesthetic Letters.” Schiller takes for granted a sort of Kantian understanding of human autonomy through which the human being assumes its species defining dignity. The “blind compulsion” of natural instinct is transformed in our capacity for reason to a “work of free choice... elevating physical necessity into moral necessity.”28 This capacity for moral autonomy simultaneously renders the freedom of the will sacrosanct, creating an injunction against treating the human being as anything other than an end in itself.29 This, for Schiller, necessarily comes with the imperative towards a political state founded on the principles of freedom in order to make the former effectual.30 The formation of this state, however, is problematic, as it is confronted with the very real existence of the “natural state,” a term used to signify any body politic “whose organization derives originally from forces and not from laws.”31 This would render virtually all established political orders of

23 Lamport F.J., “Introdcution,” in Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. F.J. Lamport, (London: Penguin Books, 1979) 11. 24 Garland, Schiller, 141, 25 Ibid., 188. 26 Friedrich Schiller, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in Friedrich Schiller: Essays, trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1993), Letter 2,p89. 27 Ibid., 2, 90. 28 Ibid., 3, 90. 29 Ibid., 4, 94. This injunction is developed in connection to Schiller’s discussion of the “pedagogical artist.” 30 Ibid., 3, 91. 31 Ibid., 3, 91, italics added.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 the day “natural,” and thus a very radical transformation seems needed for reason to become an effectual force in the world. Schiller here finds himself confronted with the dilemma of Rousseau’s Legislator, as the natural state has emerged from the natural character of human beings, which is self-interested and often violent.32 The moral character has first to be developed for this transition into the moral state to occur, but this will not emerge spontaneously, nor can the state be counted on or legitimately asked to affect this transition.33 Reason, it seems, is need of a causal agent, insufficient insofar as it lacks compelling force to lift human action outside the realm of natural necessity, dooming politics to the standards of force rather than ethical right. At first glance, then, this is where aesthetic education is to assert its credentials: a sort of causal mechanism towards the end of forming the moral character on which a politically free state can be founded. In the end, Schiller will stand behind this claim, although with increasingly muted expectations.34 But the problem posed by reason has not yet been sufficiently articulated, and therefore the stakes in Schiller’s project not quite set. Schiller has quietly shifted the terrain from Kant’s preoccupation with the standards of moral action to a question of character, and as we will find, reason itself is complicit at the very extremes of this problem. Schiller directs us towards this problem by way of employing reason towards a “pure concept of human nature,” which, perhaps tellingly, leads us out of the world of “phenomenal existence” towards the “barren and naked land of abstractions.”35 Human nature understood thusly divides itself into two conceptual categories: that thing which persists in change (the “Person” or the “Self”) and that which changes (his/her “condition”). These two categories, exhausting the whole of the human condition, have the curious feature of simultaneously calling each other into existence, while remaining intractably opposed to one another. The Person, a self-conscious identity, can only exist as a unity over and against that which changes around them. For any unity to be posited at all, variability and change has to occur lest this be the unity of an empty void. Likewise, for variability and change to be recognized as such, a subject has to appear lest experience lapse into eternally recurring instances of incoherent, and ultimately meaningless, sensations. At the level of rational abstraction, Schiller insists that these two elements of human nature emerge spontaneously and independently of each other.36 The “Person” is its own ground, or, “we are because we are.”37 Our condition, on the other hand, exists as a force independent our “person,” finding itself manifested as a “world” constituted through space and time. It is from this friction between a spontaneously emergent “self” and a world of time that the human being emerges primarily, it would seem, as a sort of vassal that houses this very tension. Schiller further characterizes humans as having, therefore, two essential drives. The “sense drive” demands for

32 Ibid., 3, 92. 33 Ibid., 3, 92. 34 In Letter Seven, Schiller acknowledges the political project as “a task for more than one century,” (105) while cautioning the political idealist against expecting any immediate results in Letter Nine (110). The 27th and final Letter concludes with the admission that the “aesthetic state” is an ideal that exists like the pure church or pure republic, namely “in some few chosen circles (178). 35 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 10, 115. 36 Ibid., 11, 116. Though Schiller admits that when we come to think of this phenomenologically (as we inevitably do), sense will precede identity. Nonetheless, person must already exist in potential, against which the flux of sensual can be said to goad identity into asserting itself. 37 Ibid., 11, 116.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 content, change, and specific vocations or purposes to be filled. This drive connects a human being directly to the world, which we should see as nothing less than a drive that demands life itself. The “formal drive,” on the other hand, proceeding from our “absolute” existence, demands the stabilization and overcoming of world through the impositions of rules, whether they are judgements regarding knowledge or moral laws regarding action.38 It is in postulating and committing to these rules that the human being wrenches itself out of time, as it were, as its identity is now attached to that which applies to all cases in all circumstances; one thinks and acts not as individual, but as a member of the species. A species, it should be added, that finds itself reciprocally obliged under the strictures of reason.39 The mutual interdependency between the sense and formal drive are not difficult to discern. Without a world of sense, form would be an empty vacuum and could only signify pre-birth or death. Without form, life would be little different than animal existence generally speaking, where neither a philosophy of freedom such as posed here, nor the politics it promises, could emerge.40 It is likewise no surprise that Schiller assigns reason, as an active faculty the mind, to the formal drive, whereas the sense drive assumes the passive role of sense-perception. Reason now becomes problematic in two fashions. Schiller has set up a “primary and radical” opposition at the core of human nature, which begets a tension that does not sit well in living experience. In order to pacify this tension a person might allow the sensual drive to encroach on the formal, making the former active such that it does “the work of the determining one.”41 This effectively subordinates reason to desire such that properly rational categories are rendered empirical. The notion of the eternal, for example, tends to be framed here as the limitless extension of time rather than an idea of substantively different order than time itself (such as its negation).42 Ideals are produced by appetites, producing what Schiller refers to as “eudaemonisms” that render the end of human life the perpetuation of some form of material well- being, often culminating in the desire for perpetual happiness. For Schiller, this manner of thinking inevitably tends to reduce social relations to hierarchies determined by utility and force, since reason never goes so far as to recognize humanity as an end in itself.43 This is far from ideal, though Schiller does acknowledge the practical virtues of any political thought directed towards the securing of material stability and material happiness; human dignity may not find itself on the political agenda of the day, but neither does the idea of dignity start making demands for human sacrifice.44 This latter is the startling possibility opened up in the second attempt at reconciling the primary tension between sense and reason. The formal drive may encroach upon the sense drive, “and substitute the determining faculty for the receptive one.”45 Here, the “person” or “self,” which understands itself as entirely self-grounded, balks at the limitations posed by the partial and contingent existence it has been bound to, and seeks to transfer its rules into the world of sense,

38 Ibid., 11, 117-18. 39 Ibid., 12, 118. 40 Ibid., 11, 117. As Schiller succinctly puts it, “only inasmuch as he changes does he exist; only inasmuch as he remains unchangeable does he exist.” 41 Ibid., 13, 123. 42 Ibid., 24, 158-59. 43 Ibid., 7, 105; 24,160. 44 Ibid., 3,91-92; see also Friedrich Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” in Friedrich Schiller: Essays, trans. Daniel Dohlstrom, (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1993), 254-59. 45 Schiller, Aesthetic Letters, 13, 123.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 that is, into reality.46 But this demand is wholly inappropriate to a drive whose essential function is to abstract, generalize, and render absolute, whose relationship to sensual reality is largely one of negation. Specific content, which is the stuff of all reality, is suddenly transformed into so much humiliating stuff.47 As an example, a person thusly disposed might seek to overcome their dependency on feelings by stifling feeling itself, in theory securing their moral character from the contingencies of passion. But whatever level of autonomy over passion is gained here comes at a steep price, for “he will at the same time be armored by principle against all natural feeling, and be equally inaccessible to the claims of humanity from without as he is to those of humanity within.”48 Indeed, Schiller wonders how we are to be just and “effective” human beings at all if we lack the power “of receiving into ourselves, faithfully and truly, natures unlike ours, of feeling our way into the situation of others, of making other’s people’s our own?”49 Here we are reminded that the “claims of humanity” are not exclusive to the moral and rational side of our nature, but to the sensual side as well. That is, whereas the rationalist may assume a “one-sided moral point of view” regarding humanity, “the complete anthropological view” properly understands the human being as a necessarily embodied dualism between reason and sense, between freedom and contingency.50 To deny this dualism in favour of reason can lead one to relate to oneself and others in a perversely insensitive fashion, perverse precisely in the sense that disregards the claims of humanity in the name of a moral ideal.51 Politically, the results of this disposition portend far greater catastrophe than any brought about by empirically driven “eudaemonisms,” however defective Schiller thinks them to be. If a regime sets out to “depopulate the sensible realm of appearance” in the name of “extending the invisible realm of morals,” the effect is to disregard, if not actively undercut, the very conditions of human existence.52 After all, what is the worth of any particular human life against the majesty of the eternal or absolute? Its dignity may come to see itself coinciding with not only its self-overcoming, but indeed with its self- negation. While Schiller remains reticent on the specific details of this sort of politics, we recall that the recent Terror in France serves as the contextual example. Virtue quickly becomes associated with not only the willingness to die, but the readiness to kill, indeed to kill the one’s we love, for the sake of a moral cause.53 One recalls a sad story amongst so many such as Camille Desmoulins, the Jacobin minister who showed outward signs of pity to the condemned Girondins and who was therefore called before the Jacobin Club to defend his revolutionary credentials, his protests against the mechanisms of terror eventually leading to his own execution.54 Or perhaps, if pity towards a Jacobin proves too impolitic, we recall Karl raising a pistol on Amalia, ready to kill his beloved in order to demonstrate his devotion to his own self-willed commitments.

46 Ibid., 13, 122-24. 47 Ibid., 13, 122n2. 48 Ibid., 13, 124n3. Italics in original. 49 Ibid., 13, 123-24n2. 50 Ibid., 4, 93. 51 Ibid., 13, 124n3. 52 Ibid., 4, 94. 53 Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013, 182, 272-80. 54 Ibid., 209.

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The Aesthetic Turn: A Means Towards and End that Means...?

Schiller’s sketch of our impulsive striving towards freedom and the characters this calls forth presents a disquieting challenge for Kantian humanism. In spirit, Schiller has largely conceded to a roughly Kantian perspective that human dignity emerges from the species’ capacity for moral autonomy vouchsafed through a good will. Schiller is just as reluctant as Kant to allow this dignity any concession to natural contingency, including those of human feeling. But in rendering rationalism and sensual experience as specific drives (a distinctly un-Kantian move), Schiller has suggested an ever-present danger associated with the very philosophy that promises a universal human dignity: a sort of perpetual revolution of the soul that sets itself against the intransigence of matter in order to vouchsafe the integrity of reason, begetting the modern moral fanatic, specifically, the fanatic of freedom.55 What then, is an idealist of the Kantian persuasion to do? Is philosophy to “retire,” as Schiller asks, “dejected and despairing from this field [of politics]?”56 It is in this context that we return to Schiller’s appeal to an unlikely refuge in the world of aesthetics. Understanding exactly what he means by making our way to freedom “through beauty” is an admittedly frustrating task, because we quickly find the aesthetic to be something of a moving target; Schiller seems at one and the same time to use it as an ontological grounding for freedom, as well a sensual means towards freedom. Adequately disentangling these two dimensions of Schiller’s argument will prove beyond the scope of this paper, although it will help at the outset to recognize this duality inherent in the project itself. Schiller is going to make the case that fine art may serve as something of a causal mechanism towards the formation of a character needed to support a free (and now we must add, non-self- consuming) regime. But as the challenge to political freedom is brought into greater focus, Schiller effectively shifts the role of the aesthetic from a specifically causal one to an essentially regulatory one. The very same pursuit of a pure conception of human nature that brought forth the primary and radical opposition between reason and sense has come with the assurance that beauty will be shown to be “a necessary condition of human being.”57 As it turns out, although the opposition is “primary,” it need not persist insofar as reason and sense might be returned towards, and bounded within, their own appropriate spheres. We are thus introduced to Schiller’s “play drive,” not to be thought of as a distinct drive in itself, since Schiller has precluded such a possibility, but rather a unique state wherein the other two drives find themselves in a condition of “reciprocal subordination” and “reciprocal action.”58 Without seeking to become too technical, this drive emerges when the imperatives given by both reason and sensual nature find themselves in congruence, and one is therefore neither aware of moral nor natural compulsion in their actions. As a quick example offered by Schiller, when we embrace a person who merits our respect with affection, we act in accordance with both reason and nature without feeling compelled by either. Rather we love, and we thus find ourselves in a state of play.59 The play drive, then, renders moral action and happiness not only compatible, but reciprocally

55 A much similar account of this particular form of moral fanaticism will later be given by Hegel. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991, §5. 56 Schiller, Aesthetic Letters, 8, 105. 57 Ibid., 10, 115. 58 Ibid., 13, 121n1. 59 Ibid., 14., 125.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 necessary.60 Schiller ascribes this condition with a twofold significance. Firstly, one finds here a higher freedom than can be secured simply through the form drive alone, since both natural and moral compulsions are simultaneously negated. Secondly, since the play drive amounts to “living form” (the combined objects of both the sense and formal drives), we are entitled to call this condition, and its object, “beautiful.”61 Without any proper justification of this conflation between beauty and “living form,” it does appear that sleight of hand may have occurred; at the very least Schiller is banking on a leap of faith on the part of his reader.62 The significant point here, however, is that Schiller now feels justified in claiming that he has fulfilled his promise to show how beauty is a “necessary condition of human being.” Since this condition represents the fulfillment of both the empirical desire towards happiness and the rational injunction towards moral autonomy, it is in this state and this state alone that one truly actualizes the fullness of their human nature.63 Furthermore, since reason desires perfection, reason is obliged to acknowledge this form of human freedom as its proper ideal. And so, “as soon as reason utters the pronouncement: let humanity exist, it has by that very pronouncement also promulgated the law: let there be beauty.”64 At the immediately practical level, this cannot help but seem, however charming, rather toothless against the problem Schiller has himself set for the politics of freedom. After all, this ideal remains exactly that: an ideal that can be approximated but never fully attained in human life.65 As the narrative of The Robbers has so aptly demonstrated, it is more often than not a matter of contingency itself whether our desires and our moral imperatives coincide. So much the better when they do, but often they will not. But the purpose here is, again, regulatory. It is the ontology of freedom that Schiller is attempting to redefine against Kant in an attempt to render freedom substantively connected to the sensual world without thereby sundering the moral autonomy that the Kantian metaphysic demands.66 Freedom, under the regulatory concept of beauty, is now not only invited, but demanded to seek content, to express itself positively in the world, and to understand this experience as the highest human potential. So far as specific political institutions may or may not correspond to this new regulatory concept of freedom, Schiller is largely silent. More directly relevant to him is how people might now understand themselves as relating to other people who are to be viewed as both moral agents, and feeling human beings. To this end, he compares his ideal of the “aesthetic state” to the “dynamic state of rights,” and the “ethical state of duties.” The dynamic state of rights is one that relates people to each other as forces, wherein they negotiate and establish the boundaries of their actions according to the obstacles

60 Ibid., 14., 127. 61 Ibid., 15, 128. 62 So far as I can tell, nowhere in the “Aesthetic Letters” does Schiller formally justify his rendition of “living form” as beautiful. As suggested, however, it is not clear that such a justification is necessary to his immediate purposes. For a formal concept of beauty itself, one would look to Schiller’s “die Kallias Briefe,” published a couple years before the “Aesthetic Letters.” 63 Ibid, 14, 126. 64 Ibid., 15, 129. Italics added. 65 Ibid., 14., 125. 66 Should Schiller be accused of unfairness towards Kant, it is worth noting the former’s admission that this tendency towards moral fanaticism is “wholly alien to the spirit of the Kantian system,” though it may nonetheless “be found in the letter of it” (“Aesthetic Letters,” 13, 122n2).

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 they are able to enforce, in essence “letting one nature be curbed by another.”67 While this makes society possible, it is the ethical state of rights that makes society morally necessary. This latter, however, does not quite escape relations of mastery, as “man sets himself over against man with all the majesty of the law, and puts a curb upon his desires.”68 So long as law remains an abstract and therefore alien force, it would seem that the merely ethical state continues frame people in antagonistic relations to each other, here casting the person as the locus of problematic desires that are to be, as it were, dealt with, albeit towards ostensibly moral ends. The characteristic of the aesthetic state, however, is to develop a “social character,” wherein “none may appear to the other except as form, or confront him except as an object of free play.”69 In short, a person is no longer prompted towards seeking the function or purpose of another person, but rather regards them as, properly speaking, an end in themselves. But to say it again, this is an end that embraces both the rational and moral dimensions of the human being, as well as the sensual or natural. It would seem then that a person ideally regards others with a moral interest, but is likewise linked to others through empathy, if not always affection, towards their humanity. It therefore becomes “a most pernicious abuse of the ideal of perfection, to apply it in all its rigour” when we make judgements of others or seek to act on their behalf, and while “severity with one’s self” might be acceptable, only when this is “combined with leniency towards others” do we find the mark of “the truly excellent character.”70 This aesthetic state is, to be sure, a fiction, and Schiller does little to hide this. In this state, even the inanimate tool becomes a free citizen, sharing equal rights with the noblest.71 This seems a bit excessive, but here the regulative concept of freedom is bleeding into the pedagogical function of fine art. It will prove beyond the scope of this paper to give justice to the multifaceted toolkit Schiller develops, including “melting beauty,” “energizing beauty,” and the “sublime.” I will here only suggest a couple of provisional statements towards approaching this dimension of the aesthetic package. To begin, those looking for any immediate and easy causal relationship between fine art and political freedom are likely to be disappointed; it is hardly the case that one can expect a scenario wherein one need only input more Beethoven to receive a greater output of flourishing democracy. Objects of beauty themselves have no explicit moral content, and produce no moral effects properly speaking: “it discovers no individual truth, helps us to perform no individual duty and is, in short, as unfitted to provide a firm basis for character as to enlighten the understanding.”72 The world of the aesthetic should by no means be taken to be the silver bullet of political science. At the same time, however, Schiller seeks to show how the aesthetic is deeply woven into the very fabric of our explicitly human nature. At its most basic, Schiller poses an anthropological narrative that sets the experience of semblance and illusion as that critical moment wherein the human mind liberates itself from the world of cause-and-effect, or sensual determinacy. The significance of this moment hinges on the appearance of not only a new desire, but a new order of desire. When one enjoys something in its semblance, and it is essential that they enjoy it as semblance (this is different

67 Ibid., 27, 176-77. 68 Ibid, 27, 176. Italics added. 69 Ibid., 27, 176. 70 Ibid., 13, 124n3-4. 71 Ibid., 27, 178. 72 Ibid., 21., 147.

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Joshua Johnson The Paideia of Freedom CPSA 2016 than being deceived by a false appearance, for example), a person is given over to a “disinterested and undirected pleasure.”73 That is, one begins to take pleasure in things for their own sake (since semblance serves no purpose), which has the ultimate effect of redirecting possessive longings towards the appreciation of forms in themselves. That the eye is suddenly able to give pleasure (rather than merely anticipate it) suggests a radical departure from animalistic existence, as the world itself has become an object to the human mind capable calling forth its own ends.74 Here we can see the aesthetic moment as offering a transitional stage towards our moral development, but we also see that it simultaneously acts, through artistic representation, in transforming human feeling into an end in itself. The aesthetic moment, as it were, is the first free moment a human being experiences, and for this reason, we are entitled to consider “beauty our second creatress.”75 In all the varieties that aesthetic experience takes, it seems that the constant tendency is towards restoring power to the will such that it neither becomes too steeped in sensual reality nor overly fixated in moral abstraction.76 While it might seem strange to make a will aligned with reason problematic, one must recall the dangers of giving oneself over too entirely to something as pure as (pure) reason. Maintaining a healthy balance between preserving the integrity of moral dignity while guarding against the emergence of moral fanaticism produces no easy answer when the former demands political actualization, and in subsequent works, Schiller takes an ambivalent stance towards the idealist and realist; both have their charms, and both have their flaws. While the realist never actualizes the moral grandeur of the idealist, they are often fairer in their judgements of others and more forgiving of human weakness and limitation. While the idealist alone is capable of acquainting “the human spirit with its independent greatness and freedom,” this person is also, as the sworn enemy of everything petty and trivial, “prepared to reconcile... with the extravagant and the monstrous, if only it testifies to a great potential.”77 Supposedly both characters could learn from each other, and in doing, perhaps one’s own character could be developed in the process. It does seem, after all, the very disposition towards empathetic engagement that Schiller is trying to affect. As a final note, and by way of conclusion this discussion of Schiller’s aesthetic project, it is worth pointing out that as much as Schiller tends to use Kant as a foil, this project is nonetheless underwritten in large amount by Kantian humanism. It would be fair to posit that while Kant is more interested in the formal criteria of moral action, Schiller’s concern is the articulation of a moral character, and while it is not clear that these projects are always compatible, Schiller at least seems to assume the preservation of a distinctly Kantian moral universe as the backdrop against which the aesthetic world can function in curbing its political excesses. Freedom, then, can only be legitimately pursued in its intimate association with reason. The idealist set towards freedom in this vein may indeed be “often dangerous,” but the effects of the visionary who arbitrarily constructs an ideal of freedom through the “whims of his imagination” are “terrifying:”

73 Ibid., 27, 175. 74 Ibid., 26, 167. 75 Ibid., 21, 148. 76 Ibid., 22, 148-49. 77 Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” 252-55.

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...the visionary does not merely deny the human character – he denies all character, he is utterly lawless, hence he is nothing and is good for nothing. Precisely because this fantasy is a deviation, not from nature, but from freedom, because it thus springs from a disposition in itself worthy of respect and infinitely perfectible, it also leads to an infinite fall into a bottomless depth and can only end in complete annihilation.78

So it would seem that Schiller adds a stern warning to his aesthetic reconfiguration of political freedom. Whereas the beautifying balm that he casts upon its purely rationalistic account might sway the disposition of modern idealists towards preferring cultural outlets of becoming rather than statist acts of self-negation, no effective aesthetic recourse should be expected should freedom find itself articulated through the whims of imagination itself. Should our recourse to aesthetics become the politics of aesthetics, in other words, we would risk “an infinite fall” into a “bottomless depth.”

78 Ibid., 259-260.

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Works Cited

Buchwald, Reiner. Schiller Vol.1. Leipzig: Insel, 1937.

Garland, H.B. Schiller. London: George Harrap & co, 1949.

Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991.

Linton, Marisa. Choosing Terror. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013.

Schiller, Friedrich. “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.” Ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Continuum Publishing Co, 1993.

Schiller, Friedrich. “On the Aesthetic Education of Man.” Ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Translated by Elizabeth Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. New York: Continuum Publishing Co, 1993.

Schiller, Friedrich. “On the Art of Tragedy.” In Friedrich Schiller: Essays. Ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel Dahlstrom. Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1993.

Schiller, Friedrich. The Robbers.Trans F.J. Lamport. London: Penguin Books, 1979

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