Sabine Roehr
Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 64, Number 1, January 2003, pp. 119-134
(Article)
Access provided by University of the Arts, London (2 May 2017 17:09 GMT)
Freedom and Autonomy in Schiller
Sabine Roehr
Much has been said lately about the development of the concept of au-
tonomy up to Kant.1 This essay will examine what happened to the concept
immediately after Kant, specifically how it fared at the hands of the German
playwright and Kantian Friedrich Schiller, who was famous for his support of
human freedom and self-determination. Commentators have drawn attention
to his employment of different concepts of freedom and autonomy.2 Others
have complained about the inconsistency found in Schillers Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man regarding the aesthetic ideal of play and the moral
ideal of practical reason.3
This essay will try to provide a systematic as well as chronological account
of Schillers use of the concepts of freedom and autonomy. It will show that
one of these concepts is Kantian, while the others are not. One non-Kantian
concept is Schillers notion of natural autonomy; another one is connected to a
particular concept of free will that he took over from the philosopher Karl
Leonhard Reinhold. This concept of the will in turn influenced Schillers re-
construction of the Kantian dualism of sensibility and intellect and his attempt
at overcoming this dualism with the help of the concepts of freedom and play.
Lastly, I will address some specific problems that arise from Reinholds and
Schillers concepts of freedom and autonomy and show how the simultaneous
employment of different concepts of autonomy leads to conflicting ideals of
aesthetics and morality in Schiller.
1
Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philoso-
phy (Cambridge, 1998).
2
See, W. M. Calder, Schiller on the Will and the Heroic Villain, Oxford German Studies,
2, (1967), 41-53; Paul Menzer, Schiller und Kant. Zum 150. Todestage Friedrich von Schillers
am 9. Mai 1955, Kant-Studien, 47, (1955/56), 113-47, 234-72; R. D. Miller, Schiller and the
Ideal of Freedom: A Study of Schillers Philosophical Works with Chapters on Kant (Oxford,
1970).
3
Dieter Henrich, Beauty and Freedom: Schillers Struggle with Kants Aesthetics, Essays
in Kants Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago, 1982); Lesley Sharpe, Schillers
Aesthetic Letters: A Theory of Beauty in a Revolutionary Age, talk given at a workshop on
Schillers Aesthetic Letters in January 1999 at the Institute of Germanic Studies, London.
119
Copyright 2003 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
Schillers writings on ethical and aesthetic theory fall mainly in the period
1792-96. After some years of struggles in his work as a dramatisthe finished
the Don Carlos in 1787 after five years of writinghe turned to theory, read-
ing widely in the areas of history, aesthetics, and philosophy. Most of all it was
the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that influenced him, a fact well known and
much written about. After initially reading some of Kants shorter essays on
history, it was Kants third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, that impressed
Schiller enduringly.
The Kallias-Letters, written to his friend Christian Gottfried Krner dur-
ing January and February 1793, was his first detailed reaction to Kants aes-
thetic theory.4 Schiller tries there to refute Kants claim that no objective con-
cept of beauty is possible. He does so by utilizing Kants concept of moral
autonomy, the moral self-legislation of practical reason, in the realm of the
aesthetic. He assigns the appearance, the similitude, of autonomy to natural
or artificial objects that appear to be determined from within themselves, by
their own nature. Nature is the particular essence of a thing, so to say, the
person of a thing, as Schiller puts it.5 In inanimate objects it is the form that
expresses this essence and correspondingly must shape the material of the ob-
ject completely; in animate objects the living forces perform this task. We
perceive beauty everywhere, where the mass is completely dominated by the
form and (in the plant and animal kingdoms) by the living forces (in which I
locate the autonomy of the organic).6 For this kind of autonomy, Schiller uses
the term heautonomy, which he takes over from Kant.7 In contrast to Kant, he
employs the concept in order to describe the regulative character of aesthetic,
not teleological judgment. What is perfect can possess autonomy, in so far as
its form is determined purely through its concept; but only beauty possesses
heautonomy, because only in beauty is the form determined by the inner na-
ture.8
Moral autonomy is the self-legislation of practical reason in a sensible-
rational, human being. Schiller takes this concept from Kant. Free in this
4
Schiller, Kallias oder ber die Schnheit, Kallias oder ber die Schnheit. ber Anmut
und Wrde (Stuttgart, 1971), from now on quoted as Kallias-Briefe.
5
Kallias-Briefe, 38.
6
Ibid., 40.
7
Kant introduces the concept of heautonomy in the introduction to his Critique of Judg-
ment. Apparently, he made it up in order to distinguish between moral autonomy and the particu-
lar autonomy of the faculty of judgment that judges nature according to a subjective principle of
purposiveness. The judgment has therefore also in itself a principle a priori of the possibility of
nature, but only in a subjective aspect, by which it prescribes not to nature (autonomy), but to
itself (heautonomy) a law for its reflection upon nature. See Critique of Judgement, tr. J. H.
Bernhard (London,1951), 22. The added prefix he, as in the Greek heauton, is probably
meant to draw attention to the purely reflexive character of such law.
8
Kallias-Briefe, 47. See also Ernst Cassirer, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen
Geistesgeschichte (Darmstadt, 1961), 286.
context means through reason, and that means through concepts. Pure self-
determination in general is the form of practical reason. When a rational being
acts, it must act from pure reason, if it is to show pure self-determination.
When a mere natural being acts, it must act from pure nature, if it is to demon-
strate pure self-determination; for the essence [Selbst] of a rational being is
reason, the essence of a natural being is nature.9 Heautonomy, or beauty, is the
appearance of freedom in a natural or artificial object that only seems to deter-
mine itself through its own nature but in reality is not free at all, showing only
the semblance of freedom, or freedom in appearance.10 The use of the no-
tion of freedom in this case is merely regulative.11 The two concepts of moral
and aesthetic autonomy tentatively come together in the story of a human
being that spontaneously acts from duty, with an ease, as if mere instinct had
acted in him,12 an idea of moral beauty that runs like a thread through Schillers
theoretical writings, from his student times at the Karlsschule to his last major
theoretical work On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.13
These are the two concepts of freedom in the Kallias-Briefe. Soon after-
ward Schillers outlook on freedom and autonomy changed in certain respects.
For one, he gave up, or at least postponed, his search for objective criteria of
beauty in objects and also the idea of natural autonomy. He did not give up
though on the idea of moral beauty in humans, but for this he needed a different
concept of freedom, one that was independent of practical reason. Schiller found
this in the concept of a neutral free will as it was formulated by his colleague
and sometime-friend in Jena, the philosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Reinhold
deeply influenced Schillers reception of the Kantian philosophy, a fact that
has not gained enough attention up until now.
Schiller met Reinhold after he moved to Weimar in the summer of 1787.
Reinhold was originally from Vienna, where he was born in 1757, educated by
the orders of the Jesuits and the Barnabites, ordained as a priest, and employed
by the Barnabites as a teacher of philosophy. He was closely involved in the
intellectual and cultural life of Vienna and in 1783 he became a Freemason and
Illuminatus. His engagement with enlightened and Freemasonic thought soon
led him into questioning his stance toward the dogmas and institutions of Ca-
tholicism. He fled Austria at the end of 1783 and moved to Weimar, where he
met Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried Herder, and other important
thinkers of this age. He converted to Protestantism, married one of Wielands
9
Kallias-Briefe, 17.
10
Ibid.
11
See Sigbert Latzel Die sthetische Vernunft: Bemerkungen zu Schillers Kallias mit
Bezug auf die sthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts, Friedrich Schiller: Zur Geschichtlichkeit seines
Werkes, ed. Klaus Berghahn (Kronberg, 1975), 247.
12
Kallias-Briefe, 32.
13
See Dieter Henrichs Beauty and Freedom: Schillers Struggle with Kants Aesthetics.
daughters, and started to make a name for himself as a writer of articles and
reviews. He wrote, for example, for Wielands journal Der Teutsche Merkur, of
which he became co-publisher in 1786.
Reinholds philosophical break-through came with his widely-read Briefe
ber die Kantische Philosophie,14 which appeared in the Teutsche Merkur in
1786/87 and in which he famously popularized Kants critical philosophy. In
this work he presented the results of Kants first Critique in a manner more
accessible than the original work, though one structured by his own practical
concerns. Reinholds and Schillers biographies show interesting parallels in
this period of their lives. Schiller, too, planned to become a co-publisher of the
Merkur and a son-in-law of Wieland, neither of which plans worked out, al-
though Schiller published in the Merkur.15
From their first meeting, the two talked about Kant. Schiller wrote to his
friend Christian Gottfried Krner, that compared with Reinhold, [Krner]
look[ed] with contempt on Kant, for (Reinhold) claim[ed] that in a hundred
years time, [Kant] would have to have the reputation of Jesus Christ.16 How-
ever, while Reinhold at this point still agreed with the Kantian system, he soon
began to introduce changes, first in regard to Kants theoretical philosophy and
later, after the publication of Kants Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in
regard to his practical philosophy as well.17 In particular, Reinhold criticized
Kants concept of free will.
14
Briefe ber die Kantische Philosophie, in Der Teutsche Merkur (Weimar, 1786), III and
(Weimar, 1787), I, II, III.
15
E.g., his Briefe ber Don Carlos and his poem Die Gtter Griechenlands (Teutsche
Merkur, 1788), his Was heit und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? and
Die Knstler (1789).
16
Letter 97, to Krner, Weimar, 29 August 1787. Schillers Werke Nationalausgabe (NA),
XXIV, ed. Benno von Wiese (Weimar, 1963), 143.
17
See Briefe ber die Kantische Philosophie (Leipzig, 1790), I and (Leipzig, 1792), II.
18
Karl Ameriks, Kants Deduction of Freedom and Morality, Journal of the History of
Philosophy, 19 (1981), 54.
19
Ibid., 59.
20
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1933), A533/
B561.
21
Critique of Pure Reason, A534/B562.
22
Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. and intro. L. W. Beck (London,
1959), [440], 59 (page numbers in brackets refer to the Akademie-Ausgabe).
23
Ibid., [458], 77.
24
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. and intro. L. W. Beck (London, 1956), [32], 32.
framework that he has set up, which inextricably links freedom with moral
autonomy and human sensuous nature, i.e., existence under empirically con-
ditioned laws with heteronomy.25
Not surprisingly, Kant himself was made aware of the problem connected
with the freedom of heteronomous actions 26 and tried to solve it in the first part
of his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, which appeared in 1792, at
the same time that Reinholds second volume of the Briefe ber die Kantische
Philosophie was published, which contained his detailed analysis of the prob-
lem. Without doubt, the Religion contains some of the clearest passages re-
garding the accountability for immoral actions, as when Kant writes that the
source of evil cannot lie in an object determining choice through inclination,
nor yet in a natural impulse; it can lie only in a rule made by choice for the use
of its freedom, that is, in a maxim.27 That means persons must determine them-
selves to let themselves be determined by inclination; there must be an au-
tonomy to heteronomy.
Some commentators think that Kant solved the problem in the Religion,
others do not. For example, John Silber claims that, in comparison with his
Critiques, Kants Religion offers his only sustained analysis of the human
will, with Willkr analyzed ... as a unitary faculty in which the forces of
sensibility and rationality have a common meeting place. It thus provides the
basis for an understanding of the experience of obligation as the constraint of
the law upon a will tempted to reject it.28 Allen W. Wood accepts the human
propensity to evil, which Kant introduces in order to explain immoral actions,
as an inseparable part of moral character and as an explanation for the imput-
ability of such actions.29 Gerold Prauss, on the other hand, argues that Kant
gets caught in a circulus vitiosus when trying to explain immoral actions by
assuming radical evil as part of human nature and ultimately fails because he
does not question the analytical nature of freedom and morality and radically
locates the good of the moral law ... at the root of freedom.30 Thus, there is no
consensus between experts, and it is certainly beyond the scope of this article
to discuss the merits of the various views. However, Reinhold and Schiller, for
their part, did not think that Kants Religion solved the problem.
Reinholds solution to the imputability of immoral and amoral actions con-
sists in dissolving the analytical relationship of practical reason, freedom, and
the will by introducing the concept of a neutral will that is not tied to practical
25
Critique of Practical Reason [43], 44.
26
Through the criticisms of J. A. H. Ulrich and C. C. E. Schmid.
27
Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, tr. John Silber (New York, 1960), BA7/
17. I changed the translation of Willkr from will to choice.
28
John Silber, Introduction: The Ethical Significance of Kants Religion, Religion Within
the Limits of Reason Alone, 127-28.
29
Allen W. Wood, Kants Moral Religion (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 245.
30
Prauss, Kant ber Freiheit als Autonomie (Frankfurt,1983), 98f.
faculty is subordinated neither to the law of nature nor to that of reason. While
the moral will must still follow practical reason, the will in general does not
have to do so in order to prove itself as free: as a force of nature it is free in
regard to both....41 When it acts contrary to the dictates of reason, it uses its
freedom, but it does so in an unworthy manner.
Schiller maintained this concept of the will throughout his subsequent philo-
sophical writings, even though he changed some of the terms involved. In ber
den moralischen Nutzen sthetischer Sitten he clearly distinguishes between
the freedom of an external action as immediately springing from the will of a
person and the morality of an inner action as the immediate determination of
the will by the law of reason.42 In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Mankind he describes the will as located completely free between duty and
inclination, and no physical compulsion can, or should, encroach upon this
sovereign right of his (mans) personality.43 In this work Schillers concept of
a free will and how it is grounded is much more detailed than in his former
writings. Earlier it had remained ultimately an open question how a will free to
choose between two necessary alternatives came into being.
41
Schiller, ber Anmut und Wrde, 114-15.
42
ber den moralischen Nutzen sthetischer Sitten, NA, vol. 21, 29. On the moral use-
fulness of aesthetic manners/habits.
43
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller. Essays, tr.
Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, 93 (4th letter).
44
Reason possesses a very real reason to think freedom as an absolute causethat is, self-
consciousness, through which the acting of this faculty announces itself as a fact and through
which it justifies common sense to make an inference from its reality to its possibility (Briefe
ber die Kantische Philosophie, II, 511).
45
See ber Anmut und Wrde, 82, 94.
46
Concerning the Sublime, Friedrich Schiller: Essays, 70.
47
Aesthetic Letters, 120 (12th letter).
48
Ibid., 127 (14th letter).
49
Ibid., 128.
50
Ibid., 130, 131 (15th letter).
51
Except in the passage from The Metaphysics of Morals quoted above, where he calls
practical reason neither free nor unfree.
ing to follow a particular inclination and the absolute freedom of choosing the
moral law. On the other hand, in the later Briefe ber die Kantische Philosophie
he describes both the selfish and the unselfish drivethe moral versions of
sense and form driveas necessary. The same ambiguity can be found in
Schiller, who in the fifteenth of his Aesthetic Letters links the form drive to
freedom, while in the nineteenth letter freedom is the result of the reciprocal
relation of material and form drive.
Reinhold first presented this dualism of material and formal drive in his
Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermgens of 1789,
a work in which he tried to provide a firm foundation for Kants critical phi-
losophy (which in his opinion was missing in Kants own attempt at a system-
atic philosophy) on the basis of the concept of representation. A representation
consists of matter and form, matter being the content and form that which is
contributed by the mind. For the most part of Versuch Reinhold treats of the
faculty of representation as the ground of the mere possibility of representa-
tion; only in the last chapter, Grundlinien der Theorie des Begehrungs-
vermgens (Outline of the theory of the faculty of desire), he talks about
actual representation. For the latter to come into being, an active representing
force must be present. When this force combines with the faculty of represen-
tation, we get the drive of the representing subject to represent. To be deter-
mined by the drive to produce a representation is called desire, and the capacity
to be determined by the drive, the faculty of desire in a broader sense.52
Desire lies at the heart of any actual representation, and without the drives
for matter and form no actual, real representation will come about. Reinhold
further describes the drive for matter as a need for matter that possesses a dis-
tinct form of receptivity and is only satisfied when something is given to it.
Therefore he calls it selfish. The drive for form is a positive force which, in
combination with the form of its spontaneity, is only satisfied when it can act.
Thus he calls it unselfish. The drive for matter is sensible, the drive for form
intellectual. In regard to the moral realm, Reinhold talks of the drive for happi-
ness and the pure and rational, or moral, drive.53
While calling this last chapter, for example, odd (Alfred Klemmt) or
curious (Daniel Breazeale), many commentators have interpreted it in the
light of Reinholds goal to provide a unified theory of all human faculties, of
bringing together theoretical and practical reasonas actually his whole theory
52
Reinhold, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermgens (At-
tempt at a new theory of the human faculty of representation) (Prague, 1789; repr. Darmstadt,
1963), 561.
53
Schiller adopted this terminology in On the Art of Tragedy (1791/92). After this, he
employed various terms. It is confirmed that he had read at least half of Reinholds Versuch, a
particularly dry, abstract work (see Reinholds letter to Jens Baggesen, 23 January 1792).
of representation was meant to provide a unifying basis for Kants critical phi-
losophy.54
Two features seem to be of importance in connection with Schiller: the
first is the concern with reality/actuality as opposed to mere possibility. Schiller
employed in his own theory of the free will the notion of force in order to talk
about the reality of acting freely in the world,55 in contrast to Kant, who cat-
egorically denies any possibility of demonstrating the reality of freedom, its
actual, empirical occurrence in the sensible world.
Second was, the concern with reconciling the dualism of sensibility and intel-
lect. The structure in both thoughts is basically the same: two necessary drives
cancel each other and thus create a realm of freedom, which Schiller describes
as a realm of undeterminedness between the others that are both absolutely
determined (by nature and by reason, respectively). It seems possible that Schiller
adopted this structure because it coincided with his own interpretation of Kantian
dualism, in particular his mostly negative view of Kantian duty and the repres-
sive character of the moral law. A third reason might be found in Schillers
concern with the relationship of matter and form in a work of art and how this
compares to the same relationship in regard to human beings. In the fourth of
the Aesthetic Letters he stresses that, while the artisan and even the artist do
violence to their material, for the pedagogic or the political artist man is at
once the material on which he works and the goal toward which he strives.
Thus he must approach his material and its innermost being with respect.57
It was Schillers declared goal to overcome the Kants dualism of inclina-
tion and duty. People possessing grace, who perform acts of duty as if from
instinct, whose conscience has become second nature, a part of their sensible
nature and who, thus, do not have to repress their feelings for the sake of the
strict moral law, were his ideal. The aesthetic state of play presents the realiza-
tion of this ideal, when the full realization of both necessary drives leads to an
54
See Martin Bondeli, Das Anfangsproblem bei Karl Leonhard Reinhold: Eine systematische
und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Philosophie Reinholds in der Zeit von 1789
bis 1803 (Frankfurt, 1995), 85, 91f.
55
See Jeffrey Barnouw, Freiheit zu geben durch Freiheit, 139, 147.
56
Schiller, Aesthetic Letters, 106, (8th letter).
57
Ibid., 94, (4th letter).
Reinhold and, following him, Schiller can be credited with breaking open
Kants identification of practical reason and freedom and thus providing a con-
cept of a neutral will that is free to decide between different options for acting.
However, this approach creates problems of its own. Karl Ameriks has recently
drawn attention to two problems connected to the origin of this will. Being the
product of the canceling of two opposing drives, one sensible, the other ratio-
nal, limits this kind of will to beings who possess these two sides, beings with
a dualistic, mixed nature. What about God? Since he is purely rational and not
automatically subject to the absolute rule of natural desire, can he therefore
not be free?58 As Ameriks points out, Reinhold himself became eventually aware
of this dilemma. However, while Reinhold was sensitive to this problem (since
one of his main philosophical objectives was to secure humanitys moral and
religious beliefs), Schiller might have been not really concerned about this
effect, since his concern was with human freedom alone.
Another consequence of Reinholds dualism of drives, again remarked on
by Ameriks, is that there exist only two different courses of action open to the
will, either to follow the selfish or the unselfish drive. Reinhold tries to escape
this conclusion by insisting that the scope of the empirical will is larger than
that of the impure, immoral will, and that practical reason not only estab-
lishes the moral law but other practical, nonmoral laws as well. Unfortunately,
he does not expand on this idea.59
Schiller could be said to avoid this problem from the start when he charac-
terizes the form drive as pertaining to laws in general, those of knowledge as
58
Ameriks, The Gospels Revised, 74.
59
See Reinhold, Einige Bemerkungen ber die in der Einleitung zu den Anfangsgrnden
der Rechtslehre von I. Kant aufgestellten Begriffe von der Freiheit des Willens.
well as morality, not morality alone.60 The footnote at the end of the nineteenth
letter might be interpreted in this light. He talks there about two kinds of hu-
man freedom, one that pertains to a human being considered as intelligent
being, and a second that is founded upon his mixed nature.61 The first one
might be interpreted as that freedom which Schiller, in the twelfth letter, links
to the form drive and to law-giving in general.62 When he then proposes to
explain the latterthe product of reciprocal action between sense and form
drivequite simply as a natural possibility of the former,63 he derives aes-
thetic not from moral freedom, as has been claimed,64 but from a general kind
of freedom that belongs to human beings as intelligible beings.
A third problem arises from the concept of free will as something third
between two necessary sides. It leaves freedom as choice in an indeterminate
realm without rules or laws. Only the will that chooses to act morally is gov-
erned by a law, that of practical reason. But on what basis does a person choose
in the first place? As Reinhold puts it, It depends on the subject whether it lets
itself be determined or determines itself.65 However, the subject is a purely
transcendental one, it has no substance of its own. As Alessandro Lazzari has
asked, Who is the subject of the will?66 The accusation of contingency can-
not be easily fought off. Schiller was aware of the danger of a state of indeter-
minacy that would be empty and contingent. As we have seen, he tried to over-
come this problem by assigning the greatest possible content to the two drives
that cancel each other. The ensuing indeterminacy is not empty, but full of
content. Freedom thus equals not contingency but a higher kind of necessity.
Another, and maybe the most important, problem concerns the notion of
autonomy. What happens to Kantian autonomy as the free self-legislation of
practical reason? For Reinhold this self-legislation becomes necessary. How-
ever, he tries to avoid the consequence of autonomy becoming the opposite of
freedom by having it denote not only self-legislation but also the self-determi-
nation of the free will. The autonomy of the will consists not only in the self-
legislation of reason, whereby the person acts spontaneously but involuntarily,
but in the self-determination of the will for this law, to which it commits it-
self.67 So Reinhold wants to have it both ways: autonomy is necessary and
60
Schiller, Aesthetic Letters, 120.
61
Ibid., 144.
62
Alternatively, it could also be seen as Kants theoretical concept of comparative freedom
of choosing between different courses of action in accordance with theoretical, hypothetical
considerations.
63
Ibid., 144n.
64
W. M. Calder, Schiller on the Will and the Heroic Villain, 47.
65
Reinhold, Einige Bemerkungen ber die in der Einleitung..., 380.
66
A. Lazzari, System und Freiheit. K. L. Reinholds Bearbeitung der Freiheitsthematik
zwischen 1789 und 1792, Proceedings of the International Karl Leonhard Reinhold Collo-
quium 1998.
67
Reinhold, Briefe ber die Kantische Philosophie, 502.
free at the same time, necessary in respect to legislation and free in respect to
execution.
Certainly this is an ambiguous outcome, which Schiller, following Reinhold
in using the notion of autonomy for both moral self-legislation and free self-
determination, does not avoid either. This ambiguity is responsible for the in-
conclusiveness that many commentators find in Schillers Aesthetic Letters,
and in other writings as well. Is the aesthetic state a transitory one facilitating
the ultimate triumph of the moral law? Or is it the goal itself and, as a harmoni-
ous one, superior to the one-sidedness of practical reason? Does the aesthetic
state come to represent true morality?
No doubt, both readings can be found in Schiller. In On Grace and Dig-
nity, if graceful, morally beautiful acting is impossible, dignity must take its
placesubmission to the dictates of the moral law and suppression of the senses;
the ideal of beauty is supplemented with that of the sublime. In the twenty-third
of the Aesthetic Letters Schiller describes the aesthetic state as a precondition
for the moral one, as a transitional state. In the same letter he speaks of aes-
thetic transcendence by noble actions which he characterizes as exceeding
duty, going beyond it, something that is not possible for merely moral con-
duct. Still, sublime conduct is to be held in higher esteem: Noble conduct is to
be distinguished from sublime conduct. The first transcends moral obligation;
not so the latter, although we rate it incomparably higher. But then again man
must learn to desire more nobly, so that he may not need to will sublimely.68
Schiller clearly finds the aesthetic state more desirable, although he dutifully
reserves the highest respect for the moral.
Dieter Henrich has expressed the dilemma like this:
Henrich attributes the problem to Schillers unawareness of the fact that the
Kantian conceptual framework hindered him in consistently formulating his
own ideal of aesthetic freedom.70 One might add that it was exactly Schillers
68
Schiller, Aesthetic Letters, 155 n. 3, 156.
69
Henrich, Beauty and Freedom: Schillers Struggle with Kants Aesthetics, 253-54.
70
Ibid., 255.
adoption of Reinholds concept of free will that broke up the Kantian frame-
work and that it was Schillers insistence on retaining both concepts of free-
dom and autonomy that created the ambivalence of different ideals.
Schiller was certainly aware of the problem. He tried, though halfheart-
edly, to overcome it by having the true ideal of moral conduct lie in the har-
mony of the two sides of beauty and the sublime. As Henrich remarks, this was
not a convincing solution, since as long as [Schiller] assumes that sensibility
is active in the harmonious soul, while reason is active in the sublime soul, it is
impossible for him to show where the genuine unity of these two modes of
activity lies.71 Although this idea occurs in the Aesthetic Letters, it is not promi-
nent. If one can take the last, twenty-seventh, letter as Schillers final state-
ment, then it is clear that he contrasts the aesthetic with the moral (political)
state and makes no attempt at reconciling them.
In conclusion, the advantage of Schillers concept of autonomy is that, in
identifying autonomy with self-determination in general and separating it from
reason, a neutral kind of freedom ensues that makes the imputability of moral
as well as immoral and amoral actions comprehensible. Also, this autonomy
refers to the whole person and not only to a persons rational side. There is a
line of development here from Kant, who locates the person in a human
beings rational side, through Reinhold, for whom the person encompasses
both sensible and rational sides but who cannot quite make good on this claim,
and lastly Schiller, who strives to identify autonomy with self-determination
and place it within the reconciliation of a persons mixed nature.
That his concept of autonomy still faces some of the difficulties that
Reinholds concept encounters cannot be denied. Those who claim that Schiller
uses different concepts of freedom are right. But it certainly helps to trace their
source. When the well-known Schiller scholar Lesley Sharpe claims that Schiller
felt torn between two models of human behaviour,72 which she calls the
harmony model and the triumph of the will model, she puts her finger on
exactly the two types of freedom and autonomy in Schiller whose origin this
paper has tried to illuminate. These two kinds of freedom are responsible for
the dualism of Schillers aesthetic-moral idealsgrace and dignity, beauty and
the sublime, play and moral law.
71
Henrich, Beauty and Freedom, 254.
72
Sharpe, Schillers Aesthetic Letters, 11.