The Perfection of Freedom

Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns

Schindler

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894940
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Perfection of Freedom seeks to respond to the impoverished conventional notion of freedom through a recovery of an understanding rich with possibilities yet all but forgotten in contemporary thought. This understanding, developed in different but complementary ways in the German thinkers Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, connects freedom, not exclusively with power and possibility, but rather most fundamentally with completion, wholeness, and actuality. What is unique here is specifically the interpretation of freedom in terms of form, whether it be aesthetic form (Schiller), organic form (Schelling), or social form (Hegel). Although this book presents serious criticisms of the three philosophers, it shows that they open up new avenues for reflection on the notion of freedom; avenues that promise to overcome many of the dichotomies that continue to haunt contemporary thought--for example, between freedom and order, freedom and nature, and self and other. The Perfection of Freedom offers not only a significantly new interpretation of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, it also proposes a modernity more organically rooted in the ancient and classical Christian worlds.

1

Friedrich Schiller’s Dramatic Philosophy: Freedom in Form

I. On the Significance of Style

It is our aim to study Schiller’s philosophy of freedom, but to do so we must first assure ourselves that he in fact has one. That freedom was a notion of great importance for him, there can be no doubt. Indeed, it is arguably the central theme of both his life and his work, appearing as an ideal not only in his poetry and drama, but also in his writings on history and aesthetics. He became known in nineteenth-century America as “the Poet of Freedom,” and was named an “honorary citizen” of France by the revolutionaries.1 Goethe once said, in a reflection on his close collaborator and friend, that Schiller “preached the gospel of freedom,”2 that freedom was the idea that animated all of his work, from first to last,3 and this judgment has been echoed up through the most recent studies on Schiller’s thought.4 What is less obvious is the question whether Schiller has indeed a philosophy of freedom, in the sense of a coherent body of thought on the matter, rather than mere flashes of brilliant intuitions scattered throughout his writings on aesthetics, intuitions that are unsystematic at best and self-contradictory at worst. To be able to make this judgment, before we inspect the various ideas about freedom he records, we have to come to terms with his particular way of philosophizing. Our first task will thus be to reflect on Schiller’s philosophical style.

According to the scholastic dictum, the object determines the method. The unreflective imposition of what Hegel would call an “abstract” method—i.e., one that bears only an incidental relation to its subject matter—threatens to set aside a priori what is most proper to its object, and so to undercut its most basic aim: to understand. While this dictum holds for any significant figure in philosophy, it is especially important for the study of Friedrich Schiller’s philosophical thought for three reasons. In the first place, his philosophical writings seem at first glance to be burdened by inconsistency and contradiction—an observation made regularly by those who study them.5 Before we conclude that Schiller was simply clumsy in a field that he never really appropriated,6 or that his changing ideas and new influences passed over into his writings undigested,7 we ought to consider the possibility that the apparent contradictions are not mistakes betraying confusion but are a deliberate feature of Schiller’s style that holds philosophical significance. What seems to conflict, in other words, might reveal at a deeper level something essential. This possibility acquires prima facie plausibility when we consider how explicitly and emphatically Schiller states what is evidently contradictory,8 and his constant observation in his letters of the unity, soundness, simplicity, rigor, and inner consistency of his highest philosophical achievement, the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.9 Significantly, the scholars who discern a unity amidst the various tensions among Schiller’s statements are typically those who attend directly to what might be called the “rhetorical” aspect of Schiller’s thought.10

Second, by his own admission, Schiller does not fall clearly into standard categories of genre, but writes essays that, like some of Kierkegaard’s, are “too rigorous to be edifying and too edifying to have the rigour of scholarship.”11 Although trained to be a medical doctor and officially employed as a professor of history, Schiller thought of himself as a dramatic poet with a strong philosophical bent. While he would complain in moments of frustration that the poet in him prevented him from ever being a true philosopher, and the philosopher in him would always intrude whenever he would try to write poetry,12 at bottom, he presents a rare synthesis of the two. To the extent that this synthesis in fact succeeds, the most promising approach to Schiller’s philosophy will be to observe it, as it were, in its natural habitat, to try to interpret it, as far as possible, in the light of what his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt called its “original unity” with poetry,13 the meaning of which we will discuss at the end of this chapter. Among other things, this approach entails an attention to the aesthetic dimension of his philosophical writing.14

Third, a basic principle in Schiller’s writing, and indeed in his sense of being in general, is the ideal of inseparable unity between form and content—a unity, as we will eventually see, that he identifies with freedom. If this principle implies that content cannot be abstracted from its form without significant loss, a certain sterility and superficiality will characterize any study of Schiller’s thought that does not reflect at the same time on his style. While we thus have another reason to begin our study of Schiller’s philosophy of freedom by investigating his mode of expression, this principle also presents an important difficulty: if form and content are inseparable, then we will be unable fully to understand the significance of Schiller’s style until we grasp the substance of what he says about freedom. In this respect, the reflections in this first chapter ought to be taken as merely preliminary; they wait upon the study of the second chapter to flesh out their significance. The first two chapters of this book are meant to be read in light of one another.

In what follows, we will take a brief look at his biographical connection to philosophy, and then turn our attention to an essay he wrote on the significance of style in the expression of ideas before returning at the end to face the question directly in what sense Schiller offers a philosophy of freedom.

II. Biographical Background

There are three things in Schiller’s youth and education we wish to highlight in relation to our theme:15 his generous idealism, his association of freedom with drama and poetry, and the rigorous intellectual training he received, which was centered on what we could call philosophical anthropology. The idealism that characterizes Schiller’s mature work was present from the beginning. He seems to have been deeply inspired by the learned pastor in Lorch, Pfarrer Moser, with whom he began to study Latin at the ripe age of six. To the regular consternation of his parents, he took the pastor’s lessons to heart and would secretly give away his books and clothes to those he thought needed them more than he. Once he even snuck out the sheets from the beds in his house to help a beggar on the street keep warm.

When it came time to start his higher education, it was his wish to become a pastor himself. This desire was quite directly frustrated, however. The duke of Württenburg, Karl Eugen, had at that time founded an experimental new institution of education that came to be known as the “Karlsschule,” with the intention of producing an elite military by means of a systematically ordered curriculum coupled with intensive physical training and discipline. One of the most distinguishing features of this school was its aim to approach every subject from a rigorous philosophical perspective, and its emphasis, in pursuing this aim, on contemporary sources.16 Promising young men from the area were essentially drafted into the school and destined for one profession or another according to the duke’s determination of aptitude and need. When Schiller proved to be too poor and inconsistent a student to pursue law, his initial “Fach,” it was decided that he would train to become a doctor. He was thus redirected to the study of what was called at the school “philosophical medicine.”17 This change, incidentally, pleased him greatly, insofar as he considered medicine “more closely connected to poetry” than all the others subjects, presumably because of the philosophical approach the teachers at the Karlsschule adopted.18 After his graduation on December 14, 1780, he was incorporated with his other classmates into the duke’s regiment. Notably, Schiller’s favorite professor while a student there was Jacob Friedrich Abel, the philosophy professor who was responsible for the central role of that discipline in the curriculum. It happened to be Abel who also first introduced Schiller to Shakespeare.

The pain of being torn from home against his and his parents’ will and forced to conform to a rigid discipline that ran contrary to his nature was a suffering that stamped his character and stayed with him his life long. Nevertheless, this discipline was the continuation of an experience he had from the start: when he wrote, later, of his “spirit- and heartless education,” he meant the strict household that his father ran and the demanding schools to which he was sent as a boy.19 It seems to be the writing of poetry, which he first began to dabble in at thirteen, and his playing theater, which started even earlier, that provided Schiller with a sense of freedom in the midst of this imposed order. Significantly, the drama that made him famous, The Robbers, a play of tragic rebellion that he wrote secretly on the side of his studies at the Karlsschule, proved to occasion the break from the path into which he had been forced. He stole away to watch the extraordinarily successful opening of his play in Mannheim on January 13, 1782.20 When the duke later learned of Schiller’s absence without leave, he had him arrested and made him pledge that he would never write poetry and drama again. This threat to prevent Schiller from entering a land he had just discovered, as it were, provoked a permanent desertion of the Karlsschule, by means of an elaborate scheme aided by friends, so that he could devote himself to what he had now come to see as his vocation. Like a character in one of his plays, Schiller spent the next two years in hiding, pouring himself into his writing while living incognito in a modest farmhouse near Mannheim until he had assurances that Karl Eugen had finally resigned himself to letting Schiller go.

His desire for liberation, however, was not a drive to throw off the shackles of authority, but from first to last a passion to integrate freedom and order, to affirm the integrity of the self with dependence on laws in both the natural and the social order.21 And he sought not only to achieve this integration, but to understand it and give it exp...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Friedrich Schiller’s Dramatic Philosophy: Freedom in Form
• Chapter 2: An Aesthetics of Freedom: Schiller and the Living Gestalt
• Chapter 3: The Dark Roots of Life: Organic Form as a Symbol of Freedom in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie
• Chapter 4: From Organism to Incarnation: The Fall and Redemption of Finite Form in Schelling’s Late Philosophy
• Chapter 5: Freedom as the Concrete Form of Reason in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
• Chapter 6: “The ‘I’ That Is ‘We’ and the ‘We’ That Is ‘I’”: On the Sociality of Freedom in Hegel and its Excesses
• Chapter 7: A Dramatic Conclusion: Opening Up Actual Possibility
• Bibliography