Abstract

Kant's Critique of Judgment was published in 1790. Schiller's writings from the 1790s dealing with aesthetics and ethics are intertwined, simultaneously, both with an affirmative reception of Kant's ideas and with critical attitudes against them. This applies to, among other, essays such as On Grace and Dignity (1793), Kallias (Schiller's letters to Gottfried K6rner, 1793), On the Sublime (1793/4), On the Risk of Aesthetic Virtues (1795), and especially to the essay On the Aesthetic Education of Man, In a Series of Letters, dated 1795, and to the original letters in this matter sent by Schiller one to two years earlier to Herzog Friedrich-Christian von Augustenburg. In these writings Schiller himself declared his loyalty to Kant's principles, saying that his own ideas are not original but rather committed to the philosopher's basic concepts.' This statement, however, like the philosophical concepts that Schiller often used inconsistently,2 and, in particular, the main theses introduced in his writings, are highly problematic. Schiller's declarations of loyalty to Kant's principles at times harshly contradict his critical positions regarding these very principles. It seems that Schiller maintained a complex, inconstant, and ambivalent attitude toward philosophy in general and toward Kant in particular.3 The most blatant contradiction in Schiller's philosophy in this context pertains to the main concern of his theory-the affinity between the aesthetic realm and the concept of moral society. The letters of On the Aesthetic Education of Man present two incongruent theses: On the one hand they present the assertion that aesthetic education may psychologically serve the realization of morality (a la Kant) and thus also establish a free society.4 Aesthetic educationwhich in this context should not be distinguished essentially from the unmediated aesthetic experience5-is conceived according

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