Narrating Community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin by Karin Schutjer (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1,2003 235 originals were unexpectedly rediscovered. Readers must also refer to keys to abbreviations in more than one volume, and to the index of names in Volume x in order to identify Herder's less famous correspondents and other individuals mentioned in his letters. The effortrequired to familiarize oneself with the complex layout of the edition is, however, eminently worthwhile. This splendid commentary at last makes all known letters of Herder's pre-Weimar years fully accessible, and Giinter Arnold is to be congratulated on bringing this monumental enterprise a large step nearer to its conclusion. All Herder scholars will wish him well in his labours on the last two volumes of commentary and the concluding indexes. SlDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE H. B. NlSBET Narrating Community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin. By Karin Schutjer . (Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2001. 280 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-8143-2968-3 (hbk). According to Karin Schutjer, 'community is one of the most persistent fantasies and elusive notions of our age' (p. 13); and, as a variant on the ancient notion of the polis, it enjoys a long history in the Western tradition of philosophy and of literature: spe? cifically,in the case of this study, in Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin. Following the work of Rudolf A. Makkreel, Schutjer argues that the core of Kant's model of community is the circular structure of 'reflective judgment', the open-endedness of the hermeneutic circle (p. 16; cf. p. 42). 'Narration', then, is used by Schutjer 'in the broadest possible sense' (p. 16), and her discussion of Kant's third Critique (1790) is rapidly followed by analyses of three texts which could, in varying degrees, be described as more self-consciously iiterary' in a narratological sense: Schiller's Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), and Holderlin's three unfinisheddraftsof Der Tod des Empedokles. Indeed, Schutjer describes her chapter on Kant as 'a literary reading', defined as a focus on 'rhetorical features including the play of images and metaphors' and the application of 'an associative rather than a strictly conceptual logic to Kant's text' (p. 44). If the central point here is the kind of community invoked to sustain the notion of a 'judg? ment of taste', Schutjer sees Schiller as 'com[ing] up against and wrestlfing] with the limits of the circular narratives and insular spaces' of Kant's aesthetics (p. 83). Arguing against those critics, such as Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, who regard the argument of the Aesthetic Letters as 'coherent', Schutjer detects a disruptive 'redemptive christological strain' in the Third Letter, where Schiller talks about 'einen dritten Charakter [...], der [. . .] zu einem sinnlichen Pfand der unsichtbaren Sittlichkeit diente' (pp. 87, 89,91). At the same time, she maintains that'Schiller tries to work within Kant's system but accords more emphasis to sensation than Kant's aesthetics allow' (p. 111). But if Schiller 'looks to Kant's aesthetics to heal the split that runs throughout his own early thinking between a desire to redeem sensation and a desire to overcome sensation through reason', and 'ultimately brings so much empirical weight to Kant's aesthetic construct in the Aesthetic Letters that he produces irreparable fissures and fails to achieve the wholeness he seeks', then Goethe, Schut? jer contends, takes from Kant 'just the opposite impulse?toward differentiation and irony rather than resolution' (p. 121). Although there is said to exist 'a structural analogy between Wilhelm's Bildung and Kant's aesthetic judgment' (p. 123), the Lehrjahre remains, in Schutjer's eyes, an exploration of the problematic relationship between 'aesthetic individuality' and 'aesthetic community' and a demonstration of 'the instability of the aesthetic', its narrative containing both a 'liberalizing potential' and a 'conservative strain' (pp. 134, 138, 161). Yet out of this conflict Goethe at least 236 Reviews ultimately fashioned a novel; in the case of Holderlin, the competing claims of indi? viduality and community lead, on one level, to the death of Empedocles, or, in terms of 'the enterprise of writing', to what Alice Kuzniar calls 'the deferral of closure, the delaying...