The Idea of Cultural Evolution in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesFranz Leopold Neumann, Angst und Politik, Recht und Staat in Geschichte und Gegenwart, CLXXVIII and CLXXIX (Tübingen, 1954), p. 10.Heinrich Popitz, Der entfremdete Mensch, Philosophische Forschungen, N.F., Vol. II (Basel, 1953), p. 36.Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955), p. 180.Under this abbreviated title all references are made to On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of Letters (New Haven, 1954) (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen, 1793–4). All subsequent references in the text will be to this edition. The Roman numeral will refer to the letter that is quoted.Eduard Spranger, “Schillers Geistesart,” Abh. d. Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jahrgang 1941, Phil.-Histor. Klasse, p. 42.Julius Petersen has pointed to this evolutionary tradition in German thought in his book Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage und Dichtung (Stuttgart, 1934), pp. 29–36.Lessing, Theological Writings (London, 1956), p. 96.Ibid.Ibid., p. 97.Ibid.Herbert Grundmann, Studien über Joachim von Floris (Leipzig, 1927), p. 107.In view of these later trends in Schiller’s thinking a letter written on October 15, 1792 to Körner is of interest. “Undoubtedly you know Mirabeau’s pamphlet Sur l’Education … It speaks well for the book and its author that he was anxious, even amidst the birthpangs of the French constitution, to perpetuate it eternally through a purposeful educational system.” Schillers Briefe, hrsg. von Fritz Jonas (Stuttgart, 1892), III, 221.In the last year of his life, Schiller wrote to his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt: “In the end we both are idealists, and we would be ashamed to have it said that circumstances shaped our personalities, and that we did not shape destiny.” Ibid., VII, 226.Cf. Martin Werner, Der protestantische Weg des Glaubens (Bern, 1955), I, 611–621.Schiller, Briefe, IV, 294–96.Allow me to call it provisionally the play-impulse, until I have justified the term” (64). Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig, 1856), 1. Abt., 2422, acknowledge Schiller’s originality in this word-formation.The idea of periodicity of drives can well be related to the genetic sublimation theory as discussed in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, p. vii.Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London, 1949), p. 168.Ibid., p. 13.Ibid., p. 7.Ibid., p. 46.Ibid., p. 7.Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, Säkular-Ausgabe (Stuttgart), XII, 121.Ibid., XII, p. 143. Irving Babbitt in his reckoning with romanticism also directs his attack against Schiller, “… by encouraging the notion that it is possible to escape from neo-classical didacticism only by eliminating masculine purpose from art, he opens the way for the worst perversions of the aesthete, above all for the divorce of art from ethical reality.” (Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, 1919), p. 43. Babbitt pushed Schiller into a camp in which the romanticists and neo-romanticists would be all too glad to have him.Schillers Briefe, III, 371.Lessing, op. cit., p. 96.