Aesthetic Letters Research Articles

TOWARD A TELEMATIC AESTHETICS

This paper focuses on the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser’s notion of telematic society, arguing that it implies a media-theoretical revision of Friedrich Schiller’s project for an aesthetic model of civic education, according to which aesthetic effectivity is reconsidered in light of a history of media based on a technological alternation of images and texts. After a brief overview of Schiller’s aesthetic letters, it examines the ways in which Flusser repositions and expands upon Schiller’s vision of an aesthetic education (most importantly, the aesthetic condition or middle disposition), highlighting the role that Flusser assigns to the evolution of codes inherent in the most important cultural and media techniques, namely, images, texts, and technical images. It then shows how this modification results in a forecasting of a telematic model of aesthetic education, before concluding by addressing the prospects of such a model in a post-digital world of automated media bias.

Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy ed. by María del Rosario Acosta López and Jeffrey L. Powell

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy ed. by María del Rosario Acosta López and Jeffrey L. Powell Sabine Roehr María del Rosario Acosta López and Jeffrey L. Powell, editors. Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Pp. 217. Cloth, $90.00. In the past, Schiller has often been underestimated as a philosopher in his own right. Fortunately, this has been changing, beginning with the bicentennial commemoration of his death in 2005, which has since then produced a fair number of volumes, mostly in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Unfortunately, Frederick Beiser's 2005 Schiller the Philosopher: A Re-Examination, one of the still rare book-length treatments by a single author, has failed to lead to a similar "new wave" in the English-speaking world (3). Thus, it is heartening to have here a volume of essays focusing on his philosophical writings and bringing together titans of the fields of philosophical Schiller-studies, German early romantic aesthetics, and German idealism, such as Beiser, Daniel Dahlstrom, and Manfred Frank, together with a younger generation of Schiller scholars. What makes this compilation additionally useful is the fact that its editors have not shied away from providing several essays in translation, thereby opening access to readers for whom they might otherwise be inaccessible. As a short review such as this cannot possibly do justice to all essays in this collection, I can only try to mention in radically abbreviated form some of the contributions that offer important or novel approaches. Yvonne Nilges's reconstruction of Schiller's implicit references to Rousseau's political philosophy is most instructive for us modern readers, for whom they might be no longer obvious. The same goes for María del Rosario Acosta López's essay, which shows that Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man as a critique of the French Revolution holds its own in comparison to Hegel's in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Frank's "Schiller between Kant and Schelling," first published in German in 2007, provides the indispensable grounding of Schiller's ethical/aesthetic views in Kant's Critique of Judgment and gives us not only the most complete account of "imaginative freedom" referenced in the title of the book, but also an analysis of different concepts of freedom found in Schiller. Dahlstrom's essay, which starts the second part of the book, could as well have been closing the first, since, in addition to making a connection to twentieth-century phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, it provides a close reading of [End Page 178] Schiller's most important philosophical work after the Aesthetic Letters, his On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry—a work that Beiser's Schiller the Philosopher had left out. Dahlstrom shows it to render a view of poetry as one way to reflect on humanity's place in the world after the loss of a kind of naturalness that Schiller sees realized in ancient Greek culture—which he idealized, like many of his contemporaries. For him, it is the task of culture, of which poetry is a part, "to lead us back, 'along the path of reason and freedom,' to nature" (107). Jeffrey Powell interprets Schiller's political aesthetics as the "disruption" (170) of aestheticized politics as it was critiqued by Walter Benjamin, based as it is on Schiller's concept of perfect freedom. María Luciana Cadahia uses Schiller's concept of positivity in his Aesthetic Letters as a corrective to contemporary readings of Michel Foucault's notion of dispositif. This is maybe the most important insight brought forward by most of the contributions: the idea of aesthetic freedom as an all-encompassing force, not one limited to the traditional realm of art but meant to mediate the dualisms of the age, and foremost that of the political and the moral. In the words of Jacques Rancière, "the aesthetic is equally ethical, political, or religious . . . [carrying] the promise of a newly non-separated world, one where art will no longer exist as a separate sphere, but where the practices of artists will be identical...

As categorias sob disfarce: uma especificação categorialógica da consideração de D. Dilworth da proveniência das categorias de Peirce em Schiller

Uma análise metodologicamente correta da profundidade e escopo da influência de Schiller sobre o pensamento maduro de Peirce requer três passos: (i) uma análise preliminar das passagens que poderiam sustentar a hipótese de uma influência prolongada e, assim, poderá também indicar seus vetores sistemáticos. No caso de tal análise dar resultados positivos, tornar-se-ia (ii) necessário explorar as juvenilia que documentam a recepção inicial de Peirce de Schiller, para (iii) tentar identificar aquelas ideias que tornam inteligibilidade à re-emergência de Schiller no pensamento de Peirce após 1900. Com base nos resultados que nossa contextualização arquitetônica preliminar das reminiscências de Peirce de seu estudo juvenil das Cartas Estéticas resultaram em um artigo duplo. O presente artigo foca nos segundo e terceiro passos. Logo, nosso propósito é mostrar que a tríplice aparência das categorias de Schiller fazem em seu disfarce – ora como momentos de determinação lógica, ora como estados mentais coletivo e individual de mentes socializadas moldadas pelas relações de unidades psíquicas elementares, e ora como estágios de processos históricos – primeiro agindo como o catalizador para o entendimento inicial de Peirce das deficiências da categoriologia de Kant e, consequentemente, foi ‘fadado’ à re-emergência posterior em consideração a determinar desafios arquitetônicos que Peirce encontrou-se confrontado enquanto trabalhava no redesenho da cenoscopia das ciências filosóficas nos anos de 1900 a 1903. A influência de Schiller exercida sobre Peirce, portanto, origina em sua prefiguração do conceito de Peirce de categorialidade e a coerência dos usos arquitetônicos que ela permite, em especial, como um meio para a estratificação prescisiva dos componentes – fenomenal, normativa e metafísico-entelequial –da experiência comum e os modos de racionalidade ali incorporadas.

The Reemergence of Schiller in Peirce’s Reminiscences of the Æsthetic Letters: A Critical Addendum to D. Dilworth’s Account of the Provenance of Peirce’s Categories in Schiller

A determinação da profundidade e âmbito da influência que as Cartas Estéticas de Schiller exerceu sobre a filosofia de Peirce revelou-se como uma desafiadora tarefa interpretativa. Tanto o entendimento de sua necessidade quanto a consciência de suas dificuldades apenas surgiram gradativamente na obra de gerações de estudiosos. O objetivo deste trabalho é delinear a situação hermeneutica atual em relação à ‘questão-Schiller-Peirce’ (Seção I) e executar a sub-tarefa de interpretar um grupo de passagens que, até agora, não receberam a atenção e o rigor filológico que merecem: as recordações de Peirce (1902-1913) de seu estudo juvenil das Cartas. Como constituem nossa única garantia da premissa de que o pensamento de Schiller – além de servir como acesso a Kant, em torno de 1855 – teve algum significado para Peirce, as recordações são documentadas o mais plenamente possível (Seção II), a fim de situar o ressurgimento de Schiller no pensamento de Peirce no contexto dos desafios teoréticos enfrentados por Peirce, em vista da reconcepção coenoscópica das ciências filosóficas que ocorreram entre 1900 e 1903 (Seção III). Esta contextualização arquitetônica das recordações corresponde aos resultados de nossa análise da juvelinia obtida em um trabalho conjunto. A essência categoriológica das Cartas, em torno da qual Schiller constrói uma lógica tripartida de processos psíquicos, agiu como um catalizador para a análise de Peirce das deficiências da categoriologia de Kant e, assim, fundamentou sua concepção (conotação) e uso (aplicação extensa ao objeto-domínios) das categorias como constituintes meramente formais – verdadeiramente universais, estritamente ordenados, essencialmente modais – de fenomenalidade, normatividade e processualidade histórica, i.e., como os elementos constitutivos e dimensões arquitetônicas da semiose de uma inteligência, capaz de aprender através da experiência.

후설 윤리학으로 본 실러의 『미학 편지』

후설 윤리학으로 본 실러의 『미학 편지』

シュタイナーのシラー解釈からシラー『美育書簡』再考へ(司会論文,フォーラム2 あえてシュタイナーのシラー論を語ってみる-「美と教育」再論への一つの試み-)

シュタイナーのシラー解釈からシラー『美育書簡』再考へ(司会論文,フォーラム2 あえてシュタイナーのシラー論を語ってみる-「美と教育」再論への一つの試み-)

“Beauty cajoles”: Friedrich Schiller and the Aesthetic Education of Rhetoric

Friedrich Schiller may not be a household name among contemporary rhetoricians, yet since the 1960s Schiller’s critics have begun to take an interest in the rhetorical dimension of his aesthetic writings, particularly with respect to his Aesthetic Letters. These efforts, however, tend to focus on Schiller’s method of presentation rather than the possible rhetorical implications of the Letters’ key ideas and concepts. This essay proposes treating the Letters as an instance of implicit rhetorical theory, one that suggests an innovative model of rhetorical effectivity, according to which rhetoric enables people to experience the normative ideal of beauty as freedom.

Schiller’s Requests of the Whole Man in Grace and Dignity and Aesthetic Letters

Schiller’s Requests of the Whole Man in Grace and Dignity and Aesthetic Letters

Schiller's Aesthetic Freedom and the Challenges of Aesthetic Education

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, to analyze Schiller's notion of aesthetic freedom throughout his aesthetic dissertations, a notion which is closely related to his famous theory about the aesthetic State as the ultimate form for the aesthetic education, a theory sketched out at the end of his 1794 Aesthetic Letters (or his Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man). Second, to address Schiller's critical reception of Enlightenment's views on beauty, particularly Kant's, who is Schiller's main source of inspiration and criticism in aesthetics, emphasizing the relation of his own theory of beauty to aesthetic education. Third, to discuss the challenges that Schiller's theory brings to the idea of aesthetic education in the aesthetic theories of the Enlightenment. Again, our main source for criticism will be Kant.

Charles S. Peirce in Europe: The “Aesthetic Letters”

While Peirce claimed that he was not well acquainted with aesthetics, he always was interested in that field. In spite of the fact that Peirce did not develop the issue in depth, aesthetics is located in his general framework as the foundation for the other normative sciences. Perhaps the trips through Europe and the contemplation of so many works of art and of historic places left in his memory the impressions that are at the basis of the importance that Peirce would assign to art and aesthetics in his later years.

Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers (review)

Reviewed by: Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers Mary Beth Wetli Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance. Edited by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. 504. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-1571134882. Lord Woodhouselee’s 1792 translation of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) kept Samuel Taylor Coleridge reading with “chill and trembling” in the wee hours of the morning; suddenly, he “could read no more” and wrote immediately to Robert Southey, asking, “Who is this Schiller? This convulser of the heart?” (9). Coleridge, who himself translated Schiller’s Wallenstein in 1800, thus posed the framing question for the 2009 Long Beach Schiller Conference commemorating the 250th anniversary of Schiller’s birth. Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance is a collection of twenty-seven revised lectures presented at this conference, which together challenge the view that Schiller was an inveterate idealist at hopeless remove from the heterogeneous reality of his day. Instead, this collection showcases recent scholarship on Schiller’s interdisciplinary engagement in political and moral philosophy, historiography, aesthetics, and the natural sciences; its reflection on his literary production; and the recent Schillerian renaissance on the English-language stage. This interdisciplinarity is reflected in the structure of the volume, which is divided into five parts: Schiller’s drama and poetry, his aesthetics and philosophy, his historiography and politics, his reception, and current issues in Schiller studies. These essays confront many familiar conceptions of Schiller, including his alleged flight from political reality into an aesthetic ideal as his disillusionment with the violence of the French Revolution grew; the charge that his study of Kant and subsequent philosophical essays are the stuff of a mere epigone; that his œuvre is best divided into neat phases that emphasize rupture over continuity; that Schiller’s political thinking is both antimodern and naïve. Essays by Maria del Rosario Acosta López (“‘Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own’: From the Aesthetic to the Political in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters”) and Henrik Sponsel (“Was sagte dieser Schiller (damals)? Schillers Antworten auf seine Kritiker nach 1945”), for example, challenge the notion espoused by Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, and others that Schiller’s aesthetics, enabled by a naïve idealism, led inexorably to an aestheticization of politics. Instead, they argue that Schiller was well aware of the dangers that such an aestheticization presents and actively sought to thwart them. [End Page 179] These and other essays also reflect an increasing recognition of Schiller’s realism. Noting the emphasis placed on Schiller the idealist in the anniversary years of 2005/2009, Wolfgang Riedel reclaims Schiller’s realism (“Religion and Violence in Schiller’s Late Tragedies”). Without diminishing Schiller’s enthusiasm for the ideal, Riedel points to Schiller’s relationship to history and his secular portrayal of religion as evidence of his grounding in reason. This emphasis on Schiller’s realism is likewise evident in T. J. Reed’s rousing critique of critics of Schiller’s historiography (“So Who Was Naïve? Schiller as Enlightenment Historian and His Successors”); his compelling argument would be strengthened by incorporating more of the blossoming scholarship devoted to Schiller the historian in the past twelve years, however. Of the many reckonings with Schiller’s philosophical forerunners in aesthetics, two essays are particularly notable: Laura Anna Macor’s article “Die Moralphilosophie des jungen Schiller: Ein ‘Kantianer ante litteram’” and David Pugh’s “Aesthetic Humanism and Its Foes: The Perspective from Halle.” Macor disputes the primacy often accorded to Kant at the expense of Schiller’s own intellectual autonomy and challenges the partitioning of Schiller’s work into discrete phases. Rather, she argues, the moral philosophy that he articulates in his youthful works—essays, dramas, and prose—is consistent with those ideas he formulates after reading Kant and which are rooted in Schiller’s steady desire to create a pure morality independent of religion that can be transformed into action. David Pugh likewise argues that discussions of Schiller’s aesthetics should move beyond Kant to include Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten...

A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller Stephanie Hammer Steven D. Martinson, ed. A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. General Editor: James Hardin (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005). Pp. xiv, 333. $90.00. In that problematic disciplinary space that is German studies of the eighteenth century, Friedrich Schiller occupies a troubling and not entirely central place. At once a playwright, poet, aesthetician, and historian, Schiller was a highly creative and restless personality. He eventually became a professor, and as such, he presents an odd mirror image to many of us laboring to write about him. At the outset an intellectual and artistic rebel, Schiller was expelled from his home-town by the production of his first play, The Robbers (a creation that eventually garnered him honorary citizenship in the newly formed French Republic), and he was forced to cobble together a living through the theater, a university professorship, and the patronage of the Weimar Court and other interested aristocrats. Like the contemporary academic, Schiller seems to have been an underpaid but highly “respected” cultural worker on the constant lookout for grants. Perhaps because of our kinship with him, a certain nervous caution runs through much Schiller criticism. Notable contemporary exceptions to this rule are the lively, accessible books of Lesley Sharpe, the sole doyenne of Schiller studies, and the theoretically sophisticated, feminist analyses of Gail Hart. Both brilliant female scholars understand the fascination of Friedrich Schiller. For fascinating he is. Currently, productions of the Wallenstein dramas—the David Rabeesque trilogy about the Thirty Years’ War—proliferate in the reunified Germany; on New Year’s Eve 2007 they even ran as a one-night marathon in Leipzig. Schiller’s plays are produced regularly on the continent, and it is noteworthy that he inspired English-speaking authors as various as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Ayn Rand, and the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Looking at the reception and production history of Schiller, particularly in the twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries, one cannot help but wonder—in the wake of theoretical works by Eagleton, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, and Žižek—about Schiller’s relationship to gender, class, queerness, the perverse, anarchy, power-relations, academics, empire, and desire. However, the writers included in the handsomely covered Camden House collection of essays are manifestly uninterested in these by-now established realms [End Page 591] of inquiry. Instead they pursue trenchantly traditional approaches to Schiller and his work. They stress Schiller’s importance as an idealist; he was a philosophical writer interested in classical aesthetics, an artist concerned with perfecting the genre of tragedy and the Baroque style, and above all a writer devoted to the idea of love as transcendent value. This assessment of Schiller may have merit, but it certainly is not the new, “cutting-edge” criticism proposed on the Camden House jacket copy. Indeed, the essays in this volume are penned predominantly by a set of senior Germanists, many of whom are German, and whose work any specialist will have read elsewhere and at greater length. There are a few exceptions to this predominantly Northern European grouping. The aforementioned British scholar Lesley Sharpe delivers her usual, cogent, and user-friendly analysis of Schiller’s aesthetics—as articulated in The Aesthetic Letters—and Canada-based David Pugh writes a clear summation of Schiller’s use of Platonic duality in pursuit of an idiosyncratic version of classicism. Steven D. Martinson, the editor from the University of Arizona, writes a straightforward introduction to the matter at hand and gives us a useful overview of Schiller’s medical dissertations in the opening pages to his own essay on Maria Stuart. Interestingly, among the cavalcade of Goethezeit all-stars (including such names as Walter Hinderer and Karl Guthke), the truly revelatory essay of the collection comes from University of Cologne historian Otto Dann, who takes on Schiller’s now much-neglected historical writings. Martinson translates many of the essays in the volume; his translation of Dann is particularly lively and engaging, and it’s no wonder, because the essay is compelling, insightful, and smart. Dann argues for the centrality and, indeed, the...

Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism (review)

Reviewed by: Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism Ulrike Rainer Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar ClassicismRochester, NY: Camden House, 2005, xi + 281 pp. It is a great pleasure to read such a thoroughly researched and well-written book. It meticulously traces the critical discussions about the most formative influences on Friedrich Nietzsche's thought and also attempts to clarify how Weimar classicism must be seen as discrete from contemporaneous romanticism. Though the lines between these two artistic movements cannot be drawn rigidly, for there are many instances of overlapping issues and shared concerns, nevertheless, each must be seen as informed by its distinct and distinctive aesthetics. As the authors show, [End Page 140] Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spake Zarathustra do not merely reflect a purely philosophical continuum informed in large part by Greek philosophy, the idealism of Kant and Hegel, and Schopenhauer, but are heavily indebted to Friedrich Schiller's philosophical writings, most importantly his Aesthetic Letters, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe's poetic and scientific oeuvre. Nietzsche was familiar with both writers' works since his days at Schulpforta, where he was exposed both to the ancient classics and to the two intellectual and creative giants of the previous generation. The authors claim that without the inclusion of Goethe's and Schiller's Kulturkampf ("cultural struggle") against competing artistic movements, our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophical aesthetics is at best incomplete and at worst distorted. In the chapter on The Birth of Tragedy the authors show how frequent direct quotes and passing references to Goethe and Schiller are: "Nietzsche's discussion of Apollo in particular is saturated with Schillerian terminology" (29), and "[he] makes sustained reference throughout to Faust" (35). Out of the immersion in Schiller's dialectic and Faust's aesthetic final moment emerges the demand for and possibility of a renewal of art. The new form, however, depends on a new myth and a new music. Ten years later Nietzsche offers his program in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Chapters 2 and 3 of the book give a detailed overview of the compositional framework and the "aesthetic gospel" of this work. And, as in The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche also had analyzed the problem of knowledge in relation to life, "the dialectic between Ernst und Spiel, derived fromGoethe and Schiller, . . . is related here as in Weimar Classicism to the problem of 'Schein,' both in the sense of the phenomenal world and of the 'Schein des Scheins' ('ein Leben im Unwahren' [i.e., the seeming of seeming and thus an inauthentic life]), and in the sense of 'Schein des Seins' or (aesthetic) play" (87). Having rejected Kantian aesthetics and epistemology, Zarathustra instead turns to Goethe's concept of "Stirb und werde!" ("Die and become!"), the theme of transformation and the ultimate acceptance of the eternal recurrences necessary for aesthetic experience, that is, Faust's final realization of the moment as eternity. In addition, the authors present a close and perspicuous analysis of Nietzsche's rhetorical and stylistic tools, including a group of symbols belonging to Weimar classicism. Chief among these is the child at play, a direct reference to Schiller's claim in his Aesthetic letter 15 that the human being is only fully one when he or she plays. Chapter 4, "From Leucippus to Cassirer: Toward a Genealogy of 'Sincere Semblance,' " traces the long history anticipating Schiller's and Goethe's position and its subsequent reception from their contemporaries up to the most recent critical trends by both philosophers and nonphilosophers. Anti-Platonic theories of beauty found their way into both the cultural and theological discourse from ancient times on. Schiller articulated as precisely as mediation through language [End Page 141] will permit the idea of the "manifest freedom" of art as self-regulating and self-regulated. Such an aesthetic illusion can be achieved when "the relations established in the aesthetic object must inhere in the medium used, so that its aesthetic order does not appear to be imposed from the outside, but seems rather to be immanent in the object itself " (154–155). Far from being a pure mental exercise, these ideas, the authors point out, have concrete psychological ramifications...

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

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...