Goethe Yearbook 273 geschichtlichen und persönlichen Konsequenzen eines bestimmten Verhaltens zur Wirklichkeit — eines Verhaltens, das schließlich zum 'Unsinn' geführt hat" (85). Lenz, and othere whom he perhaps represents in Goethe's look back through the course of his long life, had seen poetry — writing — as the means of coping with and transcending life. Goethe, who had survived the dangerous Werther-perÃ-od and lived to tell about it, had attained a more realistic view of poetry — poetry as a complement to life, achievement, and learning — that was both more fulfilling and more "do-able." In Weber's interpretation, which strikes me as eminently reasonable, Goethe is a moderately conservative "Aufklärer," skeptical of revolutions but not disinclined to wish for progress and improvement of the human condition. When he encounters a younger intellectual who has the ambition of achieving the ultimate in poetry, he remembers his own past and the difficult times he experienced before attaining a balance in his own life and creativity. What seem to be negative judgments are not primarily moral-critical judgments, but post-mortem clinical diagnosis (in the case of Lenz) or an expression of concern over the human fate that he foresees (the case of Kleist, perhaps also Hölderlin). Weber's monograph is well written and generally quite pleasant to read. A finaf chapter on Odo Marquard, Peter Sloterdijk, and modern theories of aesthetic compensation adds nothing to the main line of argument and effectivefy obscures it by seeming to compare Goethe's highly pragmatic and experiential view of life with theories of how one compensates for fack of same. University of California, Irvine Thomas P. Saine Kontje, Todd Curtis, Constructing Reality: A Rhetorical Analysis of Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. New York: Peter Lang, 1987 (New York University Ottendorfer Series. Neue Folge, Bd. 25). Schiller's tense, often contradictory pursuit of ideals offers a rich opportunity for critics to apply the vocabularies of critical studies, deconstruction , and recent hermeneutics. In this well written, but finally inconclusive study of Schiller's Aesthetic Education, Todd Kontje tries to take advantage of that opportunity by extending the insights of Herman Meyer, GertUeding, and Elizabeth Wilkinson into a more contemporary critical framework. The biggest probfem seems due to the book's "mirror stage" of development: at times, the argument resembles what it is describing. When, for example, it ends with the point that Schiller's works "become broken open, fragmentary constructs on the edge of dissolution" (145), the statement seems to reflect on Kontje's argument itself. In spite of this difficulty, the book makes a substantial contribution to the research. Throughout, the writing moves briskly and with conceptual vigor. A summary of Schiller's rhetorical theory opens with the question of his "linguistic skepticism" (19-22). Despite the "radical epistemológica! and linguistic skepticism" of the early "Theosophie des Julius" in the Philosophi- 274 Book Reviews sehe Briefe, Schiller's theory of language was not simply negative (22). In agreement with Wilkinson and Matthijs Jolies, Kontje finds that Schiller saw "a hierarchy between the effectiveness of different types of communication" (21). The ideal type of language would fuse the sign to the signified and contribute to an ideal model of communication in which the ideals of the poet are conveyed immediately to the audience (26). In aesthetic terms, Schiller saw his larger task as the "popularizer" of Kantian phifosophy; this role was connected to the ethical concept of the "beautiful soul" (32-34); the political function of aesthetics was to be the creation of a sensus communis (35-43). The prominent place of the Aesthetic Education in Die Horen suggests that the letters were meant to justify Schiller's aesthetic, ethical, and political ideals, and to "exemplify" the type of writing he preferred (43)· Yet Schiller repeatedly modified his ideals. At one moment, he planned to write the Aesthetic Education in "a freer epistolary form which would avoid the pitfalls of philosophical abstraction" (54). At another moment, he praised "the mental activity required by the philosophical style" above "the popular style" (56), and at a third moment he advocated a "beautiful style" that would satisfy "the demand...