Review of Klassische deutsche Philosophie (6): Schiller

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

Part 6 of a review of Wolfgang Förster, Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008)

Friedrich Schiller is best known as a poet but he was a philosopher and historian, too. He was very much influenced by the disputes in his time between Protestant Christians and advocates of Enlightenment rationalism. In particular, he engaged with the ideas of the Piestists in Württemburg; the Pietists were conservative Protestants with a distinct mystical strain in their theology. Via England and Ireland, Piestism had a large influence on the development of American fundamentalism. Förster mentions in particular the ideas of the Pietists and the Separatists about eschatology, specifically including a notion of a "thousand-year kingdom" - that is, a "Tausendjährigen Reich", literally "thousand-year empire", a phrase with which we are today familiar from a very different context.

Schiller's mature philosophy would combine a Pauline pessimism about humanity's innate tendency to evil with an optimism about the material future. Förster mentions Schiller's work, Geschichte des Abfalls der Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (1788), about the Netherlands Revolution against Spanish Habsburg rule. Förster notes that his event was "für die gesamte Klassik bestimmenden Auffassung vom Modellcharakter ... für die bürgerliche Umgestaltung (for all the classic [thinkers] a decisive of an exemplary character … for the bourgeois refashioning [of society])."

But the need for a political revolution of some sort in Germany suggested by that work was later mitigated if not rejected in Schiller's view by the excesses of the French Revolution in its later stages. He went on to argue that education in the arts would be the key to humanity's learning to control our basically selfish and destructive natures and enable a free government to be established. As Förster observes, such a development in Schiller's time would have been available only to a small and affluent segment of the population.

But Schiller's aesthetic notion of human progress recognized that a sphere of life and consciousness was needed inside a society characterized by "Entfremdung, Zerissenheit und Klassenspaltung (alienation, inner conflict and class division)” . (Förster) Despite the individualist nature of this vision, Förster argues, "In ihrem illusionären Gehalt tangieren die Ideen Schillers die Grenzen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und übersteigen sie visionär (In their illusionary form, Schilling’s ideas pushed to the borders of bourgeois [capitalist] society and stepped beyond them in a visionary way)."

Schiller also adopted an idea of historical development in which he saw ancient Greece as a period when people were in harmony with nature. He saw his own time as part of second period of human development in which people search for a way to return to such harmony. He look for a third great historical period in which a new harmony between humanity and nature would be found at a higher level. He wrote in "Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung”:

Die Welt, als historischer Gegenstand, ist im Grunde nichts anders als der Konflikt der Naturkräfte unter einander selbst und mit die Freyheit des Menschen und den Erfolg dieses Kampfes berichtet uns die Geschichte. So weit die Geschichte bis jetzt gekommen ist, hat sie von der Natur zu (der all Affekte gezählt werden müssen) weit größere Thaten zu erzählen, als von der selbständigen Vernunft.

[The world as historical condition is basically nothing other than the conflict of the powers of nature among themselves and with the freedom of humanity. And the success of this fight is what history reports to us. So far as history has come up until now, it has many more deeds of nature (in which all affects must be counted) to tell than from those of self-standing Reason.]

Schiller recognized that philosophy had to take human sentiments into account and not assume that people could operate fully on the basis of reason.

Peter Meinhold has pointed out that Schiller was "durchaus in die Traditionen des deutschen Spiritualismus" (thoroughly in the traditions of German mysticism) in seeing spirit and reality as not only distinct but in eternal opposition to one another. This added a critical edge to Schiller's view of history and also expressed an element of his pessimism about human improvement. As Meinhold puts it: "Jede geschictliche Konkretion des Geistes bedeutet an sich schon sine Depravation (Every historically concrete manifestation of the spirit already represents a deprivation)”. (Peter Meinhold, "Schillers spiritualistische Religionsphilosophie und Geschichtskritik I" Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschhichte 8/1956) Schiller called the period of the Crusades "ein langer, trauriger Stillstand in der Kultur" and "ein Rückfall der Europäer in die vorige Wildheit" (“a long, sad pause in culture” and “a regression of the Europeans into the previous wildness”).

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