Ella Wheeler Wilcox - "Poems of Experience"

Harry Leon Wilson - "Merton of the Movies"

John Fox, Jr. - "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine"

Jeffery Farnol - "Peregrine's Progress"

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
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Books: Literary and Philosophical Essays

V >> Various >> Literary and Philosophical Essays




Schiller's importance in the intellectual history of Germany is by
no means confined to his poetry and dramas. He did notable work in
history and philosophy, and in the department of esthetics
especially, he made significant contributions, modifying and
developing in important respects the doctrines of Kant. In the
letters on "Esthetic Education" which are here printed, he gives the
philosophic basis for his doctrine of art, and indicates clearly and
persuasively his view of the place of beauty in human life.


LETTERS UPON THE AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MAN


LETTER I.

By your permission I lay before you, in a series of letters, the
results of my researches upon beauty and art. I am keenly sensible
of the importance as well as of the charm and dignity of this
undertaking. I shall treat a subject which is closely connected with
the better portion of our happiness and not far removed from the
moral nobility of human nature. I shall plead this cause of the
Beautiful before a heart by which her whole power is felt and
exercised, and which will take upon itself the most difficult part
of my task in an investigation where one is compelled to appeal as
frequently to feelings as to principles.

That which I would beg of you as a favour, you generously impose
upon me as a duty; and, when I solely consult my inclination, you
impute to me a service. The liberty of action you prescribe is
rather a necessity for me than a constraint little exercised in
formal rules, I shall scarcely incur the risk of sinning against
good taste by any undue use of them; my ideas, drawn rather from
within than from reading or from an intimate experience with the
world, will not disown their origin; they would rather incur any
reproach than that of a sectarian bias, and would prefer to succumb
by their innate feebleness than sustain themselves by borrowed
authority and foreign support.

In truth, I will not keep back from you that the assertions which
follow rest chiefly upon Kantian principles; but if in the course of
these researches you should be reminded of any special school of
philosophy, ascribe it to my incapacity, not to those principles.
No; your liberty of mind shall be sacred to me; and the facts upon
which I build will be furnished by your own sentiments; your own
unfettered thought will dictate the laws according to which we to
proceed.

With regard to the ideas which predominate in the practical part of
Kant's system, philosophers only disagree, whilst mankind, I am
confident of proving, have never done so. If stripped of their
technical shape, they will appear as the verdict of reason
pronounced from time immemorial by common consent, and as facts of
the moral instinct which nature, in her wisdom, has given to man in
order to serve as guide and teacher until his enlightened
intelligence gives him maturity. But this very technical shape which
renders truth visible to the understanding conceals it from the
feelings; for, unhappily, understanding begins by destroying the
object of the inner sense before it can appropriate the object. Like
the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or
the spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art.
Thus, in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it
in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract
notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of
words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognise
itself in such a copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth
appears as paradox?

Permit me therefore to crave your indulgence if the following
researches should remove their object from the sphere of sense while
endeavouring to draw it towards the understanding. That which I
before said of moral experience can be applied with greater truth to
the manifestation of "the beautiful." It is the mystery which
enchants, and its being is extinguished with the extinction of the
necessary combination of its elements.

LETTER II.

But I might perhaps make a better use of the opening you afford me
if I were to direct your mind to a loftier theme than that of art.
It would appear to be unseasonable to go in search of a code for the
aesthetic world, when the moral world offers matter of so much
higher interest, and when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is so
stringently challenged by the circumstances of our times to occupy
itself with the most perfect of all works of art--the establishment
and structure of a true political freedom.

It is unsatisfactory to live out of your own age and to work for
other times. It is equally incumbent on us to be good members of our
own age as of our own state or country. If it is conceived to be
unseemly and even unlawful for a man to segregate himself from the
customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, it would be
inconsistent not to see that it is equally his duty to grant a
proper share of influence to the voice of his own epoch, to its
taste and its requirements, in the operations in which he engages.

But the voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all
events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The
course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time
that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of
art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily
above necessity and neediness for art is the daughter of freedom,
and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the
necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is
necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity
under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which
all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient. In this great
balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and,
deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity
Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself
robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers
of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are
enlarged.

The eyes of the philosopher as well as of the man of the world are
anxiously turned to the theatre of political events, where it is
presumed the great destiny of man is to be played out. It would
almost seem to betray e culpable indifference to the welfare of
society if we did not share this general interest. For this great
commerce in social and moral principles is of necessity a matter of
the greatest concern to every human being, on the ground both of its
subject and of its results. It must accordingly be of deepest moment
to every man to think for himself. It would seem that now at length
a question that formerly was only settled by the law of the stronger
is to be determined by the calm judgment of the reason, and every
man who is capable of placing himself in a central position, and
raising his individuality into that of his species, can look upon
himself as in possession of this judicial faculty of reason; being
moreover, as man and member of the human family, a party in the case
under trial and involved more or less in its decisions. It would
thus appear that this great political process is not only engaged
with his individual case, it has also to pronounce enactments, which
he as a rational spirit is capable of enunciating and entitled to
pronounce.

It is evident that it would have been most attractive to me to
inquire into an object such as this, to decide such a question in
conjunction with a thinker of powerful mind, a man of liberal
sympathies, and a heart imbued with a noble enthusiasm for the weal
of humanity. Though so widely separated by worldly position, it
would have been a delightful surprise to have found your
unprejudiced mind arriving at the same result as my own in the field
of ideas, Nevertheless, I think I can not only excuse, but even
justify by solid grounds, my step in resisting this attractive
purpose and in preferring beauty to freedom. I hope that I shall
succeed in convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign to
the needs than to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a
solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must
be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.
But I cannot carry out this proof without my bringing to your
remembrance the principles by which the reason is guided in
political legislation.

LETTER III.

Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her
other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an
independent intelligence, she acts for him. But the very fact that
constitutes him a man is, that he does not remain stationary, where
nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing
the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the
work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical
necessity into a moral law.

When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he
is a man, he surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a
state. He was introduced into this state, by the power of
circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But
as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political
condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for
that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him.
In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his
free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an
instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral
influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the
passion of love. Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his
childhood by an artificial process, he founds a state of nature in
his ideas, not given him by any experience, but established by the
necessary laws and conditions of his reason, and he attributes to
this ideal condition an object, an aim, of which he was not
cognisant in the actual reality of nature. He gives himself a choice
of which he was not capable before, and sets to work just as if he
were beginning anew, and were exchanging his original state of
bondage for one of complete independence, doing this with complete
insight and of his free decision. He is justified in regarding this
work of political thraldom as non-existing, though a wild and
arbitrary caprice may have founded its work very artfully; though it
may strive to maintain it with great arrogance and encompass it with
a halo of veneration. For the work of blind powers possesses no
authority, before which freedom need bow, and all must be made to
adapt itself to the highest end which reason has set up in his
personality. It is in this wise that a people in a state of manhood
is justified in exchanging a condition of thraldom for one of moral
freedom.

Now the term natural condition can be applied to every political
body which owes its establishment originally to forces and not to
laws, and such a state contradicts the moral nature of man, because
lawfulness can alone have authority over this. At the same time this
natural condition is quite sufficient for the physical man, who only
gives himself laws in order to get rid of brute force. Moreover, the
physical man is a reality, and the moral man problematical.
Therefore when the reason suppresses the natural condition, as she
must if she wishes to substitute her own, she weighs the real
physical man against the problematical moral man, she weighs the
existence of society against a possible, though morally necessary,
ideal of society. She takes from man something which he really
possesses, and without which he possesses nothing, and refers him as
a substitute to something that he ought to possess and might
possess; and if reason had relied too exclusively on him, she might,
in order to secure him a state of humanity in which he is wanting
and can want without injury to his life, have robbed him even of the
means of animal existence which is the first necessary condition of
his being a man. Before he had opportunity to hold firm to the law
with his will, reason would have withdrawn from his feet the ladder
of nature.

The great point is therefore to reconcile these two considerations:
to prevent physical society from ceasing for a moment in time, while
the moral society is being formed in the idea; in other words, to
prevent its existence from being placed in jeopardy, for the sake of
the moral dignity of man. When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he
lets the wheels run out, but the living watchworks of the state have
to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for
another during its revolutions. Accordingly props must be sought for
to support society and keep it going while it is made independent of
the natural condition from which it is sought to emancipate it.

This prop is not found in the natural character of man, who, being
selfish and violent, directs his energies rather to the destruction
than to the preservation of society. Nor is it found in his moral
character, which has to be formed, which can never be worked upon or
calculated on by the lawgiver, because it is free and never appears.
It would seem therefore that another measure must be adopted. It
would seem that the physical character of the arbitrary must be
separated from moral freedom; that it is incumbent to make the
former harmonise with the laws and the latter dependent on
impressions; it would be expedient to remove the former still
farther from matter and to bring the latter somewhat more near to
it; in short to produce a third character related to both the
others--the physical and the moral--paving the way to a transition
from the sway of mere force to that of law, without preventing the
proper development of the moral character, but serving rather as a
pledge in the sensuous sphere of a morality in the unseen.

LETTER IV.

Thus much is certain. It is only when a third character, as
previously suggested, has preponderance that a revolution in a state
according to moral principles can be free from injurious
consequences; nor can anything else secure its endurance. In
proposing or setting up a moral state, the moral law is relied upon
as a real power, and free will is drawn into the realm of causes,
where all hangs together, mutually with stringent necessity and
rigidity. But we know that the condition of the human will always
remains contingent, and that only in the Absolute Being physical
coexists with moral necessity. Accordingly if it is wished to depend
on the moral conduct of man as on natural results, this conduct must
become nature, and he must be led by natural impulse to such a
course of action as can only and invariably have moral results. But
the will of man is perfectly free between inclination and duty, and
no physical necessity ought to enter as a sharer in this magisterial
personality. If therefore he is to retain this power of solution,
and yet become a reliable link in the causal concatenation of
forces, this can only be effected when the operations of both these
impulses are presented quite equally in the world of appearances. It
is only possible when, with every difference of form, the matter of
man's volition remains the same, when all his impulses agreeing with
his reason are sufficient to have the value of a universal
legislation.

It may be urged that every individual man carries, within himself,
at least in his adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The
great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes
of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this
ideal. This pure ideal man, which makes itself known more or less
clearly in every subject, is represented by the state, which is the
objective and, so to speak, canonical form in which the manifold
differences of the subjects strive to unite. Now two ways present
themselves to the thought, in which the man of time can agree with
the man of idea, and there are also two ways in which the state can
maintain itself in individuals. One of these ways is when the pure
ideal man subdues the empirical man, and the state suppresses the
individual, or again when the individual BECOMES the state, and the
man of time is ENNOBLED to the man of idea.

I admit that in a one-sided estimate from the point of view of
morality this difference vanishes, for the reason is satisfied if
her law prevails unconditionally. But when the survey taken is
complete and embraces the whole man (anthropology), where the form
is considered together with the substance, and a living feeling has
a voice, the difference will become far more evident. No doubt the
reason demands unity, and nature variety, and both legislations take
man in hand. The law of the former is stamped upon him by an
incorruptible consciousness, that of the latter by an ineradicable
feeling. Consequently education will always appear deficient when
the moral feeling can only be maintained with the sacrifice of what
is natural; and a political administration will always be very
imperfect when it is only able to bring about unity by suppressing
variety. The state ought not only to respect the objective and
generic but also the subjective and specific in individuals; and
while diffusing the unseen world of morals, it must not depopulate
the kingdom of appearance, the external world of matter.

When the mechanical artist places his hand on the formless block, to
give it a form according to his intention, he has not any scruples
in doing violence to it. For the nature on which he works does not
deserve any respect in itself, and he does not value the whole for
its parts, but the parts on account of the whole. When the child of
the fine arts sets his hand to the same block, he has no scruples
either in doing violence to it, he only avoids showing this
violence. He does not respect the matter in which he works, any more
than the mechanical artist; but he seeks by an apparent
consideration for it to deceive the eye which takes this matter
under its protection. The political and educating artist follows a
very different course, while making man at once his material and his
end. In this case the aim or end meets in the material, and it is
only because the whole serves the parts that the parts adapt
themselves to the end. The political artist has to treat his
material--man--with a very different kind of respect from that shown
by the artist of fine art to his work. He must spare man's
peculiarity and personality, not to produce a deceptive effect on
the senses, but objectively and out of consideration for his inner
being.

But the state is an organisation which fashions itself through
itself and for itself, and for this reason it can only be realised
when the parts have been accorded to the idea of the whole. The
state serves the purpose of a representative, both to pure ideal and
to objective humanity, in the breast of its citizens, accordingly it
will have to observe the same relation to its citizens in which they
are placed to it, and it will only respect their subjective humanity
in the same degree that it is ennobled to an objective existence. If
the internal man is one with himself, he will be able to rescue his
peculiarity, even in the greatest generalisation of his conduct, and
the state will only become the exponent of his fine instinct, the
clearer formula of his internal legislation. But if the subjective
man is in conflict with the objective and contradicts him in the
character of the people, so that only the oppression of the former
can give the victory to the latter, then the state will take up the
severe aspect of the law against the citizen, and in order not to
fall a sacrifice, it will have to crush under foot such a hostile
individuality, without any compromise.

Now man can be opposed to himself in a twofold manner: either as a
savage, when his feelings rule over his principles; or as a
barbarian, when his principles destroy his feelings. The savage
despises art, and acknowledges nature as his despotic ruler; the
barbarian laughs at nature, and dishonours it, but he often proceeds
in a more contemptible way than the savage, to be the slave of his
senses. The cultivated man makes of nature his friend, and honours
its friendship, while only bridling its caprice.

Consequently, when reason brings her moral unity into physical
society, she must not injure the manifold in nature. When nature
strives to maintain her manifold character in the moral structure of
society, this must not create any breach in moral unity; the
victorious form is equally remote from uniformity and confusion.
Therefore, TOTALITY of character must be found in the people which
is capable and worthy to exchange the state of necessity for that of
freedom.

LETTER V.

Does the present age, do passing events, present this character? I
direct my attention at once to the most prominent object in this
vast structure.

It is true that the consideration of opinion is fallen, caprice is
unnerved, and, although still armed with power, receives no longer
any respect. Man has awaked from his long lethargy and self-
deception, and he demands with impressive unanimity to be restored
to his imperishable rights. But he does not only demand them; he
rises on all sides to seize by force what, in his opinion, has been
unjustly wrested from him. The edifice of the natural state is
tottering, its foundations shake, and a physical possibility seems
at length granted to place law on the throne, to honour man at
length as an end, and to make true freedom the basis of political
union. Vain hope! The moral possibility is wanting, and the generous
occasion finds an unsusceptible rule.

Man paints himself in his actions, and what is the form depicted in
the drama of the present time? On the one hand, he is seen running
wild, on the other in a state of lethargy; the two extremest stages
of human degeneracy, and both seen in one and the same period.

In the lower larger masses, coarse, lawless impulses come to view,
breaking loose when the bonds of civil order are burst asunder, and
hastening with unbridled fury to satisfy their savage instinct.
Objective humanity may have had cause to complain of the state; yet
subjective man must honour its institutions. Ought he to be blamed
because he lost sight of the dignity of human nature, so long as he
was concerned in preserving his existence? Can we blame him that he
proceeded to separate by the force of gravity, to fasten by the
force of cohesion, at a time when there could be no thought of
building or raising up? The extinction of the state contains its
justification. Society set free, instead of hastening upward into
organic life, collapses into its elements.

On the other hand, the civilized classes give us the still more
repulsive sight of lethargy, and of a depravity of character which
is the more revolting because it roots in culture. I forget who of
the older or more recent philosophers makes the remark, that what is
more noble is the more revolting in its destruction. The remark
applies with truth to the world of morals. The child of nature, when
he breaks loose, becomes a madman; but the art scholar, when he
breaks loose, becomes a debased character. The enlightenment of the
understanding, on which the more refined classes pride themselves
with some ground, shows on the whole so little of an ennobling
influence on the mind that it seems rather to confirm corruption by
its maxims. We deny nature in her legitimate field and feel her
tyranny in the moral sphere, and while resisting her impressions, we
receive our principles from her. While the affected decency of our
manners does not even grant to nature a pardonable influence in the
initial stage, our materialistic system of morals allows her the
casting vote in the last and essential stage. Egotism has founded
its system in the very bosom of a refined society, and without
developing even a sociable character, we feel all the contagions and
miseries of society. We subject our free judgment to its despotic
opinions, our feelings to its bizarre customs, and our will to its
seductions. We only maintain our caprice against her holy rights.
The man of the world has his heart contracted by a proud self-
complacency, while that of the man of nature often beats in
sympathy; and every man seeks for nothing more than to save his
wretched property from the general destruction, as it were from some
great conflagration. It is conceived that the only way to find a
shelter against the aberrations of sentiment is by completely
foregoing its indulgence, and mockery, which is often a useful
chastener of mysticism, slanders in the same breath the noblest
aspirations. Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops, as
it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more
tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent
impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are
held to be the highest wisdom of life. Thus the spirit of the time
is seen to waver between perversions and savagism, between what is
unnatural and mere nature, between superstition and moral unbelief,
and it is often nothing but the equilibrium of evils that sets
bounds to it.