<center><i><h2>Johann Schiller</h2></em></center>

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Johann Christopher Friedrich Von Schiller (1759-1805): German poet, dramatist, and philosopher

             One of the most formative experiences in Schiller's life was attending the Duke of Wurttemburg's Pflanzschule.According to John George Robertson, at the Pflanzschule,"The strict military discipline of lay heavily on Schiller, and intensified the spirit of rebellion, which, nurtured on Rousseau and the writers of the Sturm and Drang, burst out in the young poet’s tragedy."(324). Exploding from Schiller’s writing is yearning for more than just political freedom; he desired what Deric Regin has termed an "absolute liberty encompassing political; as well as moral freedom" (1).
             Themes of tyranny appear throughout Schiller’s poetic, dramatic, and historical works. His major poetic and dramatic works--including, Die Rauber (1782), Don Carlos (1787), Wallenstein Stuart (1800), Wilhelm Tell (1804)--all treat a yearning for escape from tyranny. In fact, the success of Die Rauber forced Schiller to flee from his own tyrant, Wurttemburg. Schiller eventually landed in Wiemar and Jena where he met the foremost German intellectuals and established a close friendship with Goethe. The first of his histories, The History of the Revolt of the Netherlands against the Spanish Government (1788), and a recommendation, secured him a professorship at the University of Jena in 1789. Schiller followed his appointment with A History of  the Thirty Years War (1791-3), and intense study of Kant’s philosophy.
             It was as a professor at Jena that Schiller wrote The Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of letters. Aesthetic Education envisions a transformation of the world by a revolution of aesthetic principles rather than political and physical violence. M. H. Abrams characterizes Aesthetic Education as a "systematic procedure...to internalize the political concepts and ideals, as well as the millennial hope of the Revolution, by translating them into mental, moral, and cognitive terms;" moreover, "the ‘aesthetic state’ offers [humankind] an alternative realm in which [it] can even now achieve the great revolutionary aims of liberty, equality, fraternity" (350). Concerning the "aesthetic state" Steven Goldsmith says that "In the form of the aesthetic, apocalypse now represents a space apart from history, a space which makes available in the present the freedom of the Kantian telos" (7).
             Aesthetic Education offers a vision of moving beyond the immediate environment, and creating better one, by solidifying a new ideal, the aesthetic. By concentrating energies in the pursuit of the ideal aesthetic once necessarily sows the seeds of destruction for the present forms of existence.

The present age, far from exhibiting that form of [unified and true] humanity we have recognized as a necessary condition of any moral reform of the state, shows us rather the exact opposite. If, therefore, the principles I have laid down are correct, and if experience confirms the portrayal of the present age, we must continue to regard every attempt at political reform as untimely, and every hope based upon it as chimerical, as long as the split within man is not healed, and his nature so restored to wholeness that it can itself become the artificer of the state, and guarantee the reality of this political creation of reason. (Aesthetic Education 104)

If truth is to be victorious in her conflict with forces, she must herself first become a force and appoint some drive to be champion in the realm of phenomena; for drives are the only motive forces in the material world. If she has hitherto displayed so little of her conquering power, this was due, not to the intellect that was powerless to unveil her, but to the heart that closed itself against her, and to the drive that refused to act on her behalf. (Aesthetic Education 106)

Works Cited


Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism; Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971.

Robertson, John George. "Schiller, Johann Christopher Friedrich Von."Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1911. 24: 324-6

Goldsmith, Stephen. Unbuilding Jerusalem. 1997

Schiller, Johann Christopher Friedrich Von. The Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Friedrich Schiller, Essays. Eds. Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Walter Hinderer. New York: Continuum, 1993. 86-178.

Additional Bibliography


Kontje, Todd Curtis. Constructing Reality: A Rhetorical Analysis of Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. New York: Peter Lang, 1987.

Kooy, Michael John. "The End of Poetry: Aesthetic and Ethical Investigations in Coleridge and Schiller." The Wordsworth Circle 26:1 (1995) 23-6.

Regin, Deric. Freedom and Dignity, The Historical and Philosophical Thought of Schiller. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965.

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Another Online Biography of Schiller

On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters.