What did Schiller write?

Friedrich Schiller, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Friedrich Schiller answers

The question is broad enough to answer in several directions, so let me give you the shape of the authorship as I would describe it from within. The dramas came first and never ceased. Die Räuber in 1781 opened with the conflict between two brothers — one who seizes freedom by violence, one who obtains power by cunning — and the play's fury came from my sense that neither path leads where it promises.

The late tragedies, from the Wallenstein trilogy through Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Die Braut von Messina, and Wilhelm Tell, are a different kind of work: less volcanic, more architecturally deliberate, more concerned with the spectator's inner freedom than with the hero's outer one. The philosophical essays occupied the middle years and remain the center of my theoretical achievement.

The Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen — the Aesthetic Letters, addressed to the Duke of Augustenburg — were written in direct response to what the French Revolution had revealed: that a people not yet inwardly prepared cannot bear the weight of political freedom without breaking it.¹ The argument runs that any durable reform must emanate from a way of thinking, and that the character of citizens alone creates and upholds the state.²

Beauty is not ornament appended to that argument; it is the path through which the moral condition becomes possible at all. In my physical state, man suffers the dominion of nature; in the aesthetic state he emancipates himself from it; in the moral state he acquires mastery over it.³ The sequence cannot be reversed — neither by nature nor by will.⁴

Before beauty works this liberation, what is man? Eternally uniform in his aims, eternally changing in his judgments, self-seeking without being himself, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving any rule.⁵ The aesthetic condition is precisely what breaks this condition open — not by imposing a law from outside, but by creating what I called the third realm, the joyous realm of play and of appearance, where the aesthetic impulse emancipates man from all constraint, whether physical or moral.⁶

To give freedom through freedom is the fundamental law of this realm.⁷ The practical consequence the Letters draw is this: man must learn to desire more nobly, so that he need not will sublimely.⁸ Aesthetic education subjects to the laws of beauty all those spheres of human behavior where neither natural laws nor rational laws are yet binding — and in the form it gives to outer life, it already opens up the inner.⁹

Alongside the Letters stand Über Anmut und Würde on grace and dignity, the Kallias Letters on beauty as freedom in appearance, Über das Pathetische and Über das Erhabene on the sublime and tragic experience, and Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung on the two fundamental modes of poetic consciousness. The historical works — the History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands and the History of the Thirty Years' War — belong to the Jena years and gave me the material out of which Wallenstein was eventually made. That is the corpus in its main lines: drama, philosophical essay, and history, each feeding the others.

Sources

1. Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man are in great part a response to what he saw as the tragedy of the French Revolution: a brutal attempt to turn a people's natural instincts into moral virtue overnight, the fate of a people 'not yet ripe for civil liberty' because of what they lacked in 'human liberty.'

   Essays

2. 'Any durable reform,' Schiller wrote the duke of Augustenburg, 'must emanate from a way of thinking, and where the principle is rotten, nothing healthy or benign can grow. The character of its citizens alone creates and upholds the state and makes political and civilian freedom possible.'

   Essays

3. Man in his physical state merely suffers the dominion of nature; he emancipates himself from this dominion in the aesthetic state, and he acquires mastery over it in the moral.

   Essays

4. these several periods may indeed be either lengthened or shortened, but no one of them can be left out altogether; nor can the order in which they follow each other be reversed, neither by the power of nature nor by that of the will.

   Essays

5. Eternally uniform in his aims, eternally changing in his judgments, selfseeking without being himself, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving any rule.

   LETTERS ON THE ÆSTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN, pp. 108–109

6. In the midst of the formidable realm of forces, and of the sacred empire of laws, the aesthetic impulse of form creates by degrees a third and a joyous realm, that of play and of the appearance, where she emancipates man from fetters, in all his relations, and from all that is named constraint, whether physical or moral.

   LETTERS ON THE ÆSTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN, pp. 126–127

7. To give freedom through freedom is the fundamental law of this realm.

   LETTERS ON THE ÆSTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN, pp. 126–127

8. He must learn to desire more nobly, so that he may not need to will sublimely.

   Essays

9. This is brought about by means of aesthetic education, which subjects to laws of beauty all those spheres of human behavior in which neither natural laws, nor yet rational laws, are binding upon human caprice, and which, in the form it gives to outer life, already opens up the inner.

   Essays