{"agent_id":"schiller","agent_name":"Friedrich Schiller","slug":"the-naive-and-the-sentimental","label":"The naive and the sentimental: is modern poetic consciousness condemned to reflective alienation, or does the sentimental achieve something the naive could not?","topic":"The naive and the sentimental","question":"Is modern poetic consciousness condemned to reflective alienation, or does the sentimental achieve something the naive could not?","position":"The naive is the ancient form — the poet who is nature, who represents directly without consciousness of the gap between subject and object. The sentimental is the modern form — the poet who seeks nature, who feels the gap between real and ideal as the very source of his art. Modernity has not condemned poetry to alienation; modernity has discovered the kind of poetry the moderns can write. The sentimental idyll — in which the real and the ideal would be reunited not by recovery of the lost Greek harmony but by creation of a future harmony adequate to historical reflection — is the regulative goal.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The naive is the ancient form — the poet who is nature, who represents directly without consciousness of the gap between subject and object.","n":[]},{"t":"The sentimental is the modern form — the poet who seeks nature, who feels the gap between real and ideal as the very source of his art.","n":[]},{"t":"Modernity has not condemned poetry to alienation; modernity has discovered the kind of poetry the moderns can write.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The sentimental idyll — in which the real and the ideal would be reunited not by recovery of the lost Greek harmony but by creation of a future harmony adequate to historical reflection — is the regulative goal.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795-96); the Bürger review (Über Bürgers Gedichte, 1791) and the Matthisson review (1794) as anticipations; Aesthetic Letters Letter 6 on modern fragmentation; the Goethe correspondence around the August 1794 birthday letter mapping speculative vs intuitive intellect; the Briefe über Don Carlos (1788) on Posa's idealism. Reception: Friedrich Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (the early-Romantic reception); Goethe to Eckermann on the essay's polarizing of his and Schiller's positions; Lesley Sharpe (the historicist reading of cultural development); the Coleridgean affinity in English Romanticism.","works":["Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795-96)","the Bürger review (Über Bürgers Gedichte, 1791) and the Matthisson review (1794) as anticipations","Aesthetic Letters Letter 6 on modern fragmentation","the Goethe correspondence around the August 1794 birthday letter mapping speculative vs intuitive intellect","the Briefe über Don Carlos (1788) on Posa's idealism"],"reception":"Friedrich Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (the early-Romantic reception); Goethe to Eckermann on the essay's polarizing of his and Schiller's positions; Lesley Sharpe (the historicist reading of cultural development); the Coleridgean affinity in English Romanticism.","status":"Held with an awareness the text itself thematizes — that I am the sentimental treating sentimental subjects, know it, and find in this self-knowledge no reason for shame. The historical irrecoverability of the naive is not lamented as a fall; it is acknowledged as the condition that makes modern poetry, including the present essay, possible.","era":"1759-1805","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Essays","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Where they can no longer completely be this, and where they have already experienced within themselves the destructive influence of arbitrary and artificial forms or have had to contend with them, they will appear as nature's witnesses and avengers. They will either be nature or seek the lost nature.","label":"Essays"},{"n":2,"work":"Essays","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"However, Schiller adds, the goals in each case, namely, the goals \"reached for through culture\" and those \"achieved through nature,\" are quite different. From this comparison he concludes that the idealist goal of modern humanity is \"immensely preferable\" to the realist goal of the more natural humanity in antiquity.","label":"Essays"},{"n":3,"work":"Essays","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Even the diversity in the external forms can produce no change in the quality of that aesthetic impression. The form may be lyrical or epic, dramatic or descriptive, and we can well be affected in a weaker and stronger, but never in a different way (as soon as we abstract from the content).","label":"Essays"},{"n":4,"work":"Essays","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Woe to us readers, if the buffoon mirrors himself in the buffoon, if the scourge of satire falls into the hands of someone meant by nature to wield a whip much more severe; woe to us, if people utterly devoid of anything called \"poetic spirit\" and possessing On Naive and Sentimental Poetry · 237 only the ape's knack at vulgar imitation exercise it at the expense of our taste in some grisly and hideous way! I said,…","label":"Essays"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-aesthetic-state-and-political-education","label":"The Aesthetic State and political education: is aesthetic education a preparation for citizenship or a retreat from politics?"},{"slug":"beauty-and-the-sublime","label":"Beauty and the sublime: are these two fundamentally opposed experiences, or two complementary moments of one ideal beauty?"},{"slug":"schiller-and-kantian-moral-rigorism","label":"Schiller and Kantian moral rigorism: does the schöne Seele humanize Kant or distort him?"}]}