D. Dahlstrom, "Play and Irony: Schiller and Schlegel on the Liberating P...

Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel were influential in shaping aesthetics, literature, and criticism for centuries after Kant. Both writers believed that freedom defines what it means to be human and that literature is uniquely capable of embodying and expressing that freedom. They both believe that literature is transformative, personally, morally, and politically.

Schiller's conception of an aesthetic education centers around a holistic notion of play, while Schlegel views Romantic poetry as a fragmentary combination of wit and irony. Schiller asserts the liberating potential of art's capacity to express the ideal satisfaction of human striving, while Schlegel counters by asserting the equally liberating potential of art's capacity to disillusion or remind itself that any such expression reproduces the "endless play of the world."

Schiller's account of tragedy and its pleasure is framed by Lessing's interpretation of sympathy and Kant's analysis of dynamic sublimity. He distinguishes two sorts of sympathy in terms of what he takes to be the two competing sources of pleasure and pain: sensual and moral. He acknowledges that sympathy with another's suffering can be largely sensual, but to the degree that moral capacities get the upper hand in someone, they are more likely to be sensitive to the pleasure that, thanks to a connection with morality, combines with even the most painful state.

Schiller links sympathy directly to our capacity for empathy, our ability to put ourselves in someone else's situation, which requires in turn that we have already been in the same sort of situation. The pleasure of sympathy is the pleasure that derives from putting ourselves in a condition or situation in which someone like ourselves finds herself and doing so in such a way that we share in the action that is her moral response to that condition or situation.

Schiller also characterizes this moral struggle as something sublime, contrasting representations of what is stirring and sublime from representations of beauty. A sublime theme or object makes us feel the pain of our impotence (Ohnmacht) on the one hand and exult at the existence of a power in us superior (Übermacht) to nature on the other. In "On the Sublime," Schiller revises Kant's notion of the dynamic sublime into the "practically sublime," the moral neutralization of nature's physical power over us.

Schiller's account of tragedy emphasizes the importance of power and a clash of powers in portraying human phenomena that are contrary to or not determined by instinct. The tragedy has the job of presenting both suffering and resistance, or pathos and sublimity. The ethical propensity or "independence of spirit in a state of suffering" can take two forms: negative or positive, depending on whether a person's suffering has no effect on their moral disposition or issues from their moral character.

Schiller distinguishes between sublime composure and sublime action, which include both those who suffer for doing their duty and those who suffer for violating their duty. He believes that the purpose of theatrical art is pleasure and not moral improvement, and that aesthetic judgments have a more liberating potential than moral judgments. According to Kant, the sublime can determine the mind to think "the unattainability of nature as a presentation of ideas."

Schiller's account of a sublimity beyond good and evil further embellishes his explanation of the sympathy that the tragic stage calls for. We sympathize with the moral potency of scoundrels, sinners, heroes, and saints, as it is the capacity for a similar dutifulness that we share with them and the fact that we see our own capacity in him that explain why we feel our spiritual power elevated.

The art's capacity to "shape humans morally" is put great stock in the dramatic artist's attempts to please. The greatest pleasure is accorded by creating sublime characters with whom we can sympathize, protagonists caught up in a moral conflict, because this sort of sympathy confirms and even enhances a power within us as rational beings to transcend or overcome ourselves as creatures of instinct.

Schiller argues that humanity is diminished in the arts and taste, and that to solve the problem of politics, one must approach it through the aesthetic. He rejects Rousseau's historical argument for educating humanity aesthetically and proposes a transcendental path to a rational conception of beauty as a necessary condition of humanity. He believes that every human being has an enduring person and a transient condition, each dependent on the other and demanding its due.

Schiller's notion of formal drive's connection with universal laws is inspired by Kantian inspiration but takes cues from Fichte's conception of reciprocity to elaborate a notion of freedom that requires coordination of both drives. He constructs play as an experience where feelings and thought merge, stating that man only plays when he is fully a human being.

In this aesthetics of play, beauty cannot be adequately understood in strictly subjective or objective terms. Instead, it points to the subjective or imaginative dimension of the human spirit, which enjoys complete freedom relative to matter and form, passivity and activity, sensuousness and thought. This will is grounded in the "mixed nature" of human beings and is capable of being furthered or thwarted by natural means.

Schiller believes that the aesthetic condition is necessary for human beings to move beyond the dismal state of nature and the demands of animal self-love. Human beings are sensual and cannot be made rational until they have first been aesthetic. The transition to the aesthetic condition is the most challenging due to its emancipatory nature, which anticipates the moral condition.

Schiller introduces the concept of "the realm of aesthetic semblance" or the "aesthetic state" in the Letters, highlighting beauty's capacity to transform sexual desire into love and resolve competing desires in society. In an aesthetic state, individuals can confront each other as free and equal citizens, transforming into the third joyous kingdom of play and semblance.

In his final major work in aesthetics, Schiller contrasts the naturalness of naive poets with the more self-conscious and sentimental style typical of modern writers like Ariosto. He traces the difference between naive and sentimental poetry to antithetical modes of poetic consciousness, ancient or modern, and even between contrary traits within a single poet (e.g. Goethe). The central contrast lies in the fact that the sentimental poet alone calls attention to a particular sense of the difference between reality and his ideas and idealizations.

Schiller is less sanguine about the prospect of such a union than he is at the conclusion of Letters. Underlying the poetic difference between the naïve and sentimental is, he submits, a fundamental and debilitating psychological antagonism resolved only in "a few, rare individuals" – the difference between permitting nature (realists) or reason (idealists) to determine theory and practice. Yet even on these final pages, Schiller remains confident in poetry's paradigmatic capacity to reconcile basic oppositions.

In his early efforts to do for Greek poetry what Winckelmann had done for the plastic arts of antiquity, Schlegel used "interesting" as a metonym for "modern" and defined "interesting" as an unflattering and ultimately incongruous characteristic of the goal of modern poetry. For a certain stripe of modern aesthetes, Schlegel contends that it is more important for art to be interesting than for it to be beautiful, even if what makes it interesting is quite individualistic or subjective and permanently transient, not least for the individual who initially finds it interesting. In this sense, mixing genres and even mixing philosophy with poetry can make for interesting art.

Schlegel, a prominent figure in the early German Romanticism movement, is known for his fragment-style writings, such as his entries to Athenaeum. The journal, which became the main literary and philosophical organ of the "Romantic school," was the fruit of a circle of close friends including Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Caroline Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Veit, and Wilhelm Wackenroder. Schlegel's most famous gloss of Romantic poetry is "a progressive universal poetry." This universal character lies in its refusal to identify poetry with any particular genre or marks of a piece of writing that can be simply read off it. The sense of its "universality" extends even further, as it aims to unite separate genres and put poetry in contact with philosophy, making poetry alive and social, making life and society poetic, poeticizing wit, and filling and saturating the forms of art with matters of genuine cultural value.

The progressive character of Romantic poetry is tied to the fact that it is self-reflective. Self-reflection is a transcendental notion in the Kantian sense that it is the condition that enables every other consciousness (unreflected or not, self-styled as poetic or not). For Schlegel, Romantic poetry is not the antipode to philosophy; it is integral to philosophy's telos. He criticizes the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Fichte for being too linear and not sufficiently cyclical.

In his extensive work on fine art, dramatic arts, and literature, Schlegel played a significant role in spreading the basic ideas of Romanticism across Europe. His understanding of Romantic poetry incorporates various senses of transcendentality, such as the relation between the ideal and real, and the potential for reflection on that reflection or "progressive" self-reflection. Romantic poetry can hover on the wings of poetic reflection, free of all real and ideal self-interest, raising that reflection again and again to a higher power.

Schiller and Schlegel share many similarities in their aesthetics, placing philosophical speculation at the center of criticism and literature, drawing critically on the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Fichte. They both extol the distinctiveness of modern poetry and appreciate the moral and political import of art and literature.