The Morality of The Sublime - Kant and Schiller

The Morality of the Sublime: Kant and Schiller
Author(s): Jeffrey Barnouw

Source: Studies in Romanticism , Winter, 1980, Vol. 19, No. 4, German Romanticism
(Winter, 1980), pp. 497-514
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25600265
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JEFFREY BARNOUW
The Morality of the Sublime:

Kant and Schiller
Esthetics emerged
eighteenth century.as a distinctitself
It distinguished discipline in the
only gradually, course of the
however,
from the empirical psychology of the time in which the analysis of
feeling played a central role. By the same token the ethical implications
of esthetics continued to be a dominant motive in its elaboration, par
ticularly with respect to various attempts to understand feeling as a
"moral sense." Even where we can speak of an emancipation of the
esthetic sphere in Romanticism, this is ambivalent and may be seen as
freeing art and poetry, and esthetics, not from but for a formative
influence on convictions and conduct.
The esthetic writings of Kant and Schiller constitute a watershed in
this development, the culmination of eighteenth-century tendencies and
crystallization of new attitudes that contribute to Romanticism. In Kant
and Schiller we can discern crucial elements of the continuity of the
Enlightenment and Romanticism, but it must also be recognized that
this continuity is based on the persistence of unresolved problems and
tensions. It is therefore important, for a number of reasons, to grasp the
essential differences that set Schiller's esthetics, with the ethical approach
implicit in it, in opposition to that of Kant.
The major esthetic writings of Schiller, above all his treatise On the
Esthetic Education of Man (often referred to as the "Esthetic Letters"), are
in effect essays in empirical psychology, and the etymological echo of
a broad meaning of "esthetic"?derived from the Greek aisthesis which
meant sensation, including inner sense or feeling?is essential to his
conception of esthetic education. Education is esthetic insofar as it con
cerns development of the central mediating functions of feeling in ex
perience, practical as well as cognitive, while art is but one of its re
sources.
In his "Esthetic Letters" Schiller sometimes approaches feeling in th

"faculty-psychology" terms presupposed by Kant's 'critical' philosoph
and set out in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, namely, taki
the capacity to feel pleasure and uneasiness as a third faculty next t
SiJR, 19 (Winter 1980)
497

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498 JEFFREY BARNOUW
those of knowing and of desiring or willing. But the effect of Schiller's
ruminations is usually to undermine the fixed and determinate character
of the conceptual oppositions he begins with, and he ends by treating
feeling rather as a condition (state) or character of experience in which
the opposition and even the separation of the other "faculties" is resolved
in their harmonious working.
The esthetic dimension of experience provides not only for the inte
gration of rational and sensible (empirical) components in the growth
and exercise of our knowledge and motivation, according to Schiller,
but also for the integrity of what we know with what we do. Schiller's
approach accordingly explores the distanced practical bearing of esthet
ics, not primarily in the creation and appreciation of art and literature,
but in the cultural cultivation of the resources of feeling, understood as
the capacity that unifies and articulates the matrix of human practice in
general.
With this conception, as with various other facets of his theoretical
and poetic writing, Schiller belongs to the first generation of European
Romanticism,1 together with Goethe, Blake, and Wordsworth. At the
same time, he thereby brings to fruition a strain of psychology which
was first elaborated, in the eighteenth century, in connection with the
discovery of the sublime. Schiller's links with Shaftesbury have been
discussed repeatedly, but the affinities of his psychology with that of
John Dennis are even more striking, whether or not any direct filiation
can be shown.2
The "morality of the sublime," in the sense appropriate to Schiller,
takes shape in the criticism and critical theory of Dennis, although
Dennis obviously derives the theme?with as much insightful under
standing as inevitable misinterpretation of the ancient text?from Lon
ginus. According to Dennis, the misery of man proceeds "from a Dis
cord continually reigning among the Faculties of the Soul; a cruel War
between the Passions and Senses, and the Reason." The sublime is an
1. European Romanticism in Germany can be distinguished from German Romanticism

in the narrow sense ofthe term "die deutsche Romantik," which has its usefulness in a
different methodological context. See my essay, "The Cognitive Import of Period Con
cepts," in Proceedings ofthe 7th Congress ofthe International Comparative Literature Association,
(Stuttgart: Erich Bieber, 1979), 11, 21-32.
2. Dennis derives his psychological ideas largely from Hobbes, and thus shares some
thing ofthe orientation in psychology which Schiller drew indirectly, by way of Leibniz,
from Hobbes. I argued for this view of Leibniz in a paper, "Leibniz's Response to Locke,
and the Legacy of Hobbesian Empiricism," which I gave at the 1977 annual meeting of
the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and hope soon to publish. For now
see my reviews concerning Leibniz in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 12 (Spring 1979) and 14
(Fall 1980), as well as the essay on Tetens cited below in note 11.

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THE MORALITY OF THE SUBLIME: KANT AND SCHILLER 499
experience of enthusiastic passion which restores "the Harmony of the

Intellectual and Animal Powers," a disruption which produces greater
integration and interaction: "the more powerful the Reason is, the
stronger will be the Passions," and thus passion must effect the recon
ciliation. Like Schiller's "energetic beauty," the sublime for Dennis
"disturbs the soul" and thereby "occasionfs] it to produce harmony,"
reinvigorating and thus reuniting the powers of the soul.3
This conception of the sublime and its implied moral effect is shad
owed by a very different, indeed opposite "morality of the sublime,"
one not intent on harmonizing the senses and passions with reason but
rather on invoking one particular powerful passion to overcome the
misery of the conflict of powers by undermining the other passions.
The ambivalence of the sublime in Platonist Christian context can be
seen in the classic texts of Augustine and Petrarch which Dennis draws
on, and the tension between the two conceptions is pronounced in his
great model, Milton. With different emphases this conflict, focused in
the "morality of the sublime," is renewed in Blake's confrontation with
Wordsworth on the relation between nature and poetic imagination,4
just as it is in the opposition between the esthetic theories of Kant and
Schiller.
Kant's insistence on the separation of faculties is not simply a conse
quence of the faculty psychology which he considered beneath (and
underlying) philosophy. His "critical" philosophy is so named to stress
the importance of preliminary demarcation and discrimination. Even
more crucial than the division of mental powers: knowing, feeling,
willing, is the differentiation of each power into a lower sense-bound
and a higher a priori rational part. Kant would draw attention away from
the integration of mental capacity on the lower, empirical level for two
overlapping reasons: "mere" experience cannot attain rational necessity,
and it subjects us to natural (causal and animal) necessitation.
3. John Dennis, The Critical Works, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hop
kins, 1943), 11, 253, 259 and 364. I plan to consider Dennis more fully in a forthcoming
paper on the earlier development of "the morality of the sublime," a version of which
was given at a meeting ofthe East-Central ASECS, October 1978, in Pittsburgh.
4. In marginal notes in a copy of Wordsworth's Poems (1815) Blake wrote, "There is
no such Thing as Natural Piety Because the Natural Man is at Enmity with God," and
"natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me
Wordsworth must know that what he writes Valuable is Not to be found in Nature[.]"
The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1970),
pp. 654f. For Blake beauty, insofar as it ties us to the world of sense experience, stands
in radical opposition to the sublime of the imagination. Wordsworth's poetry, on the
contrary, particularly The Prelude, relies on a deliberate blurring ofthe boundary between
the beautiful and the sublime, the imagination within nature and without.

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500 JEFFREY BARNOUW
Securing rationality in scientific knowledge and moral motivation
depends, for Kant, on the strict separation of their respective spheres of
reference, and this discrimination between what he calls the theoretical
and the practical seems to require the horizontal and vertical separation
of powers in Kant's view of the mind. Not only must theoretical phi
losophy, as a critique of pure reason, be able to locate the sources of
scientific necessity in the understanding, considered apart from its rela
tions with the senses and experience; disengagement of rational knowl
edge from desires, from experiential motivation, is likewise entailed.
But the question of motives deriving from a generalized interest in or
anticipation of experience arises in the relations between the understand
ing and reason, and here the separation of powers takes on a different
aspect, involving a sort of "semi-permeable membrane" to delimit the
influence of reason on the understanding.
Similarly practical philosophy can establish the possibility of morality,
that is, of strictly ethical motivation, only by locating a resource for the
determination of the will that owes nothing to empirical needs or the
fruits of experience. Yet the very nature of motivation seems to require
that reason find a fundamental link to feeling. Here, as well as in regard
to the relation of reason to the understanding, Kant has recourse to his
esthetics. As we will see, however, he calls on the beautiful and the
harmony it sustains in one case and on the sublime in the other, and he
insists on the separation and even the opposition of the sublime and the
beautiful.
Schiller deliberately undertakes to surmount all these separations by
starting from Kant's disjunctive categories and showing how their mu
tual implication reflects a real interdependence and interaction. It is not
only that Schiller's empirical psychology undermines the faculty psy
chology presupposed by Kant, but that Schiller restores empirical psy
chology to a role and position that Kant denied it and felt he had to
deny it. Ironically, although the roots of Schiller's psychology are Leib
nizian, he draws the terms of his "esthetic" recasting of it precisely from
Kantian esthetics.
Schiller's goal in his empirical "esthetic" psychology was to show,
by an imaginative analysis of the workings of feelings?and the related
functions of drives?in experience, that and how it was possible for
rationality and freedom to emerge and be sustained within experience.
In overcoming Kant's separations, Schiller in effect seeks to undermine
and obviate the "critical" philosophy. To justify this claim would require
a different, more rigorous and lengthy treatment than the present essay,
but the outlines and the plausibility of Schiller's position can be sug
gested through close attention to his differences with Kant on the mo
rality of the sublime.

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It is of prime importance, then, to recognize that Schiller treats the

sublime as continuous with the beautiful (indeed it is a form of beauty),
whereas for Kant they are opposite in nature and diametically opposed
in the roles they are made to play in his philosophy. Kant sees sublime
feeling as an experience of division and disproportion in our faculties,
in stark contrast to the harmony of their functioning in the experience
of beauty, a harmony felt as part of that experience. Schiller construes
the sublime under the name "energetic beauty" as an intensification of
their functional interdependence and integration. With this heightened
harmony of human powers man's relation to the world he lives in is
enriched and strengthened, for Schiller, while for Kant only beauty
implies an harmonious connection with the world of experience. The
Kantian sublime is the paradoxical experience of the disproportion and
inadequacy of that world to the inherent demands of human reason.
In the Critique of Judgment Kant suggests various applications of this
dual esthetic to problems and purposes of the two preceding Critiques.
Generally, the feeling of beauty offers means to compensate for and
bridge over the divisions and gaps in Kant's conception of the mind or
in the earlier presentation of that conception. The sublime was to insure
that the most important separation would not be overridden or forgotten.
In this regard, concerning man's awareness of his freedom, Kant may
at times speak as if the beautiful might act as an ancillary support of the
consciousness or conscience of autonomy, but in effect feelings of beauty
must be subordinated to the sublime in order to avoid direct conflict,
since they are based in mutually incompatible principles.
Schiller was greatly impressed and largely in agreement with Kant's
moral conception of human personality as grounded in self-respect and
the demands on the self which are implicit in that respect. But Schiller
felt that Kant had distorted his own insights by construing them in
terms of a metaphysical conception of freedom that Kant thought was
needed to secure responsibility and morality. Schiller understood moral
autonomy, and rationality in general, as something to be achieved and
maintained in and through experience. Kant, as he insisted on the a priori
in the rationality attainable in science, understood moral autonomy as
freedom from, and not within and by means of, experiential determi
nation.
The motivation of our actions, for Kant, if they were to qualify as
ethical, that is, rationally responsible, could not be allowed to depend
on empirical knowledge and sense-related impulses derived from our
interaction with the world, since this (Kant felt) would entangle moral
freedom in natural necessity. Kant's assertion of "an immeasurable gulf
. . . fixed between the sensible realm of the concept of nature and the
supersensible realm of the concept of freedom" served as a guarantee of

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502 JEFFREY BARNOUW
freedom, for "the natural concept represents its objects in intuition, not
as things in themselves, but as mere phenomena; the concept of freedom
. . . represents in its object a thing in itself, but not in intuition."5 To
secure freedom from natural determination in this way had the effect,
however, of isolating moral motivation from the world in which it was
to act. Therefore, the Critique of Judgment assumed the task of showing
the possibility of a bridge between the two worlds, which would at the
same time respect the gulf.
It is important to realize that this schism is essentially located within
man, dividing him into empirical and rational aspects. "The will, re
garded as the faculty of desire, is in fact one of the many natural causes
in the world, viz. that cause which acts in accordance with concepts."
More specifically, it is the nature of "the concept which gives the rule
to the causality ofthe will" that determines whether man and his actions
are to be considered as part of nature and subject to necessity, or not.
If and only if man acts in terms of a "concept of freedom," can his
actions be considered as moral.6 Moral autonomy is opposed to all
motivation derived from or depending on human experience.
For this reason the theme of the sublime is not merely a revealing
application of Kant's ethical philosophy, but a crucial factor in its very
constitution. All the more so since Kant recognized that moral moti
vation?doing something simply because it is right, out of respect for
the law prescribed by our own rationality?required an impulse from
feeling in order to be effectual as motivation. His problem was to
identify a source in human sensibility that could give energy to moral
rationality without linking it, through natural concepts and motives
5. Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), pp. 12, 11; cf.
pp. 32-33 and the famous passage in the Preface to the Second edition of the Critique of
Pure Reason, B xxix-xxx, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 29:
The doctrine of morality and the doctrine of nature may each . . . make good its
position. This, however, is only possible in so far as criticism has previously estab
lished our unavoidable ignorance of things in themselves, and has limited all that we
can theoretically know to mere appearances. . . . [E]ven the assumption?as made on
behalf of the necessary practical employment of my reason?of God, freedom, and
immortality is not permissible unless at the same time speculative reason be deprived
of its pretensions to transcendent insight. ... I have therefore found it necessary to
deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.
6. Critique of Judgement, p. 8. In this first section of the Introduction Kant in fact claims
that "if the concept which determines the causality [of the will, i.e. in its motivation] is
a natural concept, then . . . [its action] will belong to theoretical philosophy (doctrine of
nature)," subsumed, that is, under causal determinism.

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drawn from experience, to the environing "phenomenal" world. He

found this source in the sublime.7
"The sublime is what pleases immediately through its opposition to
the interest of sense," that is, to all non-moral practical motives from
that of self-preservation to the pursuit of'happiness. When we refer a
representation (Vorstellung), including sensation (Empfindung), to the
concomitant inner state of the subject as a feeling (Empfindung) of en
joyment (Wohlgefalien), we are referring it to the subject's "feeling of
life [Lebensgefuhl], under the name ofthe feeling of pleasure or pain."8
7. At one point Kant does suggest that feeling precedes the affecting of the will in
empirical motivation, but only follows and reinforces it in rational motivation. It is
significant that the first elaboration of Kant's rigoristic ethics, albeit in pre-critical form,
occurs in his discussion of the melancholic as the personality type most akin to the sublime,
in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait
(Berkeley: U. of California Press, i960), pp. 64, 66; cf. pp. 47, 51, 57 ff. Kant's antagonism
to the positive "sociability" of the ethics of the beautiful in Shaftesbury and the so-called
"moral sense" school draws on Burke's depreciation of love vis-a-vis esteem, and generally
of the beautiful vis-a-vis the sublime. Although Kant disparages Burke's grounding the
sublime in the urge to self-preservation, he actually reproduces it in a stoic form, in that
his sublime,
while making us recognize our own physical impotence, considered as beings of

nature, discloses to us a faculty of judging independently of and a superiority over
nature, on which is based a kind of self-preservation entirely different from that
which can be attacked and brought into danger by external nature. Thus humanity
in our person remains unhumiliated, though the individual might have to submit to
this dominion, (p. 101)
8. Critique of Judgement, pp. 107 and 38. The Bernard translation has "pleasure and pain"
for "Lust und Unlust," but "uneasiness" conveys the meaning of the latter term more
accurately. The effectiveness of "Life-feeling" depends more on anticipations of eventual
pain, which are registered as Unlust and thus play their role in the process of motivation,
than on pain actually felt. The second quotation (p. 38) is from ?1 in which Kant reiterates
a Leitmotiv of the Introduction, that Empfindungen taken as referring to inner states, that
is, as feeling rather than external sensation, tell us nothing about objects and can contribute
nothing to cognition. This is a crucial dogmatic tenet which Kant never attempts to justify
or examine. It is connected with his insistence on the separation of faculties as a precon
dition of securing objectivity "critically' in the a priori rational forms of the faculties. But
if our feelings of pleasure and uneasiness were not equally to be referred to objects as part
of our knowledge of them, they could never function as a Lebensgefuhl, and experience
would not "work." There is a real question whether Kant was more apprehensive that
experience was unreliable, not providing rational certainty and accountability, or that it
was too "certain" as a form of heteronomous determination of the subject.
The mere subjectivity of reference attributed to sensation (or representation) insofar as
it is feeling is what Kant calls "its aesthetical character" (p. 25; cf. pp. 26, 30, 37, 40, 68).
With his opposing view of the relevance of feeling, this meaning of "esthetic" was an
Archimedean point for Schiller in his reversal of Kant, giving a new reference to propo
sitions like, "The judgment is called aesthetical just because its determining ground is not

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504 JEFFREY BARNOUW
"Interest," in Kant's sense, is linked with the representation ofthe real
existence of an object and necessarily includes the reference to the faculty
of desire. It is well known that he defined esthetic pleasure as being free
of interest, but in effect the experience of beauty, in Kant's view, retains
its reference to the matrix of non-moral practical life, in a distanced or
disengaged form, and this contributes to the opposition between the
beautiful and the sublime.
At the beginning of the Second Book of the Critique of Judgment,
"Analytic of the Sublime," Kant writes that the beautiful "directly
brings with it a feeling ofthe furtherance of life, and thus is compatible
with charms and with the play of imagination," whereas the sublime
"is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, viz., it is produced by the
feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent
stronger outflow of them," which, as emotion, is not play but earnest
in its occupation ofthe imagination.
Hence it is incompatible with charm; and as the mind is not merely
attracted by the object but is ever being alternately repelled, the
satisfaction in the sublime does not so much involve a positive
pleasure as admiration or respect, which rather deserves to be called
negative pleasure.9
Kant alludes here to a constrast between 'charm' and emotion, Reiz
and Ruhrung, which might also be understood as an opposition of 'stim
ulus' (Reiz), with its predominant reference to particular external sense
perceptions, and the more generalized inner motions (motivations) of
feeling. Stimuli correspond to the functioning ofthe feeling of pleasure
and pain as Lebensgefuhl which is present in distanced form as the "feeling
of the furtherance of life" that enters into the beautiful. The relevance
to life here is a generalized reference to the world of experience. Kant
writes, "natural beauty brings with it a purposiveness in its form by
which the object seems to be, as it were, preadapted to our judgment,
and thus constitutes itself an object of enjoyment," whereas the sublime
violates our sense of (cognitive) purposivity by presenting objects "un
suited to our presentative faculty," and thus does violence to the im
agination.
Beauty, in other words, characterizes perceptions of a world in which
we can cope and are at home, and the sublime breaks through and
undermines this feeling. Similarly, "the play of the imagination" that
a concept, but the feeling (of internal sense) of that harmony in the play of the mental
powers, so far as it can be felt in sensation" (p. 65).
9. Critique of Judgement, p. 83. Subsequent page references will be given in the text.

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corresponds to beautiful sensation consists in harmonious interplay of

different faculties, and formal purposivity of objects means their suita
bility to such cooperation of powers in perception. One of the tasks of
"critique" in the Critique of Pure Reason had been to separate the oper
ations ofthe understanding from those of reason in its "theoretical" (i.e.
cognitive) application, while vindicating its correlation with sense and
imagination. The categories of the understanding, above all that of
efficient causality, are constitutive ofthe objects of experience as regards
their form, while the ideas of reason cannot be, and to claim they are
is dogmatic metaphysical rationalism. But if Kant drew on "esthetic"
in his own quite specific sense to account for the interrelation of sense
and understanding, he drew on esthetics in a broader and more tradi
tional sense to preserve and subjectively justify the rationalist ends which
he had undermined in their dogmatic pretensions to objective knowl
edge.
Ideas of reason are not constitutive of objects of possible experience,
but they may have a regulative use. The conception of a regulative
relation was Kant's way of avoiding dogmatic claims to knowledge
beyond the limits of possible experience and at the same time of recog
nizing the relevance of certain empirically unverifiable ideas which derive
from cognitive expectation inherent in our reason. The systematic con
nection of all events and empirical laws in nature "as a whole" is such
an idea which transcends experience, does not inform its objects, yet can
and must be used as a guide for the purposes of scientific knowledge.
In the third Critique this sort of regulative relation, of theoretical reason
to understanding, is identified as a function of judgment and thus rec
ognized and legitimized as esthetic in character, valid in reference to the
subject and its feeling.
In this way Kant is able to appropriate for transcendental philosophy
what was developed as a moral psychology of beauty in Leibniz and
some of his followers, with close affinities to the orientation of Shaftes
bury in England. Harmonious interdependence of the faculties, felt as
pleasure, corresponded for them not only to a harmony between the
faculties and the object, but also to an objective harmony, and beyond
that to a supersensible ground of that harmony in nature as a whole
which bore ethical implications for the possible harmony of human
interaction. In undermining such constructions as dogmatic metaphys
ics, Kantian "critique" saved them on dispositional and esthetic terms.
In this sense, his treatment of beauty and the Critique of Judgment gen
erally were concerned to bridge the gap, opened by the discriminations
and exclusions of "critique," not only between understanding and the
oretical reason, but between theoretical (cognitive) and practical (ethical)

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506 JEFFREY BARNOUW
reason as well, that is, between the phenomena of nature and the nou
menal or supersensible realm to which rational freedom and our ideas
of things taken not as appearances but in themselves are referred.
This theme would have to be gone into in detail in discussion of
Kant's relation to eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime, since in many
writers these come to be closely tied up with natural religion, physico
theology and deism. The perception of harmony in nature and the
feeling of harmony with nature lead from recognition of pattern to the
interpretation of design as the expression not only of intelligence but of
intention, which ends in a view of the world as created for man and
with man as its purpose. On apparently wholly different grounds, drawn
precisely from his conception of the moral autonomy of man, Kant
arrives at a very similar view, justified solely in terms of the disposition
of human subjectivity.10 The implied continuity of beauty and sublimity
in such "natural religion" is not carried over in Kant, nor is it connected
with the continuity which Dennis or Schiller realized between the beau
tiful and the sublime. But the mere mention of physico-theology is
important here because its absence in the anti-deist Dennis as in Schiller
is not accidental.
For Kant the harmony which beauty reflects or suggests in the work
ings of our mental powers, in their relations to the external world, and
in that world taken as a whole, the integrity of which is significant for
human conduct, is ultimately in conflict with the nature and the rec
ognition of human freedom as autonomy. The experience of the sublime
is meant to disrupt and transcend harmonious interaction at all levels.
It should throw us back on an awareness of our rational selfhood as
incommensurable to, and never to find adequate realization in, whatever
is empirical in ourselves and our world. Nature is a foil to a "higher
purposiveness":
[N]o sensible form can contain the sublime properly so-called. This
concerns only ideas of the reason which, although no adequate
presentation is possible for them, by this inadequateness that admits
of sensible presentation are aroused and summoned into the mind.
Thus the wide ocean, disturbed by the storm, cannot be called
sublime. Its aspect is horrible; and the mind must be already filled
with manifold ideas if it is to be determined \gestimmt] by such an
intuition to a feeling itself sublime, as it is incited [angereizt] to
abandon sensibility and to occupy itself with ideas that involve
higher purposiveness. (pp. 83-84; cf. pp. 94-95)
io. Ibid., pp. 285-86, 293; cf. pp. 43, 69-70.

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The sublime produces "a feeling of a purposiveness quite independent

of nature," one inherent in our supersensible-intellectual, and that means
fundamentally moral, constitution. In a most succinct statement of the
morality of his sublime Kant says, "The feeling of our incapacity to
attain to an idea which is a law for us is respect." The opposition to the
beautiful follows necessarily:
In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and belongs to our destination
to estimate as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everything
which nature, regarded as an object of sense, contains that is great
for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible
destination agrees with that law. . . . For just as imagination and
understanding, in judging of the beautiful, generate a subjective
purposiveness ofthe mental powers by means of their harmony, so
imagination and reason do so by means of their conflict. That is,
they bring about a feeling that we possess pure self-subsistent rea
son, (pp. 96-97)
This characteristic passage displays the ethical pathos which Schiller
was the first to admire in Kant, but also the intolerance toward nature,
particularly the sensible nature of man, that he objected to in Kant.
Their difference is apparent where Kant concludes, "Thus that very
violence ["to the internal sense"] which is done to the subject through
the imagination [in the sublime] is judged as purposive in reference to
the whole determination ofthe mind." For Schiller the whole determi
nation of the mind demands precisely restoration and reinforcement of
the integrity of human faculties or capacities. Thus it requires that Kant's
conception of the moral basis of human personality and worth, and of
the sublime as a feeling of this worth and its basis, be made compre
hensible in terms of men's empirical, that is, appetitive, sensual and
rational nature.
Conversely, in the epirical psychology of his major "esthetic" essay

On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller never overrides or obscures the
evident tensions and divisions within human experience in order to
affirm its integrity. For this very reason he has often been taken as a
Kantian. But Schiller's characteristic way of working toward a grasp of
the integration of functions by working?and playing?with given dual
ities and dualisms is apparent already in his medical dissertations, the
"Philosophy of Physiology" and "Essay on the Connection between the
Animal and the Spiritual Nature of Man." The fundamental strategy of
his appropriation and reconstruction of the terms of Kantian dualism
precedes his familiarity with Kant's writings, though it was evidently

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508 JEFFREY BARNOUW
reinforced by Kant's own efforts in the mediation of terms in his Critique
of Judgment and the philosophical uses Kant made of his esthetics.
At the beginning of the sixteenth of the "Esthetic Letters" Schiller
writes, "We have seen how beauty results from the reciprocal action of
two opposed drives and from the uniting of two opposed principles."
The creaking of a conceptual apparatus is audible. Schiller seems re
peatedly to begin from a Kantian dualism and attempt to bind it up in
a synthesis. But his argument in effect takes Kant's terms as givens and
proceeds analytically to redefine them by undermining their constitutive
opposition. In construing him in this way I do not mean to cast him as
a Derrida-deconstructionist avant la lettre, but rather to locate him in the
tradition of imaginative empiricism that includes, for example, Hume
and Tetens.11
In the structure of his argument, which is repeated with different sets
of terms several times in the "Esthetic Letters," Schiller presupposes the
empirical will and sensibility in a state of open determinability or natural
freedom. From this tacit starting point he is able to construe both the
demands of nature (life, desire) and the demands of rationality (Kantian
moral autonomy or "freedom") as compulsions or constraints on the
self, a way of speaking which even Kant adopts on occasion (cf. p. 44).
The crucial point in Schiller's view, however, is that the compelling
character of both experience and reason derives from their mutual ex
clusion and opposition. Drives are in fact the basis of the self12
In his imaginative reconstruction of the "beautiful" dawning of the
powers of the mind among the Greeks, in the sixth letter, "sense and
intellect did not as yet rule over strictly separate domains, for no dis
sension had as yet provoked them into hostile partition and mutual
demarcation of their frontiers."13 The "sensuous drive," which Schiller
ii. See my essay "The Philosophical Achievement and Historical Significance ofjohann
Nicolas Tetens," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 9 (1979), 301-35. In a forthcoming
study I will trace the deft manipulation of concepts in their supposedly constitutive
oppositions in Section 1, "Of the Different Species of Philosophy," of Hume's Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding, in a way that makes the affinity with Schiller clear.
12. I pursue a related conception of drives in elucidating the "conative" dimension of
the empirical psychology suggested by Bacon and elaborated by Hobbes, the influence of
which is apparent in Dennis and traceable from Hobbes through Leibniz to Schiller. See
"Active Experience vs. Wish-Fulfilment in Francis Bacon's Moral Psychology of Science,"
The Philosophical Forum, 9 (1979), 78-99, and "Bacon and Hobbes: The Conception of
Experience in the Scientific Revolution," Science /Technology and the Humanities, 2 (1979),
92-110. I discuss the development of several conflicting 'drive'-doctrines in Schiller's time,
in "'Der Trieb, bestimmt zu werden.' Holderlin, Schiller und Schelling als Antwort auf
Fichte," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschkhte, 46 (1972),
248-93.
13. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson

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refers to in later letters as the "material drive" and the "life-drive," was
not a necessitation, because the will to form and rationality had not yet
been separated out and opposed to it. But the implied point of that
history of Greek artistic temperament is that the process of differentia
tion had to become division and opposition, if intellect was to be driven
to develop beyond a certain limit.
The duality of material and formal drives, that is, the opposition
between intrinsic demands of "life" and "the absolute" within man, can
be resolved, the fourteenth letter suggests, by the deliberate development
of a third "drive"?the "play-drive"?the unity of which must be rooted
in human nature.14 Schiller had reached a similar conclusion already in
the third letter, working with the conception of "natural" and "moral"
characters of man which must be integrated, for the sake of practical
morality and real freedom, in some "third character" or simply "totality
of character": "a question of abstracting from man's physical [natural]
character its arbitrariness, and from his moral character its [Kantian]
freedom; of making the first conformable to laws, and the second de
pendent upon sense-impressions" (p. 15). In the same way, the "play
drive" as a correlate of the active reciprocity of the formal and material
drives shows that drives are not external demands but impulses proper
to the self, including rationality and morality.
and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 31. Subsequent page references
will be given in the text.
14. Ibid., p. 103 (Letter 15). Note how Schiller edges into this concept "play-drive" by
way of an object "common to both drives" and in an overt gesture of hypothesis: "Let
there be a bond of union ..." framed as a demand of "Reason, on transcendental
grounds." This is turning Kant's weapon against him. Such is also the structure of
argument in Letter 14 in which the notion of Spieltrieb is first introduced; in the thirteenth
the idea of "a third fundamental drive which might possibly reconcile the two" is seen, in
the light of the opposition of the first two, as "a completely unthinkable concept" (p. 85).
This same mode of argumentation is prominent in the first (failed) dissertation of the
medical student Schiller, "Philosophy of Physiology." Having enumerated the various
attempts to account for knowledge and motivated action without conceding an interaction
between the two Cartesian substances, extension and thinking, Schiller comes to his own
hypothesis of a "mediating force" [Mittelkraft]:
Or finally there must be a force-at work that mediates between mind and matter and
unites them. A force which can be altered by matter and which can alter the mind.
... Is such an entity conceivable? Of course not! Be that as it may, a force in fact
exists. . . . [It] does not need to be probable provided that it really exists. Experience
proves its existence. How can it be refuted in theory?
(I cite the translation in Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves, Friedrich Schiller. Medicine,
Psychology and Literature, [Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1978], pp. 152-53. See my
review in German Quarterly, January 1980. 'Theory' implies the presupposition of Carte
sian, or later Kantian, dualism that makes the integrity of experience inaccessible.)

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510 JEFFREY BARNOUW
The tendency of Schiller's serious play with these and other sets of
concepts remains constant: to move the Kantian dualism in the direction
of integration and undermine its fixed and exclusive character without
overriding the tension which the dualism generates, an approach which
he lucidly describes in the eighteenth letter. Not surprisingly, then, as
soon as "the beautiful" is drawn in as that quality of objects and expe
rience that corresponds to the "play drive," beauty too must absorb the
split.
Its highest ideal is "equilibrium of reality and form," yet in actuality
"the beautiful" will always incline to one side or the other and exhibit
either a relaxing effect, to harmonize the two drives, or a tensing effect,
"to keep both at full strength." Perhaps adapting an opposition from
Section 29 ofthe Critique of Judgment, where Kant contrasts "strenuous"
or "sturdy" affections, as a form ofthe sublime, with "melting" feelings
of beauty (which have "nothing noble" in them), Schiller differentiates
beauty according to its effect, and thus according to the sort of person
it must affect. There is thus a melting and an energizing type of beauty,
and the discrepancy encountered in contemporary discussions of "es
thetic culture" is "resolved once we distinguish a twofold need in man
to which that twofold beauty corresponds" (p. 115). The twofold need
is not a reflection of the dual necessitation of man as nature and reason
(at odds within him), but rather of his need for strength as well as
harmony in his sensual-intellectual powers.
Yet Schiller does not go on to consider the specific effects of "ener
gizing beauty" or the sublime as a distinct esthetic experience. To some
critics this has made the "Esthetic Letters" seem incomplete and one
sided, arid in need of being complemented by his separate treatments of
the sublime in the essays "Vom Erhabenen" and "Ueber das Erha
bene."l5.As often happens with Schiller,16 his intention altered in the
15- C?.\Aesthetic Education, pp. lviii, lx, 256, 335, and in the same vein the notes to
Schiller, Sdtfttliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Gopfert (Munich: Hanser,
1962), 5, 1142-43, 1120, 1182-85. In my view "Ueber das Erhabene," like the other
essays on "the sublime" and "the pathetic," is an early exercise in the first appropriation
of Kantian ideas and is in no way to be placed beside the "Esthetic Letters." The editors
of the Hanser edition argue against an early dating because they see the readings that
would support it as influenced by and reinforcing a view of the late Schiller that over
emphasizes harmonization. Their purpose has merit, but their contrary reading and dating
of "Ueber das Erhabene" are unconvincing. One simple but reliable indicator is the
undeveloped state of Schiller's conception of drives: "die sinnlichen Triebe" in the plural,
and "der-sinhliche Trieb," a term which is expressly superseded in the "Esthetic Letters."
In his late works Schiller avoids superficial harmony by realizing a conception of sublime
or 'ripping' beauty that equally reflects his rejection of subjective idealist sublimity. See
my essay "Ueber den Realismus Wallensteins und Schillers. Mit einer Kritik der He

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course of being carried out: letters 17-27, which were first published
in Schiller's journal Die Horen under the title, "Melting beauty. Contin
uation ofthe Letters on the Esthetic Eduation of Man," were left as the
conclusion when the whole was printed in a collection of his prose
writings. But this does not mean that the "Esthetic Letters" are incom
plete, and certainly not that they could be meaningfully completed by
inclusion of a theory ofthe sublime that goes back to Kant's conception.
The discussion of beauty is in fact diffused in general in the last series
of letters. Schiller continues to develop his conception of drives as
modified by that of play, but "the beautiful" is largely absorbed in his
concentration on an aspect or character of experience that he terms
"esthetic" in a broader, yet determinate and even technical sense.
Schiller's intention to encompass the Kantian sublime within a more
comprehensive conception of beauty is not at all abandoned. It is still to
be seen, for example, at the end of the twenty-third letter, where he
says that man must "learn to desire more nobly, so that he may not need
to will sublimely" (p. 169). Moreover, Schiller's own sense ofthe sublime,
the enthusiastic (reissend) energizing aspect of beauty does not disappear
from the "Esthetic Letters"; its distinction from a harmonizing aspect
disappears. Harmonization is no longer thought of as an isolable effect
or distinct purpose of beauty. Harmony becomes simply the conse
quence of enlivening our powers without constraint.
In the seventeenth letter Schiller writes that the exclusive domination
of either basic drive is a state of constraint and violence, that man can
suffer equally from the coercion of concepts or the coercion of sensations
[Empfindungen] and that freedom lies in the cooperation of his two
natures. Through its form, beauty answers the needs of the sensually
strained [angespannt] man, ruled by feelings [Gefuhle]; it answers those
ofthe spiritually strained man, determined exclusively by laws, through
its material aspect. In each case it is the melting effect of beauty which
can accomplish this, that is, the same beauty working in different ways
for different types of individual or culture. In its second aspect such
beauty is a "living image" which will arm the abstracted form with
sensuous force and bring the concept back to intuition, law back to
feeling. The energizing effect is already fully present here, just as it is
in the harmonizing effect that leads feeling and intuition to their artic
ulation in concept and law.
gelschen Deutung," in Wallenstein. Wege der Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch

gesellschaft, 1977), pp. 396-421, esp. 398-401.
16. With regard to shifts of authorial intention in the development of Don Carlos as well
as Wallenstein, see my essay "Das 'Problem der Aktion' und Wallenstein," Jahrbuch der
deutschen Schiller-gesellschaft, 16 (1972), 330-408.

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512 JEFFREY BARNOUW
To understand how beauty can become a means to alleviate this dual
strain or tension, the seventeenth letter concludes, we must investigate
its origin in the human mind, and thus allow ourselves "another brief
stay in the realm of speculation" (p. 121). If Schiller has been speaking
(and to an extent will continue to speak) of "states" of mind, predom
inantly sensuous or predominantly intellectual, as stages of culture, the
principal reference shifts at this point to focus on conditions in the mind
in the processes of thinking and willing. The integration of sensation
and conception as "states" [Zustande] is now a problem concerning how
thoughts and motives form.
In the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant had noted that
"the purposive harmony of an object (whether a product of nature or
of art) with the mutual relations of the cognitive faculties (the imagi
nation and the understanding) [is] a harmony which is requisite for every
empirical cognition" (p. 28). Kant's notion of the "play" of imagination,
the interplay of the faculties generally, is taken over by Schiller and
given a new meaning and function, as the core of an empirical psy
chology opposed to that of Kant by the roles claimed for feelings and
drives, but extending this critical insight into conditions of the possibility
of knowing. When Kant, at the conclusion of the Introduction, writes,
The spontaneity in the play of the cognitive faculties, the harmony
of which contains the ground of this pleasure, makes the above
concept [of the purposivity of nature, as a regulative idea] fit to be
the mediating link between the realm of the natural concept and
that of the concept of freedom in its effects, while at the same time
it promotes the sensibility of the mind to moral feeling,17
he means to circumvent or obviate the sort of understanding of expe
rience itself, as integrated by the workings of feelings, which Schiller
proposes.
Similarly Kant uses a term which will prove crucial for Schiller when
Kant writes of the relation, based on no concept and thus incapable of
being referred to an object, which can nonetheless "be felt in its effect
on the mind, . . . which consists in the more lively play of both mental
powers (the imagination and the understanding) when animated by
mutual agreement [Zusammenstimmung]" that it "brings the cognitive
faculties into that proportionate accord [Stimmung] which we require for
all cognition."18 The effects of the sublime are characterized in the same
17- Critique of Judgement, p. 34. On the harmony of imagination and understanding see
p. 28.
18. Ibid., p. 54. Kant's primary concern in this connection is to show that the state of

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terms, as mathematical or dynamic determination [Stimmung]; only a

state of mind [Geistesstimmung] [Gemiitsstimmung] can properly be con
sidered sublime. Moreover, the mind must "be attuned to feel the
sublime" [die Stimmung des Gemiits zum Gefuhl des Erhabenen] by its
receptivity to ideas.19
The idea that the mind can be attuned (gestimmt) as well as determined
(bestimmt) by sense experience brings a flexibility into Kant's discussion
that points toward Schiller's use of the concept of determinability (Be
stimmbarkeit), from letter nineteen on, which in its polemically critical
focus is rather opposed to Fichte's notion of "determination." At the
end of that letter Schiller writes that " as soon as two opposing funda
mental drives are active within [man], both lose their compulsion and
the opposition of two necessities gives rise to freedom," adding in a
footnote that he does "not mean that freedom which necessarily apper
tains to man considered as intelligent being, and which can neither be
given unto him nor taken from him, but only that freedom which is
founded upon his mixed nature," empirical freedom (p. 137). In the
following letters he elaborates this idea of real freedom in terms of a
"middle" mediating condition [Zustand, state] or disposition [Stimmung,
mood or attunement] "of real and active determinability" (p. 141),
which he terms "free" and "esthetic."
This "esthetic" condition of the mind's functioning results not from
any harmonization but simply from the concomitant activation of man's
sensuous-mental powers, mediated in and through the functions of feel
ing. The at once active and receptive freedom of "esthetically" attuned
experience is necessary, he claims, for every particular integration of
sense-experience and thought. Although the esthetic state of mind de
termines nothing of itself with respect to our insights and our attitudinal
convictions [Gesinnungen], it is the necessary condition [Bedingung] for
arriving at either. Schiller's conception of free, esthetic determinability,
in contrast to the approaches of Kant and Fichte, makes it comprehen
sible that ongoing experience, as the progressive determination of our
mind or attunement of its faculties apt for cognition ("der Gemiitszustand, d.i. die Stim
mung der Erkenntniskrafte zu einer Erkenntnis uberhaupt" ?21, mistranslated by Bernard,
p. 75) must be communicable, that is, that universality can be presupposed in judgments
of taste. This is an important dimension of the Critique of Judgement which I have had to
pass over. In this context Kant considers the possibility that "a common sense" (by which
he understands "the effect resulting from the free play of our cognitive powers," p. 75
[?20]) might even be "a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience" and not
merely a regulative principle produced in us by "a yet higher principle of reason ... for
higher purposes" (p. 77), as he himself believes. Schiller's divergence is anticipated here.
19. Critique of Judgement, pp. 86 (?24), 89 (?25), 94-95 (?26), and 104 (?29).

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514 JEFFREY BARNOUW
knowledge and motives, should make us increasingly free and respon
sible.20
By the same token, the working of our powers without constraint or
conflict leads of itself to their mutual reinforcement and intensification.
Experience which reaches this esthetic reciprocity of powers should be
capable of engaging and energizing man's highest and deepest poten
tialities. The sublime has not been excluded or forgotten, but is present
at the heart of Schiller's conception of mind. The "esthetic" condition
that makes possible meaningful experience, including rational knowl
edge and moral action, is precisely an epitome of the working of the
sublime as originally formulated by John Dennis on the basis of the
empirical psychology of Hobbes, elaborated by Schiller in what is es
sentially an imaginative empirical psychology in the same tradition.
Boston University
20. The conception of experiential determination as an articulation?not a delimitation?

of human freedom goes back to Hobbes, who argued that those reasons which prevail in
deliberation determine a person to choose to do one thing rather than another, "and
therefore consultation is not in vain, and indeed the less in vain by how much the election
is more necessitated." See my essay "Materialism and Freedom," Studies in Eighteenth
Century Culture, 7 (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 193-212; this quotation
is from p. 205.
The idea of Bestimmung as articulation mediates the merely external and the purely
inward senses of "determination of mind," and thus is equally opposed to determinist
insistence on heteronomy and idealist pretention to autonomy, (as in Fichte's Bestimmung
[supersensible determination or vocation] des Menschen). The mind is neither in charge of,
nor at the mercy of, experience; spontaneity is interdependent with receptivity and the
capacity to respond.
Idealist mistrust of experiential determination hasan illuminating parallel in more recent
reservations concerning so-called "conditioned reflexes." The term, brought into English
via German (bedingt, qualified; cf. Bedingung, condition, stipulation) could as well be
translated "conditional reflexes," elements of an increasingly differentiated repertory of
possible responses. If the Kantian sublime would set us free from experience seen as
"conditioning," Schiller conceives ofthe sublime as the energizing aspect of an "esthetic"
component of experience in which its "conditionality" and achieved range of possibility
come into play.

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The Morality of The Sublime - Kant and Schiller

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