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How Shall We Read Schiller Today?

Schiller, the dramatist whose works are performed on our stages even today, is not forgotten. His Don Carlos conquered both the theatre and opera stages. Schiller, who taught history in Jena, has also provided the alma mater Jenensis with his name since 1989. It is well known that Schiller was not only a professor of history in Jena, but that he also wrote important essays on aesthetics during his Jena period (and before) with the intention of surpassing Kant’s aesthetics and ethics in certain respects. But is Schiller to be read as a philosopher side by side with Kant and others, as Beiser provocatively suggests in his book? Undoubtedly, Schiller’s philosophical ambitions deserve to be taken seriously. He gave important direction to the modification of some of Kant’s central philosophical theses. Moreover, Schiller’s essays opened the question of how to apply Kant’s aesthetic theses to literature and how to combine the Kantian prima facie rational model of beauty with the sensibility of an empirical world of arts. But can Schiller’s work stand alone? That is, can we understand Schiller’s aesthetic writings without having intensively studied Kant? Schiller’s work remains deeply dependant on the critical works of Kant. Beiser himself stresses this fact on the one hand, yet on the other hand, he suggests that we read Schiller as an alternative to Kant. Schiller’s dependence on Kant is not the result of any poverty in Schiller’s thought. Yet we may question how that dependence affected the reception of his work. Even today, Schiller remains famous primarily for his literary contributions and only secondarily for his philosophical contributions. Therefore, Beiser’s move to present Schiller as a philosopher is a most provocative one. Furthermore, to say that Schiller widely improved Kantian theory (see p. 2) is a move that is quite