1、 AESTHETICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYSby Frederick SchillerCONTENTS:INTRODUCTIONVOCABULARY OF TERMINOLOGYLETTERS ON THE AESTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MANAESTHETICAL ESSAYS:-THE MORAL UTILITY OF AESTHETIC MANNERSON THE SUBLIMETHE PATHETICON GRACE AND DIGNITYON DIGNITYON THE NECESSARY LIMITATIONS IN THE USE
2、 OF BEAUTY AND FORMREFLECTIONS ON THE USE OF THE VULGAR AND LOW ELEMENTS IN WORKS OF ARTDETACHED REFLECTIONS ON DIFFERENT QUESTIONS OF AESTHETICSON SIMPLE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRYTHE STAGE AS A MORAL INSTITUTIONON THE TRAGIC ARTOF THE CAUSE OF THE PLEASURE WE DERIVE FROM TRAGIC OBJECTSINTRODUCTION.The
3、 special subject of the greater part of the letters and essays ofSchiller contained in this volume is Aesthetics; and before passing toany remarks on his treatment of the subject it will be useful to offer afew observations on the nature of this topic, and on its treatment by thephilosophical spirit
4、 of different ages.First, then, aesthetics has for its object the vast realm of thebeautiful, and it may be most adequately defined as the philosophy of artor of the fine arts. To some the definition may seem arbitrary, asexcluding the beautiful in nature; but it will cease to appear so if itis rema
5、rked that the beauty which is the work of art is higher thannatural beauty, because it is the offspring of the mind. Moreover, if,in conformity with a certain school of modern philosophy, the mind beviewed as the true being, including all in itself, it must be admittedthat beauty is only truly beaut
6、iful when it shares in the nature of mind,and is minds offspring.Viewed in this light, the beauty of nature is only a reflection of thebeauty of the mind, only an imperfect beauty, which as to its essence isincluded in that of the mind. Nor has it ever entered into the mind ofany thinker to develop
7、the beautiful in natural objects, so as to convertit into a science and a system. The field of natural beauty is toouncertain and too fluctuating for this purpose. Moreover, the relationof beauty in nature and beauty in art forms a part of the science ofaesthetics, and finds again its proper place.B
8、ut it may be urged that art is not worthy of a scientific treatment.Art is no doubt an ornament of our life and a charm to the fancy; but hasit a more serious side? When compared with the absorbing necessities ofhuman existence, it might seem a luxury, a superfluity, calculated toenfeeble the heart
9、by the assiduous worship of beauty, and thus to beactually prejudicial to the true interest of practical life. This viewseems to be largely countenanced by a dominant party in modern times, and1www.TaleBpractical men, as they are styled, are only too ready to take thissuperficial view of the office
10、of art.Many have indeed undertaken to defend art on this score, and to showthat, far from being a mere luxury, it has serious and solid advantages.It has been even apparently exaggerated in this respect, and representedas a kind of mediator between reason and sense, between inclination andduty, havi
11、ng as its mission the work of reconciling the conflictingelements in the human heart. A strong trace of this view will be foundin Schiller, especially in all that he says about the play-instinct inhis “Aesthetical Letters.“Nevertheless, art is worthy of science; aesthetics is a true science, andthe
12、office of art is as high as that assigned to it in the pages ofSchiller. We admit that art viewed only as an ornament and a charm is nolonger free, but a slave. But this is a perversion of its proper end.Science has to be considered as free in its aim and in its means, and itis only free when libera
13、ted from all other considerations; it rises up totruth, which is its only real object, and can alone fully satisfy it.Art in like manner is alone truly art when it is free and independent,when it solves the problem of its high destination-that problem whetherit has to be placed beside religion and p
14、hilosophy as being nothing elsethan a particular mode or a special form of revealing God toconsciousness, and of expressing the deepest interests of human natureand the widest truths of the human mind.For it is in their works of art that the nations have imprinted theirfavorite thoughts and their ri
15、chest intuitions, and not unfrequently thefine arts are the only means by which we can penetrate into the secretsof their wisdom and the mysteries of their religion.It is made a reproach to art that it produces its effects by appearanceand illusion; but can it be established that appearance is objec
16、tionable?The phenomena of nature and the acts of human life are nothing more thanappearances, and are yet looked upon as constituting a true reality; forthis reality must be sought for beyond the objects perceived immediatelyby the sense, the substance and speech and principle underlying allthings m
17、anifesting itself in time and space through these realexistences, but preserving its absolute existence in itself. Now, thevery special object and aim of art is to represent the action anddevelopment of this universal force. In nature this force or principleappears confounded with particular interes
18、ts and transitorycircumstances, mixed up with what is arbitrary in the passions and inindividual wills. Art sets the truth free from the illusory andmendacious forms of this coarse, imperfect world, and clothes it in anobler, purer form created by the mind itself. Thus the forms of art,far from bein
19、g mere appearances, perfectly illusory, contain more realityand truth than the phenomenal existences of the real world. The world ofart is truer than that of history or nature.Nor is this all: the representations of art are more expressive andtransparent than the phenomena of the real world or the e
20、vents ofhistory. The mind finds it harder to pierce through the hard envelop ofnature and common life than to penetrate into works of art.Two more reflections appear completely to meet the objection that art oraesthetics is not entitled to the name of science.It will be generally admitted that the m
21、ind of man has the power ofconsidering itself, of making itself its own object and all that issuesfrom its activity; for thought constitutes the essence of the mind. Nowart and its work, as creations of the mind, are themselves of a spiritualnature. In this respect art is much nearer to the mind tha
22、n nature. Instudying the works of art the mind has to do with itself, with whatproceeds from itself, and is itself.Thus art finds its highest confirmation in science.Nor does art refuse a philosophical treatment because it is dependent on2caprice, and subject to no law. If its highest aim be to reve
23、al to thehuman consciousness the highest interest of the mind, it is evident thatthe substance or contents of the representations are not given up to thecontrol of a wild and irregular imagination. It is strictly determinedby the ideas that concern our intelligence and by the laws of theirdevelopmen
24、t, whatever may be the inexhaustible variety of forms in whichthey are produced. Nor are these forms arbitrary, for every form is notfitted to express every idea. The form is determined by the substancewhich it has to suit.A further consideration of the true nature of beauty, and therefore ofthe voc
25、ation of the artist, will aid us still more in our endeavor toshow the high dignity of art and of aesthetics. The history ofphilosophy presents us with many theories on the nature of the beautiful;but as it would lead us too far to examine them all, we shall onlyconsider the most important among the
26、m. The coarsest of these theoriesdefines the beautiful as that which pleases the senses. This theory,issuing from the philosophy of sensation of the school of Locke andCondillac, only explains the idea and the feeling of the beautiful bydisfiguring it. It is entirely contradicted by facts. For it co
27、nvertsit into desire, but desire is egotistical and insatiable, whileadmiration is respectful, and is its own satisfaction without seekingpossession.Others have thought the beautiful consists in proportion, and nodoubt this is one of the conditions of beauty, but only one. Anill-proportioned object
28、cannot be beautiful, but the exact correspondenceof parts, as in geometrical figures, does not constitute beauty.A noted ancient theory makes beauty consist in the perfect suitablenessof means to their end. In this case the beautiful is not the useful, itis the suitable; and the latter idea is more
29、akin to that of beauty. Butit has not the true character of the beautiful. Again, order is a lessmathematical idea than proportion, but it does not explain what is freeand flowing in certain beauties.The most plausible theory of beauty is that which makes it consist in twocontrary and equally necess
30、ary elements-unity and variety. A beautifulflower has all the elements we have named; it has unity, symmetry, andvariety of shades of color. There is no beauty without life, and life ismovement, diversity. These elements are found in beautiful and also insublime objects. A beautiful object is comple
31、te, finished, limited withsymmetrical parts. A sublime object whose forms, though not out ofproportion, are less determined, ever awakens in us the feeling of theinfinite. In objects of sense all qualities that can produce the feelingof the beautiful come under one class called physical beauty. But
32、aboveand beyond this in the region of mind we have first intellectual beauty,including the laws that govern intelligence and the creative genius ofthe artist, the poet, and the philosopher. Again, the moral world hasbeauty in its ideas of liberty, of virtue, of devotion, the justice ofAristides, the
33、 heroism of Leonidas.We have now ascertained that there is beauty and sublimity in nature, inideas, in feelings, and in actions. After all this it might be supposedthat a unity could be found amidst these different kinds of beauty. Thesight of a statue, as the Apollo of Belvedere, of a man, of Socra
34、tesexpiring, are adduced as producing impressions of the beautiful; but theform cannot be a form by itself, it must be the form of something.Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moralbeauty which is the basis, the principle, and the unity of the beautiful.Physical beaut
35、y is an envelop to intellectual and to moral beauty.Intellectual beauty, the splendor of the true, can only have forprinciple that of all truth.Moral beauty comprehends two distinct elements, equally beautiful,justice and charity. Thus God is the principle of the three orders ofbeauty, physical, int
36、ellectual, and moral. He also construes the two3great powers distributed over the three orders, the beautiful and thesublime. God is beauty par excellence; He is therefore perfectlybeautiful; He is equally sublime. He is to us the type and sense of thetwo great forms of beauty. In short, the Absolut
37、e Being as absoluteunity and absolute variety is necessarily the ultimate principle, theextreme basis, the finished ideal of all beauty. This was the marvellousbeauty which Diotimus had seen, and which is described in the Banquet ofSocrates.It is our purpose after the previous discussion to attempt
38、to elucidatestill further the idea of art by following its historic development.Many questions bearing on art and relating to the beautiful had beenpropounded before, even as far back as Plotinus, Plato, and Socrates, butrecent times have been the real cradle of aesthetics as a science.Modern philos
39、ophy was the first to recognize that beauty in art is one ofthe means by which the contradictions can be removed between mindconsidered in its abstract and absolute existence and nature constitutingthe world of sense, bringing back these two factors to unity.Kant was the first who felt the want of t
40、his union and expressed it, butwithout determining its conditions or expressing it scientifically. Hewas impeded in his efforts to effect this union by the opposition betweenthe subjective and the objective, by his placing practical reason abovetheoretical reason, and he set up the opposition found
41、in the moralsphere as the highest principle of morality. Reduced to this difficulty,all that Kant could do was to express the union under the form of thesubjective ideas of reason, or as postulates to be deduced from thepractical reason, without their essential character being known, andrepresenting
42、 their realization as nothing more than a simple you ought,or imperative “Du sollst.“In his teleological judgment applied to living beings, Kant comes, on thecontrary, to consider the living organism in such wise that, the generalincluding the particular, and determining it as an end, consequently t
43、heidea also determines the external, the compound of the organs, not by anact springing from without but issuing from within. In this way the endand the means, the interior and exterior, the general and particular, areconfounded in unity. But this judgment only expresses a subjective actof reflectio
44、n, and does not throw any light on the object in itself.Kant has the same view of the aesthetic judgment. According to him thejudgment does not proceed either from reason, as the faculty of generalideas, or from sensuous perception, but from the free play of the reasonand of the imagination. In this
45、 analysis of the cognitive faculty, theobject only exists relatively to the subject and to the feeling ofpleasure or the enjoyment that it experiences.The characteristics of the beautiful are, according to Kant:-1. The pleasure it procures is free from interest.2. Beauty appears to us as an object o
46、f general enjoyment, withoutawakening in us the consciousness of an abstract idea and of a categoryof reason to which we might refer our judgment.3. Beauty ought to embrace in itself the relation of conformity to itsend, but in such a way that this conformity may be grasped without theidea of the en
47、d being offered to our mind.4. Though it be not accompanied by an abstract idea, beauty ought to beacknowledged as the object of a necessary enjoyment.A special feature of all this system is the indissoluble unity of what issupposed to be separated in consciousness. This distinction disappearsin the
48、 beautiful, because in it the general and the particular, the endand the means, the idea and the object, mentally penetrate each othercompletely. The particular in itself, whether it be opposed to itself orto what is general, is something accidental. But here what may beconsidered as an accidental f
49、orm is so intimately connected with the4general that it is confounded and identified with it. By this means thebeautiful in art presents thought to us as incarnate. On the other hand,matter, nature, the sensuous as themselves possessing measure, end, andharmony, are raised to the dignity of spirit and share in its generalcharacter. Thought not only abandons its hostility against nature, butsmiles in her. Sensation and enjoyment are justified and sanctified, sothat nature and liberty, sense and ideas, find their justification andtheir sanctification in this union. Neverthel
