[IX]
THE ÆSTHETIC OF IDEALISM: SCHILLER, SCHELLING, SOLGER, HEGEL
The "Critique of Judgment" and metaphysical idealism.
It is well known that Schelling held the Critique of Judgment to be the most important of the three Kantian Critiques, and that Hegel together with the great majority of the followers of metaphysical idealism had a special affection for the book. According to them the third Critique was the attempt to bridge the gulf, to resolve the antitheses between liberty and necessity, teleology and mechanism, spirit and nature: it was the correction Kant was preparing for himself, the concrete vision which dispelled the last traces of his abstract subjectivism.
F. Schiller.
The same admiration and an opinion even more favourable were extended by them to Friedrich Schiller, the first to elaborate that part of Kant's philosophy and to study the third sphere which united sensibility to reason. "It was the artistic sense dwelling in his also profoundly philosophical mind," says Hegel, "which, against the abstract infinity of Kant's thought, against his living for duty, against his conception of nature and reality, and of sense and feeling as utterly hostile to intellect, asserted the necessity and enunciated the principle of totality and reconciliation, even before it had been recognized by professed philosophers: to Schiller must be allowed the great merit of having been the first to oppose the subjectivity of Kant, and of having dared try to go beyond it."[1]
Relations between Schiller and Kant.
Discussion has raged around the true relation between Schiller and Kant, and it has lately been maintained that his Æsthetic was not, as would seem to be the case, derived from Kant, but from the pandynamism which, starting from Leibniz, had propagated itself in Germany through Creuzens, Ploucket and Reimarus down to Herder, who had conceived a wholly animated nature.[2] There can be no doubt that Schiller shared Herder's conception, as may be seen from the theosophical tone of the fragment of correspondence between Julius and Raphæl and in other writings. It cannot be denied, however, that whatever personal feelings Kant may have had towards Herder, or Herder towards his former teacher (against whose Critique of Judgment he published his Kaligone, as he had replied to the Critique of Pure Reason with his Metacritica), when Kant in a somewhat dubious manner made the first step towards a reconciliation, the breach was at all events partially healed. The dispute is therefore of small importance: we shall find it more useful to observe that Schiller introduced an important correction of Kant's views when he obliterated every trace of the double theory of art and the beautiful, giving no weight to the distinction drawn between pure and adherent beauty, and finally abandoning the mechanical conception of art as consisting in beauty joined to the intellectual concept. It was certainly his own experience of active artistic work that led him to this simplification.