The æsthetic sphere as the sphere of Play.
Schiller defined the æsthetic sphere as the sphere of play (Spiel); the unfortunate term, suggested to him partly by some phrases of Kant, partly, perhaps, by an article on card-games by one Weisshuhn which he published in his review The Hours (Die Horen),[3] has given rise to the belief that he anticipated certain modern doctrines of artistic activity as the overflow of exuberant spirits, analogous with the play of children and animals. Schiller did not fail to warn his readers against such a mistaken interpretation (to which, however, he lent himself) when he begged them not to think of "games in real life, which are usually concerned with wholly material things," nor yet of the idle dreaming of the imagination left to itself.[4] The activity of the play of which he treated held the mean between the material activity of the senses, of nature, of animal instinct or passion as it is called, and the formal activity of intellect and morality. The man who plays, i.e. contemplates nature æsthetically and produces art, sees all natural objects as animated; in such a phantasmagoria mere natural necessity gives place to the free determination of the faculties; spirit appears as spontaneously reconciled with nature, form with matter. Beauty is life, the living form (lebende Gestalt); not life in the physiological sense, since beauty does not extend throughout all physiological life, nor is it restricted to that alone: marble when worked by an artist may have a living form; and a man, although possessed of life and form, need not be a living form.[5] Wherefore art must conquer nature with form: "in an artistic work of true beauty the content ought to be nil, the form everything: by form man is influenced in his entirety; by content in his separate faculties only. The true secret of great artists is that they cancel matter through form (den Stoff durch die Form vertilgt); the more imposing, overwhelming or seductive the matter is in itself, the greater its obstinacy in striving to emphasize its own particular effect, the more the spectator inclines to lose himself immediately in the matter, so much the more triumphant is the art which brings it into subjection and enforces its own sovereign power. The mind of hearer or spectator should remain perfectly free and calm; from the magic circle of art it should issue as pure and perfect as when it left the hands of the Creator. The most frivolous object should be treated in such a manner as to enable us to pass at once to the most serious matters; and the most serious in such a way that we may pass from them to the lightest game." There is a fine art of passion; a passionate fine art would be a contradiction in terms.[6] "So long as man in his early physical state passively absorbs the world of senses and simply feels it, he is one with it; and precisely because he merely is a world there is for him as yet no world at all. Only when in his æsthetic state he places the world outside himself and contemplates it, does he detach his personality from the rest; then a world appears to him, since he is no longer one with the world."[7]
Æsthetic education.
Schiller ascribed high educational value to art thus conceived as at once sensible and rational, material and formal. Not that it teaches moral precepts or excites to good actions; if it acted thus, or when it acted thus, it would at once cease, as we have seen, to be art. Determination in whatsoever direction, to the good or the bad, to pleasure or to duty, destroys the character of the æsthetic sphere, which is rather indeterminism. By means of art man frees himself from the yoke of the senses; but before putting himself spontaneously under that of reason and duty, he takes as it were a little breathing-space by staying in a region of indifference and serene contemplation. "While having no claim to promote exclusively any special human faculty, the æsthetic condition is favourable to each and all without favouritism; and the reason why it favours none in particular is that it is the foundation of the possibility of all alike. Every other exercise gives some inclination to the soul, and therefore presupposes a special limit; æsthetic activity alone is unlimited." This indifference, which if not yet pure form is not pure matter, confers its educational value on art; it opens a way to morality, not by preaching and persuading, that is to say, determining, but by making determination possible. Such is the fundamental concept of his celebrated Letters on the Æsthetic Education of Man (1795), in which Schiller took his cue from the conditions of his times and from the necessity of finding a middle way between supine acquiescence in tyranny and savage rebellion as exemplified by the revolution then raging in France.
Vagueness and lack of precision in Schiller's Æsthetic.
The defects of Schiller's æsthetic doctrine are its lack of precision and its generality. Who has given a better description of certain aspects of art, the catharsis produced by artistic activity, the serenity and calm resulting from the domination over natural impressions? Equally just is his remark that art, although wholly independent of morality, is in some way connected with it. But what precisely this connexion may be, or what the exact nature of æsthetic activity, Schiller does not succeed in explaining. Conceiving the moral and intellectual as the only formal activities (Formtrieb) and denying as a convinced anti-sensationalist in opposition to Burke and philosophers of his type that art can belong to the passionate and sensuous nature (Stofftrieb), he cut himself off from the means of recognizing the general category to which artistic activity belongs. His own concept of the formal is too narrow: too narrow, also, his concept of the cognitive activity, in which he is able to see the logical or intellectual form, but not that of the imagination. What for him was this art he describes as an activity neither formal nor material, neither cognitive nor moral? Was it for him, as for Kant, an activity of feeling, a play of several faculties at once? It would seem so, since Schiller distinguishes four points of view or relations of man with things: the physical, in which these affect our senses: the logical, in which they excite knowledge: the moral, in which they appear to us as an object of rational volition: and the æsthetic "in which they refer to our powers in entirety without becoming the determinate object of any one faculty." For example, a man is pleased æsthetically when his feeling depends in no way on the pleasure of the senses and when he is not conscious of thinking about any law or end.[8] We look in vain for any more conclusive reply.
It must not be overlooked that Schiller delivered a course of lectures on Æsthetic in Jena University in 1792, and that his writings on the subject intended for reviews were couched in a popular style: no less popular, in his own opinion, was the style of the book quoted above, which grew out of a series of letters actually sent to his patron the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg. But the great work to be entitled Rallias, which he intended writing upon Æsthetic, was never completed; the only fragments which have reached us are contained in the correspondence with Körner (1793-1794). From the discussions between the two friends we gather that Körner was not satisfied with Schiller's formula and desired something objective, something more precise, a positive characteristic of the beautiful: and one day Schiller told him that he had definitely discovered such a characteristic. But what it was that he had discovered we do not know; no mention of it occurs in any further document, and we are left in doubt as to whether we have lost an integral part of his thought or merely the momentary illusion of a discovery.
Schiller's caution and the rashness of the Romanticists.
The uncertainty and vagueness of Schiller's theory seem almost a merit in contrast with that which followed. He had constituted himself guardian of the teaching of Kant and refused to abandon the realm of criticism; faithful disciple of his master, he conceived the third sphere not as real but as an ideal, a concept not constitutive but regulative, an imperative. "From transcendental motives, reason here demands that communion be established between formal and material activity; that is to say, there must be an activity of play, since the concept of humanity can be complete only by the union of reality with form, the accidental with the necessary, passivity with liberty. This demand must be made because reason, in conformity with her essence, aims at perfection and at sweeping away all obstacles; and every exclusive operation of one or other activity leaves humanity incomplete and confined within limits."[9] Schiller's thought, as it appears in his correspondence with Körner, has been well represented as follows:" The union of sensibility with liberty in the Beautiful, which does not actually take place but is supposed to do so, suggests to man an intuition of the union of these elements within himself: a union which does not take place actually but ought to do so."[10] The times which followed had no such nice scruples. Kant had given new vigour to the production of works on æsthetic, and, as in the days following Baumgarten, every new year saw a number of new treatises. It was the fashion. "Nothing swarms like æstheticians" (wrote Jean Paul Richter in 1804 when preparing his own book on the subject for publication): "it is rare for a youth who has paid his fees for a course of lectures on Æsthetic not to produce a book on some point of the science in the hope that the public may refund him his expenses by buying his book: some there are indeed who pay their professor's fees out of their author's royalties."[11] It was hoped, not unreasonably, that the exploration of the obscure region of æsthetic might throw some light on metaphysics, and the procedure of artists seemed to offer a good example to philosophers seeking to create a world for themselves: so philosophy modelled itself upon art and, as though to render the transition easier, the concept of art was brought as close as possible to that of philosophy. Romanticism, gaining vogue daily, was a renewal or continuation of that "age of genius" in which the youth of Goethe and Schiller had been passed; and as the period of Sturm und Drang had zealously worshipped the genius who breaks all rules and oversteps all limitations, so did Romanticism hail the domination of a faculty called Fancy, or more frequently Imagination, to which were attributed the most diverse characteristics and the most miraculous effects.