Similarly, in the third phase of history, we will no longer wish for the return of the Greeks 8: It is of course ironic to find the Greeks at the heart of such a quintessentially un-Greek argument, though it is also possible to relate it to the Neo-Platonic dialectic of fall and return that M.
Abrams has applied so effectively to the Romantic era. In the context of the eighteenth-century argument, nature and culture are antithetical terms. How, we wonder, can it then make sense to describe Greek culture as natural? Winckelmann had also used the concept of nature to establish the superiority of Greek sculpture, but his argument is largely restricted to matters pertaining to anatomy, such as the athletic training of Greek youths.
Schiller expands the argument far beyond this narrow base. First, as we have seen, he defines nature as unification, and he uses this term to illuminate not only the Greek religion, which projects humanity into nature and the divine world, but also the quality of Greek society, with its less advanced division of labor, and even Greek individuality, in which the human faculties are not fragmented.
But Schiller is clearly aware of the problem that the Greeks also had a flourishing culture, and so he describes them as having achieved the maximum degree of culture that is still reconcilable with nature: The further advance of culture in modern times necessarily brought a rupture with nature, and the breach can only be healed by the reconstitution of nature at an ideal level, however that is to be understood. In their poetry we do not come across the idea of nature, for nature was their immediate life and not an object of reflection or longing. The stress on simplicity as a feature of Greek poetry may be consistent with the old neoclassical doctrine, but this concept is now embedded in a speculative system of which Boileau and Pope had no inkling.
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On one hand, it stands for the dominion of the intellect that, with its compartmentalization and mechanization, has disrupted an original, natural unity. On the other hand, it means the process by which the rupture can be healed and the unity restored at a higher level. How did Schiller envisage this higher art?
It may seem to be making matters still more complicated when in the Ninth Letter he tells us that Greek art preserved the achievements of Greek nature, but this provides us with our answer. A simple formulation comes in the ninth Brief, where, desiring to preserve the young artist from the harmful influences of modernity, Schiller sends him to school in Greece.
Here he is able to cause the predominantly dactylic rhythm to express a poised and wistful lyricism: For Schiller, the Greeks may represent the best instantiation to date of the fusion of form and life, for which he calls in the Fifteenth Letter, but the principle of form is itself timeless, a metaphysical force that enables us to master the world of flux in which we live. We are not all that far from the world of Gottsched and German neoclassicism here. The original chorus, he writes, grew from the natural and mimetic art of ancient Greece. However, since modern art is not mimetic, the chorus can be retained, albeit with a different justification.
Far from reflecting reality, the task of modern art is to transform reality according to a model that is at once natural and ideal. Although Schiller speaks of the future state as different from Greece, it is still based on Greece as its prefiguration. Hence he calls for the revival of Greek motifs in drama, not merely the chorus but also the creation of a more external and public form of life: Although Schiller used the chorus only once, one can recognize in this wider explanation some more general features of his later dramatic style.
This brings us to the question of whether Schiller responded in any way to the political legacy of ancient Greece. The answer here must be mainly negative. The problem of disunity in Greek history, that is, the actual fragmentation of the country into warring statelets and the frequency of civil strife within them, is barely touched upon. Schiller is thinking here of a national theater as a means of overcoming German Vielstaaterei.
And yet, as he would have had to acknowledge, the theater failed to have any such effect in Greece, and the similar hopes placed in the German theater would turn out to be no less chimerical. What is left is the fallback position of the theater, or of art in general, serving as a refuge for ideals for which there is no room in real life, that is, as a substitute and a consolation and not as a means of making them a reality.
Two qualifications should be made to this depoliticized picture. Castigating the Spartan legislator, Schiller writes: All this is still abstract, but further on in the lecture Schiller writes that Solon understood these relations correctly, and hence built a state in which, in contrast to the Spartan tyranny, men governed themselves and were thus capable of the highest cultural attainments.
For this reason, the references to the historical Athens and the poetic image of the Greek Golden Age do not really represent distinct interpretations of Greece but are rather the two faces of a single complex idea. Greece figures here as the locus of two succeeding eras, both of which are states of nature, although the second is also one of culture.
Next, in a passage of astonishing concreteness, he describes the arrival of civilization and its advance in Greece up to the limits set by nature. Greek religion, art, technology, commerce, and exploration all receive their due. Even the inevitable social disunity can lead to new forms of cooperation: Significantly, it is not the selfgovernment of the Greek republics but their patriotism that Schiller celebrates, and also, by his skillful translation of the Thermopylae epitaph ll.
This is not to suggest that individual texts are inaccessible to a straightforward reading. The ballad, based on a story from late antiquity, tells of the unmasking of two murderers at a performance of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, during which the chorus of the Furies provokes such terror in the criminals that they spontaneously confess their crime. The elegy begins with an evocation of the close relationship in antiquity between poets and their audience, and goes on to celebrate the wider harmony existing at that time between idea and reality; not only were the gods visible, the poet also did not have to struggle for an inner vision but took his inspiration from the reality that surrounded him.
In both poems, Greece serves as the ideal locus for a paradigm of humanity and society. They portray a world in which aesthetic, religious, and ethical experience all work together, in which inner and outer experience mirror each other, and in which the poet is the mouthpiece for communal beliefs. It is a powerful vision, and we do not disparage Schiller by saying that he based it on the deficiencies and absences that he felt in himself and in the world in which he lived. But with its combination of personal engagement and intellectual sophistication, of formal clarity and moving lyricism, it deserves to be counted among the finest and most interesting versions of classicism to have appeared in European letters.
It is more likely that his ideas were transmitted to him by Wieland. Klaus Harro Hilzinger et al. Known as the Frankfurter Ausgabe; Frankfurt am Main: Poems are quoted from vol. His hexameter translation of part of book 1 is a school exercise and is of less interest. The name Ludovisi refers to the Roman villa where the original could be inspected.
As Rolf-Peter Janz informs us in his commentary 8: Schiller must thus have known it only from hearsay. This crisis in his concept of nature gives rise to the rupture in his aesthetics between the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime. On page 73, Auerbach quotes his own definition of figura from a previous article: For a recent discussion, see Ritzer. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
Meaning of "Marquis" in the German dictionary
The Poetry of Desire. The Poet and the Age. Poetik und Hermaneutik 4. Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Griechenland in Herders typologischer Geschichtsphilosophie. Loeb Classical Library, London: Iphigenie und Maria Stuart. Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Resigning his post as a military doctor in Stuttgart in September left Schiller without a steady income and heavily in debt.
As a historian he gained new intellectual perspectives, social connections, and sources of income. In Schiller moved from southwest to central Germany and soon became a noted partner in the flourishing book and newspaper industry. Already well known as a dramatist, as a writer he encountered personal engagement and intellectual interest within socially open-minded literary and artistic circles in Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, and Weimar.
In the second issue of the magazine, in February , the second act of Don Carlos appeared. The encouragement of the prominent Weimar writer Christoph Martin Wieland in the fall of was critical. The young historical narrator became courageous. In this subsequent work, at least four volumes of personal memoirs from European history since the Middle Ages were to appear annually. Schiller accepted the task of writing an introductory historical overview for every volume. But that was not enough: His involvement in the German university system, with which he was not yet familiar, was a personal challenge.
Schiller also recorded other of his earliest lectures and published them soon thereafter. The end of saw the continuation of his Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande.
He overestimated his energy, and became a victim of the book until, in January , his appalling physical condition caused him to take a break, at which point he either dropped his previous commitments or handed them over to someone else. He devoted his time first to aesthetic and anthropological questions, publishing them in extensive pamphlets. In , poetry and drama moved back to the center of his attention, partly due to the influence of his friendship with Goethe. For it is based on a problematic approach that is retrospective in nature, and in many respects often the anti-historical resentment of those who are committed to literature in the narrower sense.
One has to keep in mind that Schiller the historian was still an artist. For him and his contemporaries, art and science were the two great cultural realms, and were related in their investigation and mediation of truth. Beginning in Stuttgart, stories based on authentic life experiences fascinated Schiller. As an author he had a need to tell true stories. In the story he reports on the destiny of two brothers in the environs of Stuttgart. He places the story into the context of the most recent history and its educated society, telling it in the form of a drama. Here the original relationship between his literature and his historical project becomes graphically clear, as Schiller narrates once again a nexus of occurrences that extend from the framework of the everyday and were of special interest to him.
As an author, he considered it his task to bring them back to life with the aid of narrative representation.
MARQUIS - Definition and synonyms of Marquis in the German dictionary
But, before writing the final version of Verbrecher aus Infamie, Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre Criminal Out of Dishonor, , which was based on the life of an actual criminal, Schiller reflected thoroughly on the functions of historical narration and its specific methods. The first printing of the second act of Don Carlos, the most important historical drama of the young Schiller, is the focus of attention of the aforementioned second issue of Thalia. His preparations for writing the play included considerably more study of historical literature than for his earlier pieces.
In the process of studying the literature, Schiller recognized that an appealing, modern literary-historical narration ran parallel to traditional historiography. For some time, Schiller had known Sebastien Mercier, the French dramatic poet who at that time was capturing the stage with his Tableaux historiques. In the second issue of Thalia, Schiller published a translation of a characterization of King Philip II of Spain by Mercier that was associated thematically with Don Carlos, thereby presenting another piece of historical prose.
Even though he borrowed the topos, the verse makes it clear that, next to narrative stories, Schiller also had an overarching concept of universal history. As has been mentioned, in the course of the year Schiller took on a new literary project that included the term history in its title: In addition to the many forms of historical narration and reflections on history that Schiller undertook during this period, we point once again to the two historical dramas that originated in these years. After delving into all of these forms of historical representation that he had been using since , in the fall of Schiller shifted to history.
The forms of historical thinking and representation that he had developed previously affected his new practice of critical, referenced, and pragmatic historical portrayals. It is only at this point that Schiller depicts himself as a historian and is recognized as such by his readership. The transition to scientific historical narration was indeed a leap for Schiller in an existential sense. In his letters of January of that year, Schiller underscores the following points: Instead, in historical narration, he borrows themes taken from external sources and is able to process them freely.
He hopes for a different audience. Schiller does not only want to write for friends of belles-lettres, who are mostly women. He also wishes to reach the politically and economically interested businessman. He needs a higher income. After his previous bad experiences, he now places his bets on historical literature and on collaboration in magazines.
In sum, for Schiller, the transition to professional historical writing was tied to a new outline for his life that goes beyond a change of subjects. He wanted to be better anchored socially and, with the means at his disposal, to be active in public life. In the various states of the Holy Roman Empire, the s were high points for the reform movement and its initiatives, especially in education.
Translation of «Marquis» into 25 languages
His interest in alternative social behavior was visible early on. With his second drama project, Fiesco , he referred back to a national uprising in the city of Genoa. In Kabale und Liebe Intrigue and Love, written —83, published , he staged the social conflicts of his own epoch, and, in Don Carlos , the stage became the world theater of European history. It was only after these historical dramas that Schiller completed the transition to the writing of history, thematizing the Dutch revolution of the sixteenth century in his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung.
As he writes in his introduction, he wished to erect a monument to the strength of the middle class: In reading the introduction 6: Schiller first became aware of the history of the Dutch revolution of the late sixteenth century in conjunction with the writing of his drama Don Carlos. He began writing in August , after settling in Weimar. At the beginning of October he informed his publisher that he had completed the text.
One could almost say that, on that evening, the historian Friedrich Schiller was born. Wieland, the influential editor of the journal Teutscher Merkur, was present, and, as Schiller was to report to Huber in his letter of October 26, , proclaimed that Schiller was born to write histories. Wieland agreed to publish the text in his journal. It appeared in that publication at the beginning of In an accompanying note, Wieland declared the dramatist and poet to be a historian. His audience, the German educated class, now expected a historical work from him.
Motivated by Wieland, as well as by the prospect of a professorship at the University of Jena, Schiller knitted together the next phase in his life by turning decidedly in this direction. He now concentrated completely on historical work and on source materials with which he had not been familiar, but which provided him with a new self-awareness. Before completing his account of the Union of Utrecht in July of , Schiller had begun to envision continuing this thread of history in a multi-volume project on the topic of the fall of the Netherlands.
He also provided a comprehensive summary of his historical research for the volume. He named the sources from which he had profited most 6: Second, Schiller cited more recent authors, specifically from the fields of statistics and economic history, with whose help he could add a cultural-historical dimension to his manner of representation.
Influenced by the then-increasing interest in psychology, Schiller dedicated considerable space to character analyses of his leading dramatic figures. Beginning with Don Carlos Schiller succeeded in helping to bring about a breakthrough in the direction of historical writing in Germany. Schiller wanted to tie these traditions together. He wanted to go back to the sources themselves in a critical and pragmatic manner. At the same time, he wanted to write in a polished style.
With such historical narration Schiller aimed at practicing a philosophical way of thinking about history that places stories into a modern context of development.
One may conclude that Schiller followed the events in France with particular attention, sympathy, and expectation. He saw it necessary to create a new discourse concerning the idea and goal of universal history. Furthermore, new orientations opened up for the methodology and self-understanding of the writing of history. In his inaugural lecture, Schiller juxtaposes two different and fundamental approaches: The latter is the philosophical study of history.
However, historical writing since Aristotle had been focused only on actual occurrences; it was the responsibility of philosophy to inquire into the universal and the true. Schiller opposes this traditional limitation of history. He was convinced that universal history could achieve something that had been considered impossible in the Western tradition, namely, the arrival at universally valid truth-claims from a close study of the past. The individual human being would be liberated from the limitations of his private existence and placed into a larger social context.
This programmatic introductory address was followed by a number of lectures that illuminated specific connections between occurrences in human history. Three of these lectures have been preserved. They give us an impression of how Schiller completed his project of universal history. He refers to a biblical tradition, and presents an example that shows the courage and innovative power of his enlightened spirit to interpret the Bible in a new way.
In a separate section of the essay, Schiller addresses the origins of social inequality. He ends with an analysis of the origin of legends concerning monarchical sovereignty in light of the idea of the sovereignty of the people. Yet he also refers back to a report about ancient Egyptian mysteries.
Here he highlights the problem of the self-liberation of an oppressed people. Schiller singles out the constitutive role of Moses as the leader of his people, that is, the figure of a ruler. In addition, Schiller deals with the question of what significance religion can play in such a liberating process; on the one hand, for the common people, and, on the other hand, for the educated.
At the same time, a third reality is involved: Its central themes stand in the foreground and form the criteria for the comparison: Eventually, in the discussion about constitutional patriotism in a republic of citizens, he pleads for representative democracy. With that, his writing attains a political relevance achieved by no other universal-historical text. Schiller composed all of these universal-historical texts during the first year of the French Revolution. With his unswerving republicanism he was even ahead of developments, constitutionally.
His vision, which was directed at those nations that were undergoing a process of emancipation, was broadened to a universal one. In these weeks, he considered the ideal of a self-liberating humanity to be the only sensible mode of philosophically-oriented historical thinking. In light of the democratic revolution, which was now crossing national borders, history had indeed become a history of humanity. He had already publicly posed these questions early in his career. That he asked the question in this way reveals that he had in mind different basic conceptions of the general significance of history and its future role in a middle-class society.
Schiller points out that contemporary historiography still considered itself to be part of rhetoric, whose task it is to offer a moral explanation of past histories which, as he put it, warm the heart. For his part, however, Schiller argues in favor of separating historical writing from rhetoric, to which it had been attached since ancient times. It could now concentrate on its own specific duties and have its own legitimate methods: Young Schiller makes his point on the basis of a psychology of the soul Erfahrungsseelenkunde that was then considered to be modern.
It is remarkable how clearly he pleads for the emancipation of the writing of history from rhetoric while separating drama from history, even though both merge in his person. The historian has to uncover the motives of human behavior with cold reasoning and has to explain its structural relationships, but not take a moral stand. If he does this, he offends the republican freedom of the reading public, whose task it is to serve as the jury 7: He points out the historiographical significance of police, medical, and prison files 7: This call for a clear separation of historical writing and poetry by the young Schiller, which has hardly been recognized, makes his transition two years later from the one discipline, drama, to the other, history, more understandable.
As the preface to the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande exhibits, Schiller underscores the separation of historical writing from the novel. However, this raises the question of what form historical representation should take. The historian remains true to his credo: For him, contemporary historiography was on its way to becoming an empirically analytical science. The reference back to the sources and their critical analysis is of central importance here. By his own admission he did not want to become a professional scholar of history.
His primary concern was with problems of historical interpretation, as well as with the transmission and presentation of historical connections. Since the time of his more intensive study of history in Dresden, Schiller was influenced more and more by the historiography of the English-Scottish Enlightenment William Robertson, Robert Watson, Edward Gibbon.
They saw it as a new science of humanity, a genus of nature that runs through different stages of progressive development to become, and further cultivate, middle-class society. Schiller had become familiar with these works as a student at the Karlsschule. Schiller was impressed with this work, and even more so with Kant. He certainly did not overlook the fact that, in his foreword, Kant expressed the hope that the writing of history would have its own Newton.
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What Kant had in mind was a historian who not only supplied intellectual descriptions of events, but remained focused on the possible goal of a history of enlightenment, namely a world comprised of nation-states in which there was middle-class freedom for all and an internationally secure rule of law. Schiller himself had in mind a universal history that was to be enacted methodologically and critically. But he held on to history as the central realm of experience that challenged not only the philosophical thinker but also the poet and dramatist.
Schiller was no doubt the last historian to adopt the perspective of the Enlightenment before it was shattered by the experience of revolution. But even this he understood to be a challenge to his own thinking about universal history that further motivated him to rethink its own traits and their historical interconnections in the hope of achieving an authoritative standpoint in the present. The winter semester of to was the first one during which Schiller devoted his full energies to his work at the university.
Here he addresses the connection between the writing of history and the drama of history, the relationship between historical and political truth, and offers opinions about sublime events in history. This meant, above all, his critical assessment of the French Revolution. New problems and perspectives emerged from this experience of history. After having moved to Jena, Schiller met a number of women of the court, among whom was Charlotte von Lengefeld, to whom he proposed. When the wedding was announced in December , the ruling duke, Carl August of Saxony-Weimar, took a personal interest in the marriage.
Schiller was named Hofrat and thereby became worthy of appearing at court and entitled to all attending rights and privileges. At first, he received a modest stipend. His wife could not live without a maidservant, nor Schiller without a servant, and the latter immediately became his scribe. Schiller adopted a new orientation to life. In addition to newspaper reports, the personal accounts of those who had traveled to Paris gained in importance by the end of the year, especially his first conversations with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the skeptical liberal.
To Schiller, Humboldt radiated an enlightened disposition that was realistic and reserved in the face of any idealization of political revolutions, and they became close friends. It was not until May that Schiller was able to turn his attention to the development of this project for the Calender. He began this undertaking in the manner of his previous optimistic view of history, but texts being written at that time were characterized by a different view of political relationships and developments. They are the subjects of history.
People are arranged mainly according to their activities. Since the time of its appearance at the fall book fair of , it was a huge success and enjoyed the most positive reviews. Within a year of the appearance of the first part of the work, Wieland would write in his Neuen Teutschen Merkur: Selten ist in Deutschland eine Schrift mit lebhafterem und allgemeinerem Beifall gelesen worden [. The unusually high honorarium he would receive for writing the work was not the least of the reasons why Schiller accepted.
As he was working on it, from May on, it became clear to him that the project would not be restricted to one essay. His depiction of the war of states begins in Book 2, following a masterfully written overview of political and religious issues in the Holy Roman Empire — according to an outline of political relations in the European states — with an account of the so-called Westphalian War — Schiller interpreted the Bohemian Revolt —20 as an intra-Habsburgian occurrence during which the young emperor Ferdinand II had to prove himself.
In connection with the portrayal of the war, these personages are now brought into the foreground. In the course of Book 2, the two main characters, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, are introduced. The problem of the creation of a European community, with which Schiller had opened his portrayal, remains unsolved. They also have his earlier historical writing more firmly in mind, above all the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande.
With this work Schiller departed from the academic style of historical writing. He no longer included references to his sources and did not carry out a timeconsuming study of source materials before beginning to write. Schiller the historical writer of no longer considered the battle for freedom and political independence from a despotic ruler legitimate, either during the Bohemian revolt or that of the Netherlands. Princes and military commanders determined the events.
Character sketches instead occur upon the death or departure of historical personages. The writer thus heightens the significance of the leading figures as representatives of their time. In the first part of the work, Gustavus Adolphus is the most prominent hero. In part two, which was written two years later, Schiller gives greater attention to the politics of his ascendancy.
With the historiographical work that he had begun in and then continued during his professorial appointment in Jena, he had an academic audience in mind. Following his experiences with the time-consuming work of the historian and his quarrels with colleagues at the university, he was disillusioned by the academic world and sought a way to leave the university at the end of In his historical writing it became increasingly more difficult for him to bridge the gap between the academic form and the interests of his readers.
In spite of the pointed topic of a war history, his work resonated broadly. By the end of the eighteenth century, the German reading public included large portions of middle-class society. Schiller possessed a critical consciousness and a high regard for the reading public. The announcement for his next Thalia-project, the Rheinische Thalia 8: He knew his readership was divided.
A new mass public stood in contrast to the traditional, academic one. With the advent of this public, Schiller developed a need for greater knowledge of historical development. The new interest in history among the German intellectual classes and in the schools — which contemporary reviews clearly show — was tied directly to the increasing interest in and consciousness of the development of a German nation. This interest in history could not be satisfied by academic historiography: Schiller had known for some time now that the theater offered that opportunity. Therefore, it is not surprising that immediately following the success of his historical work, Schiller would have been contemplating a drama about Wallenstein, although he did not realize this plan until Wallenstein became a drama of a new kind.
Having taken up a broad study of history, Schiller wanted to create a true drama of history Geschichtsdrama. He was concerned with the representation and interpretation of a historical reality and, unlike before, with the idealization of historical personages. In the meantime, it was acclaimed as the most modern, realistic drama of the nineteenth century Hinderer, , By , the Geschichte had gone through several editions. Even today, most of the interest in the historical work is sparked by the drama, including that of scholars of literature in particular.
What is yet to be evaluated is a depiction of history that is no longer driven by a teleological viewpoint, but is immanent and oriented toward the concrete — a Geschichtsschreibung in transition. Three interrelated dimensions should be emphasized: First, its connection to its time. As the Holy Roman Empire reached more and more of a crisis through the challenge posed by the French, a depiction of its earlier time of great crisis must have been especially interesting.
The depiction of the birth of the modern European state system could also demand interest at a time in which that system was being questioned because of the division of Poland and the challenge that revolutionary France presented. Next, the person of Wallenstein. From the start, Schiller perceived Wallenstein as a rebel against the emperor and the empire. He then pursued this relationship in his drama and explored the problem of a possible revolution within the empire.
Schiller raised two aspects of this problem for discussion: In this regard it was not overshadowed until the Second World War. Schiller was considered by the educated public of the time to be the most modern writer of history Geschichtsschreiber in Germany. He saw himself as being drawn to great historical events. This enormous productivity was suddenly interrupted at the beginning of by a physical collapse that became more aggravated in May of that year. Schiller was compelled to radically reduce his activities as a historian, which had reached a new high point. His lectures on history at the university were cancelled immediately and never taken up again.
He was able to place the Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoirs into the hands of his Jena colleague and friend Paulus. Wieland had written a preface for this volume and, at the end, developed a unique perspective: Schiller could have a much greater, even a national, effect through the writing of historical dramas; he could become a German Shakespeare.
With that, Wallenstein was introduced to the public: Schiller had been working on the drama since the beginning of In December the Danish nobility offered Schiller a three-year annual stipend, which put him solidly in a position to start a new plan of work. Schiller could then turn more intensively to the clarification of aesthetic-philosophical questions that had become increasingly pressing for him since Even his work with the literature of ancient Greece continued in dialogue with Humboldt.
Alongside this, in the spring, he had written two insightful introductory texts to writings that he agreed to edit for a publisher in Jena: However, we should not be misled into thinking that this was the end of his interest in history and its representation. To a great extent, the Wallenstein project alone shows how important history was for him. His treatment of the Peace of Westphalia was original and served as a crowning touch to his work. Were military geniuses now the great movers of history?
Here, the genius of the young commander Alexander von Parma is celebrated. With the Wallenstein drama, which he worked on beginning in , the confrontation with this political-historical topic was renewed and deepened. Could a genial commander and organizer like Wallenstein be a model for a national-political revolution in Germany?
Schiller had lost his earlier perspectives on the development of a universal history as he had drafted them in his inaugural lecture at Jena, due to his disappointments over the course of the French Revolution and its consequences in Europe. From mid-July on, Schiller no longer believed that political revolutions were meaningful, and even considered them a fundamental danger, in a similar way as had Kant.
In his historical studies he gave up completely the political concept of revolution that formed the basis of his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. In a letter on May 5, , Schiller wrote to Erhard: History could no longer be regarded as a source of general truths and knowledge. Sie sind ebenso selten wie die Meisterwerke auf allen anderen Gebieten der Kunst.
Was tat der Marquis de Sade? Marquis de Sade, Fabian Elias Gebauer, Philosophien des Bosen, 16 Quellen im The book investigates the traces left in Schiller's biography, works and thinking by Adam Weishaupt's order of the Illuminati. Auf fein Herz deutend. Wem ich nur Gott Neehenfchaft abzugen habe. Darf ich Ihnen einen Rath eben. Eric Nelson has recently highlighted the question of property to identify two different strains within the republican tradition.
Following Plato, More, Harrington and Montesquieu regarded equal distribution of land as an efficient instrument to prevent corruption and guarantee concord and a virtuous life. Among the many features of Sparta which attracted attention from eighteenth- century writers one might single out the educational control of the passions and their transformation into patriotic virtues.
He thus pro- posed a militia, a patriotic education fostered by the state and national tourna- ments, to be modelled on antiquity. Education should therefore be brought back into the hands of the state and the public. Rousseau claimed that one of the basic principles of a legitimate government was to raise its children as loyal and virtuous citi- zens. Apart from the Cretans and the Persians, this had however only been achieved by the Spartans. He praised the mythical legislator for replacing them with a strong sense of honour and patriotism.
This staunch adherent of Rousseau believed the latter virtues to be directly connected with frugal living and the Spartan limitations on travel and property. He thus implicitly rejected luxury and profit-seeking as morally and politically pernicious. On the one hand, by keeping them in poverty, he had undermined their material power basis. On the other hand, Lycurgus had, from the beginning, mandated the indoctrination of children into patriotic ele- ments of the polis through public education.
On the eighteenth- century Swiss debates about patriotism see Simone Zurbuchen, Patriotismus und Kosmopolitismus: SCHMIDT psychagogie of his fellow citizens; in his view the legislator had consistently replaced noxious passions in their souls with honour and patriotism. In his review in the Briefe die Neueste Literatur betreffend of he sharply repudiated the Spartan republican model while taking a fairly humanitarian and cosmopolitan stance similar to that of Schiller twenty-five years later.
On the one hand, he dissociated himself from Rousseau by repudiating classical republican mod- els. Schiller thus criticizes a concept of virtuous, frugal life which only revolves around the res publica, the republic, without taking humanity and its potential for improvement seriously into account.
It was planned for or men and it [i. Abbt here was not concerned with the Spartan constitution. Abbt, Vom Tode, pp. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler Cambridge, , pp. Never- theless, as will be discussed below, he was fully aware of the implications for human society of a modern specialization of knowledge and separation of labour. His criticism was not confined to Sparta, but could be targeted at the ancient free states in general. He critically scrutinizes not only the missing principles of representation but also the entire intention of the ancient laws.
As Quentin Skinner has convincingly shown, laws play a central role in republican theory as a means of preventing corruption and rein- forcing virtues. He distinguishes this from a roughly liberal concept, which regards laws as instruments for claiming certain rights from society. Even prior to his systematic reception of Kantian philosophy, he not only viewed autonomy as the essence of moral agency.
Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. Diese Mittel zeugen oft von unrichtigen Begriffen, und einer einseitigen Vorstellungsart. Positive legal proscription of duties would take away the free appear- ance of moral action and replace it with a mechanical fulfilment of law, which might be driven by fear of punishment not a rational love of doing good. The claim that the Jacobins wanted to imitate the liberty, austerity and frugality of ancient repub- lics was in many ways a distortion of their complex position.
Constant particu- larly drew on the accusation that ancient liberty expressed by permanent direct participation was completely incompatible with modern conditions such as large populations and the division between private and public. With his criticism of Sparta Schiller thus moved closer to liberal and consti- tutionalist positions than might be expected from the republican rhetoric and hatred of tyrants that characterized his earlier dramas. Biancamaria Fontana Cambridge, , pp. There is a vast literature on this subject: Isaiah Berlin famously took this dis- tinction as a point of departure for his own argument on the nature of negative and posi- tive liberty: Henry Hardy Oxford, , pp.
One Concept Too Many? These texts can be accessed via: Une traduction des principes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau Paris, On Constant and antiquity cf. Giovanni Paoletti, Benjamin Constant et les Anciens: Politique, Religion, Histoire Paris, In contrast to many other early liberals, he wants to secure this individ- ual space not primarily as a means for economic activity but rather to allow individual self-perfection and Bildung.
Particularly with regard to the French Revolution, he took a more fundamental, anthropological approach to the problems of contemporary society. Constant and others, despite their criti- cism, were basically supporting the results of the Thermidorian revolution. Burrow Indianapo- lis, Beiser draws no comparison with Constant. In his brilliant recent account, Schiller as Philosopher: On this and my differing position see below.
SCHMIDT about the possibility of a real political change unless the subjects of such a change themselves had been prepared for freedom. In the tenth of his Aesthetic Let- ters he claims that only in modern times — if ever — could liberty and culture be reconciled. Sparta and indeed Athens had lost their liberty together with their barbarism.
Synonyms and antonyms of Marquis in the German dictionary of synonyms
As highlighted in recent research, he thereby developed a similar sensitivity to the implications of the separation of labour as contempo- rary Scottish thinkers such as Adam Ferguson to whose moral philosophy Schiller was much indebted during his early period. While his analysis clearly encompasses the economic sphere, his examples of how the state transforms individuals into functional parts of its machinery are rather concerned with the expansion of bureaucracy by enlightened absolutist rulers in Germany. He mentions the discovery of the satellite of Jupiter by telescope or the writ- ing of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Drama, Thought and Politics Cambridge, , pp. Willoughby Oxford, , reprinted Wilkinson and Willoughby, p. Consequently, he was very much aware of the problems of coupling liberty with modern civilized society. Despite this gloomy diagnosis, Schiller was not part of a broad group of intellectuals such as Rousseau, Adam Ferguson and other adherents of the civic humanist tradition who proposed classical republican virtues as both a remedy and a countermeasure. What struck Schiller most was the outbreak of sheer violence — in particu- lar by women — in the early years of the Revolution.
Schiller was deeply convinced that passions and reason or intellectual capacities had not been reconciled or harmonized within a fractured society. Either he was dominated by the despotism of his natural needs, his passions and senses, or he suffered from the asceticism of a rule of abstract rational principles over his sensual and emotional nature: Schiller calls it the Naturstaat Natural state which only provides the necessary means for human survival such as security.
SCHMIDT Nevertheless, he still aimed at the Vernunftstaat, where law follows the prescription of the categorical imperative, as the sole end of social reform. The dynamic state is characterized as a state where people claim rights and force each other into society to fulfil their self-interest.
Since Rousseau views a return to the primal state of inno- cent humanity as unrealistic, he argues that to overcome this alienation man must become fully political as in ancient Sparta. In contrast, Schiller claims that we must develop the full potential for our humanity before we can attain full political liberty.
Taking up the language of republican moral economy in his letters to the Prince of Holstein-Augustenburg in , the first drafts of the Aesthetic Letters, he claims that only the moral character of the citizens can produce and sustain political and civil liberty in the state. Combating the opposition between our sensual and intellectual nature, manifested in the two state models, Schiller proposed aesthetics as a remedy to reconcile them.
His point of departure was Kantian philosophy, in particu- lar the Critique of Judgement, which he eagerly studied in Appropriating this notion, while at the same time distancing himself from Kant, Schiller strove to square the circles. He wanted to have things both ways, preserving the autonomy of 86 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. For a similar, but earlier, position by the Swiss historian and political theorist Iselin cf.
Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau, p. Beauty and art should function as a means to morality and a free society as well as remaining ends in themselves. This is the core of the notion of aesthetic education. He thus departed from dominant ideas of using arts as mere tools to improve morality and virtue.
The various turns and facets of his argument have been impressively analysed by Beiser and need not be rehearsed here. One follows the Kantian notion of a free and spontaneous moral reasoning. However, as he makes very clear, this moral freedom can be inhibited by our physical and sensitive nature, our passions and drives, from fully realizing its capacities in the world. He thus proposes a second notion of freedom, in which our sensitive nature is not suppressed by but reconciled with our intellect. Only in this condition of aesthetic freedom can we realize the full capacities of our being.
Art and beauty are not only symbols of this equilibrium. Human self-realization or wholeness is itself a form of beauty which allows us to fully articulate our moral autonomy. Schiller was building on the Kantian concept of disinterested pleasure as it is already manifested in the anthropological play-drive of children and primi- tives and is further refined in the appreciation of the arts.
A certain, consciously idealized understanding of the Greek or, more precisely, the Athenian citizen uniting civic duties with aesthetic expertise was still very much at the core of his concept of the aesthetic education and the aesthetic state. See Beiser, Schiller, pp.