Schiller and Idealism
Æsthetics and Ethics
In
this last lecture I want to deal with a particular question
which connects up with the lecture in which I discussed
Schiller's influence on the present. The problem of aesthetics
in Germany comes in here because Schiller stands in close
relationship to the establishment of aesthetics as a science
— the science of the beautiful.
We
have seen what Schiller's attitude was to the beautiful at
different periods of his life. Schiller saw in the beautiful
something which had a peculiar cultural value. Now a
science of aesthetics such as we know to-day is only 150 years
old. It is true that Aristotle had written on Poetics, but for
centuries these views remained stationary. We know that even
Lessing harked back to Aristotle. No real advance was made
until the Eighteenth Century when Baumgarten grew up in the
Wolffian philosophy and wrote a book on the beautiful called
Aesthetica in 1750. He distinguishes the
beautiful from the true in that, as he says, the true contains
a clear idea, while the beautiful exists in unclear and
confused ideas. It was only a few years before Schiller's time
that ideas like this could occur.
We
have a sort of aesthetics even in Kant's Critique of
Judgment, but in him we have nothing but theory; he never
had a living idea of what beauty is, and never got three miles
away from his birthplace at Königsberg, and never saw any
important work of art; and so could only write from the
standpoint of abstract philosophy. Schiller, in his Aesthetic
Letters, was the first to grasp the problem in any living
way.
What
was the position at the time? Goethe looked longingly to
Greece, and Winckelmann also cast a regretful glance back at
the age when men copied the divine in their art. Schiller felt
the same regretful longing during his second period, as we can
see from his Götter Griechenlands. Again, in
Greek drama, what is it but a religious feeling that lies at
the back of it. It is based on the mystery, the secret of God
who becomes man, who suffers as man, dies and rises again. What
happened in the soul was regarded as a purification; and even
through the Poetic of Aristotle there still passes a faint
breath of it. The tragic was to consist in the
“production of an action which aroused pity and fear and
aimed at the purification of these feelings.” It was
difficult to understand what was meant by that; and
Lessing meditated a good deal about it. In the Nineteenth
Century a vast literature grew up around the problem, and whole
libraries could be filled with books dealing with Katharsis.
The idea was not understood because men did not understand from
what it had grown up.
In
Aeschylus we can still see something of this “drama of
the God.” In the middle of the action stood Dionysos as
the great dramatic figure, and the chorus round about him
accompanied the action. This is how Edouard Schuré has
recreated for us the mystery drama. The dramatic cult-action
had the definite object of leading man to a higher level of
existence. It was seen that man is gripped by passions, that
his lower life makes him kin to them; but he can rise above
them if the higher that lives in him is purified; he can raise
himself by looking at the divine pattern. This type of
representation was meant to bring man more easily to
ennoble himself than could be achieved by teaching. As
Schopenhauer said, it is easy enough to preach morality but
very hard to establish it. It was only at a later age of
humanity that Socrates' view grew up that virtue is teachable.
But virtue is something that lives in man and is natural to
him, as eating and drinking are; he can be led to it, if the
divine is awoken within him, by the picture of the suffering
god. This purification by the divine pattern was called
Katharsis. Pity and fear were to be called forth; ordinary
sympathy which is connected with the personal was to be raised
to the great impersonal sympathy when the god was seen
suffering for mankind. Then the dramatic action was humanised,
and in the Middle Ages we can see how morality separated off
and appeared independently. Thus in Christianity there was
produced partially what lived incarnate in the Mysteries. The
Greek looked with his own eyes on the god who rose again from
humiliation. In the mysteries virtue was not merely preached
but put before the eyes of men.
Schiller felt very intensely the desire to give men back this
knowledge to unite the sense-world and the moral. The core of
his poetry is the longing to reconcile these two — the
senses and morality, that morality which Kant had interpreted
so rigidly that duty led men away from everything which
appeared as natural inclination. Schiller, on the contrary,
demanded that duty should coincide with inclination; he wanted
passion to be so cleansed that it could become identical with
duty. This is why he revered Goethe so much, for in him he saw
a perfect union of the sense-world and the moral.
He
looked for this unification in the beautiful. And since
Schiller possessed to an unusual degree the German quality of
an aesthetic conscience, he wanted to make art a means of
raising man to a higher level of existence. During the
classical period there was a strong feeling that the beautiful
did not exist merely to fill up idle hours but that it was the
bridge between the sense-world and the divine. Schiller pushed
far enough to find freedom here. Inclination is no longer to be
suppressed: he remarked that a man must be very low in the
scale if he has to be virtuous in opposition to his own
inclinations. His inclination must be developed so far that he
acts virtuously of himself. Earlier in his The Stage as a
moral Institution he had preached something very like the
severe Kantian morality.
“In the conquest of the matter by the form lies the
secret of the master.” But what is, in fact, the material
of the poet? In what attitude can we find the right view of the
beautiful? As long as we are interested only in a single face,
we have not yet got the true artistic view; there is still a
clinging to matter. (“Heed the `what' but heed more the
`how'!”) As long as a poet shows that he hates a villain,
as if this were a personal interest, he still clings to matter
and not the form; he has not yet reached the aesthetic view. He
only attains that if the villain is represented in such a way
that the natural order, and not the poet, inflicts the
punishment. Then the “world karma” is
accomplished; world-history becomes a world-judgment. The poet
disregards himself and looks at world history objectively. This
means moreover that what Aristotle said is realised, that
poetry is truer than history. In history we cannot always
survey the whole event; it is only an extract that lies before
us so that we often get an impression of injustice. In this way
a work of art is truer than history.
Thus
was created a pure and noble conception of art; the
purification, the Katharsis, stands beyond sympathy and
antipathy. The spectator should stand before a work of art with
a pure, almost godlike feeling, and see before him an
objective, divine image of the world, and create for himself a
microcosm. The dramatist shows us within a limited
framework how guilt and atonement are connected, shows us
in detail what the truth is, but gives this truth universal
currency. Goethe means the same thing when he says that the
beautiful is a manifestation of natural laws which, without the
beautiful, would never find expression.
Goethe
and Schiller looked for a realism, but it was an idealistic
realism. Nowadays we think that we can get realism by an exact
copying of nature. Schiller and Goethe would have said that
that is not the whole truth; the sense-world only represents a
part of what is perceptible and lacks the spiritual; nor can we
regard it as truth unless we bring the whole tableau of nature
simultaneously into a work. The work of art is however still
only an extract of the real. In that they strove for truth,
they could not admit the immediate truth of nature.
In
this way Schiller and Goethe laboured to awaken an idealism,
which had actually existed in earlier times. In Dante we have
got a representation not of external reality but of what passes
in the human soul. Later on, men demanded to see the spiritual
in external form. Goethe showed in Grosskophta
how anyone who materialises the spirit becomes subject to
delusions; Schiller also occupied himself with this
materialisation of the spiritual. At that time, there was a
good deal of investigation along these lines; and much of what
we nowadays call spiritualism engaged men's attention. In
this, lies the occasion of the Geisterseher,
which treats of these things. Before he had struggled upward,
by the help of Kantianism and the artistic, to higher views,
Schiller depicted the dangers to which anyone who seeks the
spiritual in the external world instead of in himself, is
subject. That is the origin of the
Geisterseher.
A
prince whose faith has become alien to him and who is not
strong enough to waken the spiritual in his own soul, is
greatly excited by a strange prophecy which a mysterious
stranger announces to him and which is shortly afterwards
fulfilled. In this mood he falls in with some tricksters who
skilfully employ certain circumstances to bring him into a
state of mind in which he will be receptive for the appearance
of a spirit. The business is proceeding when suddenly a
stranger interrupts and unmasks the trick; but himself produces
an apparition in place of that of the trickster, and this
apparition makes an important pronouncement to the prince. The
prince is torn by doubts, for this stranger is none other than
the man who had just prophesied to him; and he soon begins to
think that both parties are concerned in the plot since the
trickster, though he had been locked up, soon escaped. New and
inexplicable incidents make him strive for an explanation of
all the secrets; as a result, he comes into complete dependence
on an occult society, losing all moral stability. The novel was
never finished. In it the struggles of a seeker after spirits
are represented in a terrifying fashion; we see how the
longing for the spiritual leads men downwards when he looks for
it in the external. No one who clings to the material, even if
he only seeks to find the spiritual appearing in sensible form,
can penetrate to the spiritual. The spiritual has to unveil
itself in the soul of man.
That
is the true secret of the spiritual; that is why the artist
sees it first as beauty. The beautiful, conquered and permeated
by the spirit, is made real in a work of art. Hence it is the
worthy material of the spiritual. At first the beautiful was
the only means for Schiller by which it could reveal itself. He
looked with longing back to the time of the Greeks when there
existed another means for the awakening of the spiritual: when
man raised himself to the divine while bringing god down,
making god into man and raising himself by god's means. Mankind
must now rise once more to the divine by conquest over the
material. Schiller in his plays was always striving higher
until the physical fell away more and more until the
Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.
which
Goethe cried to him after his death, became the full truth. The
word “gemein” is not used here in any low,
contemptuous sense; it is the common humanity, the
common fashion of men that is meant, above which Schiller had
raised himself. He had raised himself, as a true seer, to the
vision of the spiritual.
He
must stand as a pattern before us. That has been the whole
object of these lectures; so far as it was possible in a few
hours, to trace out this struggling soul of Schiller's, as it
rises to greater and greater heights of spiritual insight, and
seeks to grasp the spiritual, so that he may impress it upon
the sense world. In this struggle we really get to know
Schiller, and in him Goethe's words are in truth fulfilled:
Nur der verdient die Freiheit und das lieben
Der Täglich sie erobern muss.
Only he deserves freedom and life
Who daily must conquer them anew.
In
this way Schiller fought his way upward, till he became the
master of an etheric spirit-permeated form.
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