Digest Week 6 Trinity Term 2025

German Research Seminar

Title: Ethics for the '“Kinder des Hauses”: Schiller’s Dispute with Kant in the Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795)"'

Speaker: Tim Mehigan (University of Queensland, Brisbane)

Time: 2pm

Location: New College, Lecture Room 6

Abstract: Our cultural understanding today is more Kantian than Schillerian. Any attempt to assess the relevance of Friedrich Schiller’s thinking to today's cultural debates must contend with the prestige accorded to Kant’s aesthetics and the relative invisibility of Schiller’s aesthetics. In the long discussion about art from antiquity to its provisional endpoint today, Kant’s aesthetics today seems a better fit with the current focus on science and AI in the academy. Nevertheless, as I will argue in this paper, a great deal is to be gained from renewed attention to Schiller’s project. The upsurge of interest in aesthetic cognitivism in recent years[1] argues strongly for such reconsideration – all the more because Schiller’s protracted dealings with Kant have so far elicited little comment from either side of this debate about the cognitive claims of art. Such lack of comment may be explained in part by Schiller’s non-traditional standing as a thinker. For some commentators, Schiller is a poet whose thought is not considered to pass muster as a form of philosophy. For others, he is taken to be a literary kind of Kantian whose differences from Kant’s aesthetic and moral theory are not considered substantive. Either way, the spotlight shifts away from Schiller and towards his interlocutor Kant, for cognitivists and non-cognitivists alike.

Nevertheless, the downplaying of Schiller’s credentials as a thinker sells his ethical thought short in notable ways. While Kant’s aesthetic and moral philosophy was certainly of great importance for Schiller, the roots of Schiller’s thought in the final analysis are found less in the topsoil of the post-Kantian discussion of his time and more in the occluded subsoil of classical discussions about art and moral education. Even so, it would be wrong to dismiss Schiller as a hidebound thinker who resisted the emergence of the modern. Rather, he was a thinker decidedly of the coming secular age who saw the constructions of the rationalists of his time for what they were – valuable, though incomplete, attempts to take discussions about society forward into a new era. Since Kant was the most prominent of these rationalists, certainly in the German-speaking domain, Schiller’s interest was naturally taken up for a time with Kant’s thinking. Yet a balanced reckoning of Schiller’s dealings with the great philosopher from Königsberg leads to the view that Kant was ultimately a foil for the development of Schiller's own thought. Schiller’s various attempts to “correct” or “complete” Kant’s aesthetic philosophy had the effect, in other words, of leading Schiller to his true goal, which was to reach clarity about his own philosophical commitments.

The story of this hard-won clarity is laid out in Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen – a polyphonic document whose many layers and imperfections are apt to confuse as much as reward the reader. Nevertheless, I consider the Ästhetische Briefe to be of great significance for today's ethical debates. This paper is an attempt to say why Schiller's thought deserves our renewed attention at the current moment.