Schiller and Our Times
GA 51
25 March 1905, Berlin
IX. Schiller and Idealism
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 today 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.
Schiller und der Idealismus (Ästhetik und Moral)
Ich möchte heute in der Schlußstunde eine spezielle Frage erledigen, die sich an den Vortrag über Schillers Wirkung auf die Gegenwart anreihen soll. Die Frage der deutschen Ästhetik kann uns hier interessieren, weil Schiller in enger Verbindung steht mit der Begründung der ästhetischen Wissenschaft. Ästhetik ist Wissenschaft des Schönen.
Wir haben gesehen, wie Schiller in verschiedenen Perioden seines Lebens sich zum Schönen stellt. Schiller sah in dem Schönen etwas, was einen ganz besonderen Kulturwert hat. Inwiefern damit etwas ganz Besonderes getan war, zeigt uns die ästhetische Wissenschaft, wie wir sie heute haben, und die erst etwa hundertfünfzig Jahre alt ist. Freilich hat schon Aristoteles über Poetik geschrieben, aber durch Jahrhunderte blieben die Anschauungen darüber auf demselben Standpunkt stehen. Wir wissen, daß selbst Lessing häufig noch auf Aristoteles zurückgriff. Erst im 18. Jahrhundert, aus der Wolffschen Philosophie, ging Baumgarten hervor, der ein Buch über das Schöne, «Ästhetica», 1750 schrieb. Er unterscheidet das Schöne vom Wahren dadurch, daß, wie er sagt, das Wahre eine klare Vorstellung enthält, während das Schöne unklare, verworrene Vorstellungen verkörpert. Es war noch nicht lange vor Schiller, daß solche Gedanken auftauchen konnten. Nun haben wir bei Kant selbst in der «Kritik der Urteilskraft» eine Art Ästhetik, aber bei ihm war alles nur Theorie; er hat nie einen lebendigen Begriff erhalten von dem, was Schönheit ist, er ist nicht über drei Meilen weit von seinem Geburtsort Königsberg hinweggekommen, hat kein bedeutendes Kunstwerk gesehen; hat also nur vom Standpunkte abstrakter Philosophie geschrieben. Schiller war es, der dies Problem zuerst lebensvoll erfaßte in seinem Werk «Ästhetische Briefe».
Wie hat das Problem damals gestanden? Goethe blickte mit Wehmut auf Griechenland; so schaute auch Winckelmann sehnsüchtig in die Zeit zurück, in der der Mensch das Göttliche in seinen Kunstwerken nachbildete. Auch Schiller litt in seiner zweiten Periode an dieser Sehnsucht. In den «Göttern Griechenlands» kommt dies zum Ausdruck. Was ist es im Grunde anderes als ein religiöser Zug, der der griechischen Dramatik zugrunde lag? Ihr liegt das Mysterium zugrunde, das Geheimnis des Gottes, der Mensch wird, der als Mensch leidet, stirbt und aufersteht. Man faßte als eine Läuterung des Menschen auf, was dabei durch die Seele zog. Selbst durch Aristoteles’ Poetik zieht noch ein Hauch davon. Das Tragische sollte darin bestehen, wie Lessing sich ausdrückte, durch Vorführung von Handlungen, die Furcht und Mitleid erregen, die Reinigung von diesen Leidenschaften zu erstreben. Es war schwer zu verstehen, was damit gemeint sein sollte. Lessing selbst hat viel darüber nachgedacht. Im 19. Jahrhundert ist eine reiche Literatur darüber entstanden. Über das Wort Katharsis sind ganze Bibliotheken geschrieben worden. Es wurde deshalb nicht verstanden, weil man nicht wußte, woraus es hervorgegangen ist.
In dem Drama des Äschylos erkennt man noch etwas von dem Drama des Gottes. In der Mitte der Handlung steht Dionysos als die große dramatische Figur; der ihn umgebende Chor begleitet die Handlung. So hat Edouard Schur& das Mysteriendrama neu erstehen lassen. Die dramatische Kulthandlung hatte die ganz bestimmte Aufgabe, den Menschen auf eine höhere Stufe des Daseins zu führen.
Man sagte, der Mensch ist mit Leidenschaften behaftet; durch das niedere Leben gehört er ihnen an; er kann aber darüber hinauskommen, wenn das höhere, das in ihm lebt, geläutert wird; er kann sich herausheben durch die Anschauung des göttlichen Vorbildes. Diese Art der Darstellung sollte die Menschen leichter dazu bringen, sich zu veredeln, als dies durch Lehren erreicht wird. Denn wie Schopenhauer sagt: Moral läßt sich leicht predigen, aber es ist schwer, Moral zu begründen. — Es war eine spätere Epoche der Menschheit, als die Anschauung des Sokrates auftrat, daß die Tugend lehrbar sei. Sie ist aber etwas, was im Menschen lebt, was ihm natürlich ist wie das Essen und Trinken; er kann dazu geführt werden, wenn das Göttliche in ihm erweckt wird durch das Vorbild des leidenden Gottes. Diese Reinigung durch das göttliche Vorbild nennt man die «Katharsis». So sollte Furcht und Mitleid hervorgerufen werden. Das gewöhnliche Mitleid, das am Persönlichen hängt, soll zum großen unpersönlichen Mitleid erhoben werden, wenn man den Gott leiden sieht für die Menschheit.
Dann wurde die dramatische Handlung vermenschlicht, und im Mittelalter sehen wir, wie die Moral sich emanzipiert und selbständig auftritt. So wird später im Christentum einseitig ausgebildet, was im Mysterium leibhaftig lebte. Der Grieche sah mit eigenen Augen den Gott, der aufstieg aus der Erniedrigung. Es wurde in den Mysterien die Tugend nicht bloß gepredigt, sondern dem Menschen zur Anschauung gebracht.
Dies den Menschen wieder zum Verständnis zu bringen, diese beiden Dinge miteinander wieder zu vereinen, war etwas, was in Schiller ganz intensiv lebte. Der Nerv seiner Dichtungen war die Sehnsucht, diese beiden zu versöhnen: Sinnlichkeit und Sittlichkeit. Die strenge Sittlichkeit ist durch Kant so aufgefaßt worden, daß die Pflicht hinweggeführt hatte von allem, was als Neigung erschien. Schiller forderte dagegen, daß die Pflicht zur Neigung werde. So gereinigt wissen wollte Schiller die Leidenschaft, daß sie selbst als Pflicht erscheine. Deshalb verehrte er auch Goethe so, indem er bei ihm eine vollkommene Vereinigung von Sinnlichkeit und Sittlichkeit sah. Im Schönen suchte er diese Vereinigung von Sinnlichem und Sittlichem. Denn weil Schiller in besonderem Maße eine deutsche Eigenschaft hatte, das ästhetische Gewissen, wollte er, daß die Kunst dazu da sein sollte, um den Menschen zu höherem Dasein zu erheben. In unserer klassischen Zeit lebte ein starkes Gefühl dafür, daß das Schöne nicht zur Ausfüllung müßiger Stunden da sei, sondern daß es die Brücke sei zwischen dem Göttlichen und Sinnlichen. Und Schiller rang sich durch dazu, daß er die Freiheit hier fand. Die Neigung wird nicht mehr unterdrückt; er sagt, daß der Mensch noch niedrig stehe, der gegen seine Neigungen tugendhaft sein müsse. Nein, seine Neigungen müssen so ausgebildet sein, daß er von selbst tugendhaft handle. Früher, in der Schrift «Die Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt» hat er noch etwas Ähnliches wie die herbe kantische Moral gepredigt.
In der Besiegung des Stoffes durch die Form liegt das Geheimnis des Meisters. Was ist der Stoff der Dichtung überhaupt? In welcher Auffassung liegt der rechte Standpunkt zur Betrachtung des Schönen? — Solange ich mich interessiere für ein einzelnes besonderes Gesicht, habe ich nicht die wahre künstlerische Anschauung erworben; es ist noch ein Am-Stoffe-Hängen da. — «Das «Was» bedenke, mehr bedenke «wie!» — Solange der Dichter noch zeigt, daß er den Bösewicht haßt, in der Art des persönlichen Interesses, hängt er noch am Stoffe, nicht an der Form, er ist noch nicht zu der ästhetischen Anschauung gekommen. Erst dann ist er zu dieser Anschauung fortgeschritten, wenn der Bösewicht so hingestellt ist, daß die Naturordnung das Strafgericht vollzieht, nicht der Dichter selbst. Dann vollzieht sich das Weltenkarma, dann wird die Weltgeschichte zum Weltgericht. Der Dichter schaltet sich aus und betrachtet objektiv die Weltgeschichte. Damit vollzieht sich, was schon Aristoteles ausspricht, daß die Dichter wahrer sind als die Geschichte. In der Geschichte kann man nicht immer das ganze Geschehen überblicken; es ist ein Ausschnitt, der vor uns liegt, so daß wir oft den Eindruck des Ungerechten empfangen. Insofern ist daher das Kunstwerk wahrer als die Geschichte.
Damit war geschaffen eine reine edle Auffassung der Kunst; die Reinigung, Katharsis selbst, ist über Sympathie und Antipathie stehend. Mit reinem, beinah göttlichem Gefühl soll der Beschauer vor dem Kunstwerk stehen und so vor sich sehen ein objektives Abbild der Welt, sich einen Mikrokosmos schaffen. Der Dramatiker zeigt uns im engen Rahmen, wie sich Schuld und Sühne verketten, stellt im einzelnen dar, was Wahrheit ist, aber gibt dieser Wahrheit ein allgemein gültiges Gepräge. Goethe gibt dem Ausdruck, indem er das Schöne eine Manifestation der Naturgesetze nennt, die ohne das Schöne nie zum Ausdruck gelangten.
Goethe und Schiller wollten einen Realismus finden, aber einen idealistischen Realismus. Heute glaubt man, durch genaue Abbildung der Natur den Realismus zu finden. Schiller und Goethe würden gesagt haben: Das ist nicht die ganze Wahrheit; die sinnliche Natur stellt nur einen Teil dessen dar, was wahrnehmbar ist; es fehle das Geistige darinnen; nur dann könne man sie als Wahrheit gelten lassen, wenn man das ganze Naturtableau auf einmal in ein Werk hineinbrächte; die sinnliche Natur sei aber doch immer nur ein Ausschnitt des Wirklichen. Weil sie nach Wahrheit strebten, haben sie die unmittelbare Naturwahrheit nicht gelten lassen.
So bemühen sich Schiller und Goethe, in ihrer Zeit den Idealismus zu erwecken. Früher war dieser Idealismus vorhanden; in Dante finden wir dargestellt nicht die äußere Wirklichkeit, wie sie uns umgibt, sondern das, was sich in der menschlichen Seele vollzieht. Später wollte man das Geistige veräußerlicht vor sich sehen. Goethe hat im «Großkophta» dargestellt, wie der, welcher den Geist vermaterialisiert, Verirrungen ausgesetzt ist. Auch Schiller hat sich mit der Materialisation des Spirituellen beschäftigt. In der damaligen Zeit wurde nach dieser Richtung auch vieles gesucht. Vieles von dem, was heute als Spiritismus auftritt, beschäftigte damals weite Kreise. So entstand der tiefe «Geisterseher», eine Auseinandersetzung mit diesen Strömungen. Vor der Zeit, als er durch den Kantianismus und das Künstlerische sich zu höheren Anschauungen durchgerungen hatte, schilderte Schiller die Gefahren, denen derjenige, der das Geistige in der äußeren Welt sucht, statt in sich selbst, ausgesetzt ist. So entsteht der «Geisterseher».
Ein Fürst, der seinem Glauben entfremdert ist und nicht die Kraft besitzt, in seiner eigenen Seele das Geistige zu erwecken, wird durch eine seltsame Prophezeiung, die ihm ein geheimnisvoller Fremder verkündet, und die bald darauf in Erfüllung geht, in eine heftige Aufregung versetzt. Er fällt in dieser Stimmung Gauklern in die Hände, die durch geschickte Ausnutzung gewisser Umstände ihn in die Seelenverfassung versetzen, die für eine Geistererscheinung empfänglich macht. Die Beschwörung geht vor sich, aber plötzlich tritt ein Fremder dazwischen, entlarvt den Beschwörer, läßt aber selbst nun eine Erscheinung an die Stelle jener des Betrügers treten, die eine wichtige Mitteilung an den Prinzen macht. Der Prinz wird von Zweifeln hin und her geworfen, der Fremde ist derselbe, der ihm die Prophezeiung machte; aber bald vermutet der Zweifler, daß die beiden unter einer Decke steckten, da der erste Beschwörer zwar verhaftet wird, aber bald verschwindet. Neue, unerklärliche Vorfälle bringen ihn zu einem Streben nach der Lösung all des Geheimnisvollen; er gerät dabei vollständig in Abhängigkeit von einer geheimen Gesellschaft; er verliert aber allen sittlichen Halt. Der Roman ist nicht vollendet worden, aber in erschütternder Weise erscheint hier das Ringen eines Geistersuchers dargestellt; wir sehen, wie die Sehnsucht nach dem Geistigen den Menschen herunterführt, wenn er es im Äußeren sucht. Nicht derjenige, der an dem Sinnlichen hängt, auch nicht in der Weise, daß er verlangt, das Geistige als Sinnliches erscheinen zu sehen, kann zum Geistigen vordringen. Das Geistige soll sich in der Seele des Menschen enthüllen.
Das ist das wahre Geheimnis des Geistigen. Darum sieht es der Künstler zuerst als Schönheit. Das Schöne dann, besiegt und durchdrungen vom Geiste, wird wirklich im Kunstwerk. So ist das Schöne das würdige Material des Geistigen. Zunächst war für Schiller das Schöne das einzige, wodurch sich das Geistige offenbaren kann. Mit Wehmut blickte er zurück auf die Griechenzeit, wo die Möglichkeit zu einer anderen Erweckung des Geistigen vorhanden war. Der Mensch hatte sich zu dem Gott erhoben, indem er ihn herabholte, ihn Mensch werden und sich durch ihn erheben ließ. Jetzt sollte der Mensch sich wieder zum Göttlichen erheben durch Besiegung des Stofflichen. So hat Schiller in seinen Dramen zu immer Höherem gestrebt, bis das Physische immer mehr von ihm abfiel, bis das: «Weit hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine / lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine», das ihm Goethe nachrief, volle Wahrheit bei ihm geworden war. Nicht in verächtlichem, niederem Sinn hat hier Goethe dieses Wort «gemein» gebraucht; das allgemein Menschliche, die gewöhnliche Art des Menschen ist hier gemeint, über die sich Schiller erhoben hatte. So hat Schiller als ein echter Geisterseher sich emporgehoben zur Anschauung des Geistigen.
Er soll als ein Vorbild vor uns stehen. Nur das sollte der Zweck dieser Vorträge sein, soweit dies in so wenigen Stunden möglich war, diese ringende Seele Schillers zu verfolgen, wie sie sich emporhebt zu immer erhöhter geistiger Anschauung, das Geistige zu erfassen suchend, um es einzuprägen in das Sinnliche. In diesem Ringen erkennt man Schiller, indem sich bei ihm persönlich wahrhaft Goethes Wort erfüllt:
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muß.
So hat sich Schiller emporgerungen zum Meister der ästhetischen, geisterfüllten Form.
Schiller and Idealism (Aesthetics and Morality)
Today, in the final lecture, I would like to address a specific question that ties in with the lecture on Schiller's influence on the present day. The question of German aesthetics is of interest to us here because Schiller is closely associated with the founding of aesthetic science. Aesthetics is the science of beauty.
We have seen how Schiller approached beauty in different periods of his life. Schiller saw beauty as something that has a very special cultural value. The extent to which this was something very special is shown to us by aesthetic science as we know it today, which is only about 150 years old. Of course, Aristotle had already written about poetics, but for centuries, views on the subject remained unchanged. We know that even Lessing often referred back to Aristotle. It was not until the 18th century, from Wolffian philosophy, that Baumgarten emerged, who wrote a book on beauty, “Aesthetics,” in 1750. He distinguishes beauty from truth by saying that truth contains a clear mental image, while beauty embodies unclear, confused mental images. It was not long before Schiller that such thoughts could emerge. Now, in Kant's Critique of Judgment, we have a kind of aesthetics, but for him it was all just theory; he never gained a vivid concept of what beauty is, he never traveled more than three miles from his birthplace of Königsberg, never saw any significant works of art; he therefore wrote only from the standpoint of abstract philosophy. It was Schiller who first grasped this problem in a lively way in his work “Aesthetic Letters.”
What was the problem at that time? Goethe looked back on Greece with melancholy; Winckelmann also looked back longingly to the time when man reproduced the divine in his works of art. Schiller also suffered from this longing in his second period. This is expressed in “The Gods of Greece.” What is it, after all, other than a religious trait that underlies Greek drama? It is based on mystery, the mystery of the god who becomes human, who suffers, dies, and rises again as a human being. What passed through the soul was understood as a purification of the human being. Even Aristotle's Poetics still carries a hint of this. The tragic, as Lessing put it, should consist in striving for purification from these passions through the presentation of actions that arouse fear and pity. It was difficult to understand what this meant. Lessing himself thought about it a lot. In the 19th century, a rich literature on the subject emerged. Entire libraries have been written about the word catharsis. It was not understood because people did not know where it came from.
In Aeschylus' drama, one can still recognize something of the drama of the gods. Dionysus stands at the center of the action as the great dramatic figure; the chorus surrounding him accompanies the action. This is how Edouard Schur& revived the mystery drama. The dramatic cult ritual had the very specific task of leading people to a higher level of existence.
It was said that man is afflicted with passions; through his lower life, he belongs to them; but he can rise above them if the higher part of himself is purified; he can elevate himself by contemplating the divine model. This type of representation was intended to make it easier for people to ennoble themselves than can be achieved through teaching. For, as Schopenhauer says, morality is easy to preach, but difficult to justify. It was a later epoch of humanity when Socrates' view that virtue could be taught emerged. But it is something that lives in man, something that is as natural to him as eating and drinking; he can be led to it when the divine in him is awakened by the example of the suffering God. This purification through the divine example is called “catharsis.” Thus, fear and pity should be evoked. Ordinary compassion, which is attached to the personal, should be elevated to great impersonal compassion when one sees God suffering for humanity.
Then the dramatic action was humanized, and in the Middle Ages we see how morality emancipated itself and appeared independently. Thus, later in Christianity, what lived incarnately in the mystery was developed in a one-sided way. The Greeks saw with their own eyes the God who rose from humiliation. In the mysteries, virtue was not merely preached, but brought to human beings for their contemplation.
Bringing this back to human understanding, reuniting these two things, was something that lived very intensely in Schiller. The nerve of his poetry was the longing to reconcile these two: sensuality and morality. Strict morality was understood by Kant in such a way that duty had led away from everything that appeared as inclination. Schiller, on the other hand, demanded that duty become inclination. Schiller wanted passion to be purified so that it itself appeared as duty. That is why he also revered Goethe, seeing in him a perfect union of sensuality and morality. He sought this union of the sensual and the moral in beauty. Because Schiller had a particularly German characteristic, namely aesthetic conscience, he wanted art to be there to elevate people to a higher existence. In our classical era, there was a strong feeling that beauty was not there to fill idle hours, but that it was the bridge between the divine and the sensual. And Schiller struggled to find freedom here. Inclination is no longer suppressed; he says that man is still lowly if he must be virtuous against his inclinations. No, his inclinations must be trained in such a way that he acts virtuously of his own accord. Earlier, in his essay “The Theater as a Moral Institution,” he preached something similar to Kant's austere morality.
The secret of the master lies in the victory of form over substance. What is the substance of poetry anyway? What is the right perspective from which to view beauty? — As long as I am interested in a single particular face, I have not acquired the true artistic view; there is still an attachment to substance. — “Consider the ‘what,’ consider more the ‘how!’” — As long as the poet still shows that he hates the villain in the manner of personal interest, he is still attached to the substance, not the form; he has not yet arrived at the aesthetic view. He has only progressed to this view when the villain is portrayed in such a way that the natural order carries out the punishment, not the poet himself. Then the karma of the world is fulfilled, then world history becomes the judgment of the world. The poet removes himself and observes world history objectively. This fulfills what Aristotle already said, that poets are truer than history. In history, it is not always possible to see the whole picture; what we see is only a fragment, so that we often get the impression of injustice. In this respect, therefore, the work of art is truer than history.
This created a pure, noble conception of art; purification, catharsis itself, stands above sympathy and antipathy. The viewer should stand before the work of art with a pure, almost divine feeling and thus see before them an objective image of the world, creating a microcosm for themselves. The dramatist shows us in a narrow framework how guilt and atonement are linked, depicting in detail what truth is, but giving this truth a universally valid character. Goethe expresses this by calling beauty a manifestation of the laws of nature, which would never be expressed without beauty.
Goethe and Schiller wanted to find realism, but an idealistic realism. Today, people believe that realism can be found through the accurate depiction of nature. Schiller and Goethe would have said: That is not the whole truth; sensual nature represents only a part of what is perceptible; the spiritual is missing from it; it can only be accepted as truth if the whole tableau of nature is brought into a work at once; but sensual nature is always only a fragment of reality. Because they strove for truth, they did not accept the immediate truth of nature.
Thus Schiller and Goethe strove to awaken idealism in their time. This idealism had existed in the past; in Dante we find depicted not the external reality that surrounds us, but what takes place in the human soul. Later, people wanted to see the spiritual externalized before them. In “Großkophta,” Goethe depicted how those who materialize the spirit are exposed to aberrations. Schiller also dealt with the materialization of the spiritual. At that time, much was sought in this direction. Much of what today appears as spiritualism occupied wide circles at that time. This gave rise to the profound “Geisterseher” (The Ghost Seer), an examination of these currents. Before the time when he had worked his way up to higher views through Kantianism and art, Schiller described the dangers to which those who seek the spiritual in the outer world instead of within themselves are exposed. This is how the “Geisterseher” came into being.
A prince who is estranged from his faith and lacks the strength to awaken the spiritual within his own soul is thrown into a state of intense agitation by a strange prophecy made to him by a mysterious stranger, which soon comes true. In this state of mind, he falls into the hands of charlatans who, by skillfully exploiting certain circumstances, put him in a state of mind that makes him susceptible to ghostly apparitions. The conjuration takes place, but suddenly a stranger intervenes, unmasks the conjurer, and then himself causes an apparition to take the place of the swindler, who delivers an important message to the prince. The prince is tossed back and forth by doubts; the stranger is the same one who made the prophecy to him. but soon the doubter suspects that the two are in cahoots, as the first conjurer is arrested but soon disappears. New, inexplicable incidents lead him to seek the solution to all the mysteries; in doing so, he becomes completely dependent on a secret society, but loses all moral footing. The novel was never completed, but it presents a harrowing portrayal of the struggle of a seeker of the spiritual; we see how the longing for the spiritual leads man downhill when he seeks it in the external world. Neither those who cling to the sensual, nor those who demand to see the spiritual as sensual, can advance to the spiritual. The spiritual must reveal itself in the soul of man.
That is the true secret of the spiritual. That is why the artist first sees it as beauty. Beauty, then, conquered and permeated by the spirit, becomes real in the work of art. Thus, beauty is the worthy material of the spiritual. At first, for Schiller, beauty was the only thing through which the spiritual could reveal itself. He looked back with melancholy on the Greek era, when there was the possibility of a different awakening of the spiritual. Man had elevated himself to the level of God by bringing God down, allowing him to become human and to elevate himself through him. Now man was to rise again to the divine by conquering the material. Thus, in his dramas, Schiller strove for ever higher things, until the physical fell away from him more and more, until what Goethe called after him, “Far behind him in insubstantial splendor / lay what subjugates us all, the common,” became the full truth for him. Goethe did not use the word “common” here in a contemptuous, derogatory sense; he meant the general human condition, the ordinary nature of human beings, which Schiller had risen above. Thus Schiller, as a true seer of spirits, rose to the contemplation of the spiritual.
He should stand before us as a role model. The sole purpose of these lectures, insofar as this was possible in so few hours, was to follow Schiller's struggling soul as it rose to ever higher spiritual contemplation, seeking to grasp the spiritual in order to imprint it on the sensual. In this struggle, we recognize Schiller, for Goethe's words are truly fulfilled in him:
Only he deserves freedom as he deserves life,
Who must conquer it daily.
Thus Schiller rose to become the master of aesthetic, spirit-filled form.