Abstract
Schiller’s interests in theology, poetry, and literature influenced the way he responded to the ethics and aesthetics of the British philosopher the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper), and the German philosophers Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant. Often Schiller’s most significant philosophical contributions are those which represent alternatives to more influential views, such as his rejection of Kant’s understanding of the relation between the sensuous and rationality in the moral person. In what follows, Schiller’s key concepts within their eighteenth-century context are presented, and their significance within this context is discussed by showing how he relates the sensuous to the rational through the following: “pleasure and morality” (Sects. “Introduction”, “Locating Schiller in His Intellectual Milieu” and “Pleasure and Morality”), “form and beauty” (Sect. “Form and Beauty”), and “freedom or nature” (Sects. “Freedom or Nature” and “Concluding Remarks”).
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Notes
- 1.
Kant, Immanuel. On Turning Out Books 1996 [1798]. In Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Introduction by Allen Wood. Vol.5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 619-628 [AK 8: 433-437].
- 2.
Frederick Schiller 2016 [1793]. Letters to Prince Frederick Christian von Augustenburg. In Frederick Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man and Letters to Prince Frederick Christian von Augustenburg, ed. Alexander Schmidt, trans. Keith Tribe, 113-179. London UK: Penguin, 119–129 (second letter to the Prince, July 13, 1793).
- 3.
See McMahon 2014, 54-62, for a discussion of second nature.
- 4.
See McMahon 2020 for a brief history of beauty theory.
- 5.
See McMahon 2017 for a discussion of standard formalism compared to Kantian formalism.
- 6.
See McMahon 2018 for an examination of the distinction between rhetoric and beauty.
- 7.
See Garve [1783] 2000 for the kind of criticisms leveled at Kant from the empiricist perspective and of which Schiller would have been aware, having had contact with Garve both directly and indirectly through the philosophical circles in which he moved. See also Sassen 2000. For a discussion of the differences between Kant and Schiller’s moral theories, see Baxley 2010a, 2010b; and Deligiorgi 2020.
- 8.
The research for this chapter was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant DP150103143.
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McMahon, J.A. (2023). Schiller and His Philosophical Context: Pleasure, Form, and Freedom. In: Falduto, A., Mehigan, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16798-0_2
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