Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/121
2012
453-4
Schiller’s Island: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen as Robinsonade
121
2012
cg453-40263
Schiller’s Island: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen as Robinsonade MAT T ER LIN Wa shington Univ ersity in St. Louis Scholars have long debated the political implications of Friedrich Schiller’s tract Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (hereafter: Briefe). Whereas earlier Marxist critics took the author to task for what they saw as a flight from politics into the aesthetic realm, recent research has tended to opt instead for a more sympathetic elucidation of the complex ways in which his text responds to the concrete political challenges posed by the French Revolution. 1 There has in fact been something of a renaissance in Schiller scholarship among political theorists in the past several years, one driven by the belief that Schiller is a moral and political philosopher of the first order whose ideas have relevance for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. Inspiration for these new readings of Schiller has come from the work of Frederick Beiser, whose book, Schiller as Philosopher, appeared in 2005. According to Beiser’s insightful interpretation of the Briefe, Schiller’s political views must be situated within the long tradition of what among historians of political thought has come to be known as civic republicanism. Beiser’s assertion is based on Schiller’s claim that a reformation of moral character must precede any substantial political reform, as self-government is only possible among citizens who have learned to place the public good above private interest. As Beiser puts it, «no less than Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Ferguson, Schiller held that moral virtue is the essential support of a fundamental political goal: a stable and enduring republic» (125). Since the publication of Beiser’s book, a number of other scholars have sought to identify the potential contribution of Schiller’s uniquely aesthetic republicanism to contemporary reflection on the subject (Church, Moggach, Schmidt). 2 In the analysis that follows, I would like to take these readings as a starting point for an interpretation of the Briefe that seeks both to enrich our understanding of Schiller’s relationship to republican political thought and to refocus attention on the aesthetic, rather than the political interests that undergird the text. I would agree with Beiser that Schiller’s most original contribution to a republican tradition that had always emphasized education has something to do with his «insistence on the preeminent im- 264 Matt Erlin portance of aesthetic education» (126). But Schiller is by no means the first to claim that aesthetic experience can infuse the principles of reason with affect and thereby help to create virtuous citizens. What makes the Briefe innovative in their historical context is less their general acknowledgment of the importance of aesthetic education for politics than the degree to which they expand the range of materials that can contribute to that education. In order to make this claim plausible, I will situate the Briefe at the intersection of three conceptual frames as a way to pinpoint their discursive moment. Section one will read the Briefe against the backdrop of the history of ideas, more specifically, of the tradition of republican thought (and practice) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Section two will consider their position within the context of eighteenth-century German and European literary history. Finally, section three will attempt to clarify the results of the other two readings by way of a transhistorical theoretical framework adapted from the work of Adorno. My approach to Schiller’s text is conceived as a creative reworking of a method of triangulation used in seismology. In order to identify the exact location of an earthquake, one takes distance measurements from three seismographs. The epicenter can be found by locating the intersection of circles drawn around each of the seismographs with a radius equal to the respective distance from that seismograph to the earthquake. In this particular variant of a triangular reading, it should be noted, the object of investigation (Schiller’s Briefe) is not one of the vertices of a triangle but rather the location that is to be triangulated. Both the Briefe and the texts discussed in sections one and two are in close historical proximity to and can be said to reflect on each other. The Adorno text, in contrast, provides a transhistorical theoretical model that illuminates the intellectual-historical landscape from above, so to speak. One can thus think of the procedure as a triangulation in three dimensions, whereby the axes of analysis in sections one and two define a horizontal, historically synchronous plane. The Adorno model provides a diachronic vertical axis that intersects with the historical plane to provide an additional location coordinate. These three axes of analysis also correspond to the three primary ways in which the Briefe have been read since their appearance: as a contribution to the history of political thought, as a crucial moment in the conceptualization of autonomous literature, and as a theoretical statement on aesthetics with transhistorical validity. Without wanting to push the metaphor too far, my hope is that the approach as outlined (and as depicted, albeit in only two dimensions, in figure 1), will enable us to describe the discursive rupture instantiated by the Briefe with greater precision and in greater detail. Schiller’s Island 265 Fig. 1 Definitions of republican thought - not be confused with the ideology of the republican party in the United States - are a bit of a moving target in the history of political philosophy. When Beiser and others link Schiller’s Briefe to this tradition, they tend to focus on a few key passages in the text and appear to be drawing their insights from what has come to be termed the «civic humanist» paradigm, most closely associated with the Cambridge scholar J.G.A. Pocock. The most obvious feature of republicanism is of course an opposition to monarchy and the endorsement of a republican form of government. More significant for our purposes, however, is a preoccupation with moral questions of virtue and corruption and especially the insistence on a particular notion of individual virtue as the prerequisite for civic participation. As Pocock explains, virtue in the republican tradition was not simply a matter of behaving morally, but entailed a «moral disposition of the self towards the maintenance of a public […] good, identifiable with the political association, polis or respublica itself» (235). The republican ideal, in other words, first articulated in antiquity and revived by Machiavelli and others, demanded the complete subordination of private interest to the public good. The greatest threat to the republic was corruption, understood precisely in 266 Matt Erlin terms of an inversion of this hierarchy; in the words of John Robertson, if citizens «are led by necessity or choice to put private, material interests before public virtue, then, in the view of the civic tradition, the political community will be threatened with corruption» (138). This association of corruption with private interest makes it clear that this republican tradition, at least in its ideal-typical form, is diametrically opposed to the modern selfinterested individualism favored by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, and Kant (Beiser 125). The case for Schiller’s connection to this republican tradition can best be made on the basis of the first ten of his letters. Here the author explains the aims of his work and offers a justification for focusing on aesthetic questions at a moment that seems to demand attention to political matters. In the wake of the French Revolution, Schiller writes, one has the impression that «das große Schicksal der Menschheit» (Briefe 8) is being decided in the political arena, but he goes on to insist nonetheless on the need to attend to beauty rather than freedom. As he asserts in one of the more famous lines from the Briefe, «es [ist] die Schönheit, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert» (8). He then continues on, in letters five and six, to explain why, offering his interpretation of the modern era as one in which the division of labor has fractured and fragmented the human personality: Sobald auf der einen Seite die erweiterte Erfahrung und das bestimmtere Denken eine schärfere Scheidung der Wissenschaften, auf der andern das verwickeltere Uhrwerk der Staaten eine strengere Absonderung der Stände und Geschäfte notwendig machte, so zerriß auch der innere Bund der menschlichen Natur, und ein verderblicher Streit entzweite ihre harmonischen Kräfte. (32) Rather than a holistic development of all human capacities toward the realization of what eighteenth-century commentators referred to as die Bestimmung des Menschen, the process of civilization has resulted in a monstrous imbalance. Each individual is little more than an «Abdruck seines Geschäfts, seiner Wissenschaft» (34). The antithesis to the fragmentary quality of modern human character is to be found in the harmonious unity of personality characteristic of the ancient Greeks, who combined «die Jugend der Phantasie mit der Männlichkeit der Vernunft in einer herrlichen Menschheit» (30), and for whom each individual could serve as representative of the species or Gattung. Schiller concludes this first section of the letters by making the case that only aesthetic experience can enable us to regain this unity of personality. It cannot be recovered through action on the part of the state, since the modern state has itself given rise to the divisions. Nor can philosophy provide the solution. Modern philosophers have already identified the principles of reason according to which Schiller’s Island 267 a virtuous polity can be established; these theoretical principles, however, have proven inadequate to the task of realizing this goal. Only the fine arts are capable of libidinizing these principles in such a way as to make them matters of feeling and the will rather than mere ideas. As he puts it in another famous line, «der Weg zu dem Kopf [muß] durch das Herz geöffnet werden» (52). Here we see the outlines of the conceptual framework that Beiser identifies with the republican tradition: virtue must precede political freedom, but that virtue is sorely lacking among both the lawless, instinctual lower classes and the corrupt elites, for whom «mitten im Schoße der raffiniertesten Geselligkeit der Egoism sein System gegründet [hat]» (Briefe 26). The solution to this problematic state of affairs is a variant of the civic education - aesthetic in this case - that the republican tradition had always viewed as crucial to stable government. To this point one can hardly quarrel with Beiser’s reading. What he (and others) fail to consider in any detail, however, is just how central Schiller’s historical-philosophical framework is to this conception of aesthetic qua civic education. More specifically, I would argue that one can actually identify two different models of aesthetic education in this first part of the work. The first is the one previously mentioned, which conceives of the arts as a means to imbue the ethical principles established by reason with affect and thereby render them efficacious in the political or social sphere. It may be the case that Schiller was the first to present this model as an explicit response to the political crisis of the French Revolution, but the idea that the arts can enhance morality is a commonplace in the late eighteenth century, as Schiller himself remarks in the tenth letter. Thus one can hardly view this aspect of the letters as their most significant contribution to thinking about the cultivation of political virtue. More interesting, and more unique, is the second model, which Schiller adumbrates in the first ten letters against the backdrop of a conjectural history of humanity and elaborates in psychological terms at a later point in his deliberations. In this model, the desired transformation of the state does not simply require education in the service of virtue, but a form of education that can undo the corruption that has already occurred, corruption that constitutes the unfortunate side effect of an otherwise necessary process of historical evolution. A key to Schiller’s pedagogical program can be found in his various invocations of one of the root metaphors of the Enlightenment - namely, the equation of the history of humanity with the life span of the individual. Schiller has recourse to this metaphor on a number of occasions. In the third letter, for example, he describes the transition from the state of nature (Naturstaat) to one based on moral laws as a process whereby man 268 Matt Erlin retrieves, «auf eine künstliche Weise, in seiner Volljährigkeit seine Kindheit nach» (10). Later, as previously mentioned, he describes the Greeks as combining «die Jugend der Phantasie mit der Männlichkeit der Vernunft» (30). And in a somewhat different but closely related vein he writes of the modern artist: «Eine wohltätige Gottheit reiße den Säugling beizeiten von seiner Mutter Brust, nähre ihn mit der Milch eines bessern Alters und lasse ihn unter fernem griechischen Himmel zur Mündigkeit reifen» (56). His famous play-drive or Spieltrieb, which he associates with the aesthetic and which is said to mediate between the form-drive and the sense-drive, can also be understood within the same metaphorical framework. This metaphorical field allows us to recognize that the problem of aesthetic education for Schiller is not primarily a matter of rendering reason sensuous; it is a problem of uneven development. As Schiller explains, the species, taken as a whole, has evolved to a level of cultivation far higher than that of the Greeks, but this evolution has only been possible at the cost of abandoning the harmonious totality of human capacities that characterized each Greek individual. The task of aesthetic education is to recover this totality without renouncing the achievements of modernity. The aim, in other words, is not a straightforward return to an earlier state of development. It is a recovery of the unity of personality that characterized that earlier state, but in such a way that the individual, upon achieving that unity, is in a position to reappropriate the collective achievements of contemporary civilization in a more balanced fashion. Schiller elucidates the psychological mechanism through which beauty makes this possible in letters nineteen through twenty-one. The main idea here is summed up in a rather provocative claim: «in dem ästhetischen Zustande ist der Mensch also Null» (144). Although one finds passages in the text that present a linear progression from a sensual to an aesthetic to a moral state, in these three letters we are confronted with a different model of how aesthetic experience works. Here Schiller argues that the aesthetic returns us to the zero point of human development, a state in which we are «von aller Bestimmung frei» but in which we are also simultaneously blessed with «eine gleich unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit» (140). The former state - «von aller Bestimmung frei» - resembles that of childhood, or even the moment of birth, since, as he puts it, the individual must «auf gewisse Weise zu jenem negativen Zustand der bloßen Bestimmungslosigkeit zurückkehren, in welchem er sich befand, ehe noch irgend etwas auf seinen Sinn einen Eindruck machte» (140). This absolute indeterminacy, however, must exist simultaneously with a state of «unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit,» a state that suggests maturity on the level of both the individual and the species as a whole, inas- Schiller’s Island 269 much as it is characterized by «eine Gemütsstimmung, welche das Ganze der Menschheit in sich begreift» (150). Schiller also describes the aesthetic state as one in which «es ihm nunmehr von Natur wegen möglich gemacht ist, aus sich selbst zu machen, was er will» (146), a description that suggests both the potential of youth prior to determinations imposed by society and also the knowledge and capacity for self-determination characteristic of adulthood. Where have we seen this before? Not, I would argue, in the aesthetic treatises of any of Schiller’s European predecessors or contemporaries. Cast in the broadest possible terms, the characterization of aesthetic experience just described can no doubt be situated within the context of widespread male fantasies of self-generation or Selbstgeburt in the eighteenth century, what Helmut J. Schneider has described as the «aufklärerische Utopie der vernünftigen Selbsthervorbringung» (177). Rather than pursuing this more general line of inquiry, however, I would like to suggest two specific literary examples that evoke a more limited set of intertexts shaping Schiller’s intervention. The first is Christoph Martin Wieland’s novel Der goldne Spiegel. Published in 1772, this treatise on government in narrative form relates the fictional history of the Oriental empire of Scheschian as told, in the style of The Arabian Nights, to the Persian sultan Schach-Gebal. The high point of the story is the establishment of the rule of Tifan, who ascends to the throne at a point when the empire is nearing collapse and ushers in a golden age of peace and prosperity. Klaus Berghahn has already identified a connection between the Briefe and Wieland’s Staatsroman on a general level, pointing to the fact that Schiller is both writing for a prince and addressing Bloch’s paradigmatic utopian question: «Wie könnte die Welt vollendet werden? » The parallel I want to identify, however, is a different one. The relevance of this particular section of this particular Staatsroman for a consideration of Schiller stems from its representation of a different question, precisely the one Schiller poses in his first ten letters: how to create virtuous subjects in a corrupt state. Wieland’s novel suggests that the task is in fact impossible. In order to become the ideal ruler, the infant Tifan cannot stay in Scheschian. He must be spirited away from the depraved court at a moment of crisis and raised in a distant valley. Far from the corrupting influence of courtly life, his mentor, Dschengis, creates a small colony with a group of freed slaves, and together they transform the wilderness into fertile farmland. Against this backdrop, Tifan experiences an upbringing that could be taken straight from the pages of Rousseau’s Émile; he is, in the narrator Danischmend’s words, «von der Natur selbst auf ihrem Schoße erzogen» (205). 270 Matt Erlin Fig. 2: University of Virginia library The pedagogical relationship here proves crucial for understanding the link between this passage and Schiller’s Briefe. As an infant, Tifan finds himself «von aller Bestimmung frei.» But he is also paired with the virtuous Dschengis, who by some stroke of luck has escaped the corrupting influence of his environment and who, because of his virtue and his profound knowledge of humanity, is the source of «eine gleich unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit,» Schiller’s Island 271 providing Tifan with an upbringing that essentially recapitulates the natural course of human development in ideal terms. Knowledge must be obtained on the basis of immediate experience and in the proper order. Only after Tifan has tilled the land, herded sheep, and recognized the basic equality of all men does he begin to learn the principles of good government through both education and travel, and only upon reaching adulthood is he made aware of his noble origins and prepared to reclaim his throne. Aside from the structural analogy between Schiller’s recuperative model of aesthetic education and the pedagogical experiment related by Wieland, one finds a number of remarks in the Briefe that suggest Schiller is operating within the same general conceptual framework as Wieland in thinking about virtue and the state. Most striking is the previously cited description of the education of the artist, who must be snatched from his mother’s breast and raised under a Grecian sky before returning to his century, as a stranger, to purify it. And it is not only the artist whom Schiller depicts in these terms. Towards the end of the treatise, in letter twenty-three, Schiller explains that while the aesthetic individual needs no more than a sublime occasion «um ihn zum Helden oder zum Weisen zu machen» (164), the sensuous individual must first be transported «unter einen anderen Himmel» (164). Reading this statement with Schiller’s philhellenism in mind, one might think again of the ancient Greeks, but when considered together with his insistence on the aesthetic state as a zero point and the example from Der goldne Spiegel, a different context comes to mind. My hypothesis is that both Schiller and Wieland are channeling a more elementary, albeit fairly new literary archetype, one whose prevalence in eighteenth-century German literature has been well documented. The paradigmatic tale of an individual transported «unter einen anderen Himmel» in order to recapitulate the course of human development is of course Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Even as early as 1957, Ian Watt associated the protagonist’s experience on the island, where he eventually becomes «Master of every mechanick art» (Defoe 51), with efforts to overcome the dehumanizing division of labor in the emergent commercial society referenced by Schiller in his remarks on fragmentation (Watt 71-74). As more recent scholarship has pointed out, Crusoe’s evolution roughly parallels the sequence proposed by the fourstages theory of human development espoused by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (see Meek). He progresses from wanderer to primitive scavenger and hunter, to farmer, mechanic, and domesticator of animals. By the middle of the novel, prior to the appearance of the footprint that leads him to Friday, his island economy is generating a significant surplus that places it on the brink of commercialization (Cruise 112). Finally, as Michael 272 Matt Erlin McKeon has persuasively argued, what Crusoe achieves on the basis of his island reeducation is a kind of psychic recalibration. The «suspended time» there enables him to acquire «the psychological equipment needed for possessive individualism» (334). While McKeon and others tend to emphasize how a «naturalization» of desire prepares Crusoe for a return to commercial society rather than political life, it is worth noting that his final role on the island prior to his return is in fact that of political sovereign. His island has gradually become populated, and he describes himself as «absolute Lord and Law-giver» (Defoe 174). One could debate whether Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is really the key intertext for Schiller or whether Johann Karl Wezel’s adaptation or Campe’s wildly popular Robinson der Jüngere is a more plausible candidate. In the case of Campe’s novel, one finds, in addition to the shipwreck story that unfolds on the island, a frame narrative in which a pedagogy of play figures crucially in the education of moral subjects. Considering the explosion of Robinsonaden in the period, from the Insel Felsenburg to Der Churpfälzische Robinson, it probably makes the most sense to speak with Ian Watt of a widely circulating Robinson myth that includes the key elements of the structural parallel I have delineated: «primitivist» isolation, reeducation, and return, but with the additional specification that the isolation involves no less than a recovery of the full potential of human development, and the reeducation is in fact a recapitulation of that entire development in ideal terms. While Defoe’s original includes far more than just the island episode, especially if one considers the second and third volumes that he published in 1719 and 1720, eighteenth-century contemporaries, from Rousseau to Campe to Wezel, certainly viewed the essence of the Robinsonade along these lines. In the preface to his own version of the story, for example, Wezel explains that Robinson is «eine Geschichte des Menschen im Kleinen, ein Miniaturgemälde von den verschiedenen Ständen, die die Menschheit nach und nach durchwandert ist» (9-10). 3 In case it has not yet become clear, my claim is that the artwork functions in the Briefe as «Schiller’s island,» not merely a refuge from a corrupt modern world but one that enables the recovery of an original human potential through a form of rebirth. In order to grasp the full extent of the parallel, however, we need to consider an additional aspect. Just as Schiller’s aesthetic education requires the individual to combine simultaneously a state of indeterminacy and infinite determinability, infancy and adulthood, primitive humanity and modern civilization, such that «es ihm nunmehr von Natur wegen möglich gemacht ist, aus sich selbst zu machen, was er will,» so it is equally the case that although Crusoe returns to the zero point of human Schiller’s Island 273 development, he carries with him both the knowledge and also the technology of eighteenth-century Europe. On the island, in other words, he is both «primitive» and modern European simultaneously. And it is only as a result of his possessions and his knowledge that he is able to domesticate himself and his island. Again it was Ian Watt who first established that Robinson Crusoe offers anything but a straightforward back to nature story. Crusoe is a capitalist, who owns, as Watt puts it, «the freehold of a rich though unimproved estate» and who, thanks to the materials he has rescued from the ship, is «lucky heir to the labours of countless other individuals» (87-88). This final aspect of the parallel is significant because it helps to foreground a crucial feature of the republican tradition that has been neglected in recent scholarship on Schiller. Simply put, to endorse republicanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is by no means to endorse democracy. 4 We do well to remember that none of the independent republics in existence at the time Schiller was writing (e.g., Geneva, Venice, Genoa, the Dutch republic) were democratic in the sense of having universal suffrage. In Montesquieu’s discussion of republics in The Spirit of the Laws, he divides the category into democracies and aristocracies, depending on how many wield sovereign power. D’Alembert, in his article on Geneva for the Encyclopédie, claims that the republic «has all of the advantages and none of the difficulties of democracy» (243). Even the French constitution of 1791, to give an example more temporally proximate to Schiller’s Briefe, distinguished between active and passive citizens based on property, and the property requirements for electors were even more restrictive. This distinction brings us to the crucial point. In both classical republican theory and its reappropriations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, virtuous citizenship was seen to be contingent upon certain material prerequisites, the most important of which is property. As Pocock and others have explained, property, particularly in the English tradition, is the precondition of civic virtue and thus of political participation. This is because property - more specifically, agrarian property - provides the independence that allows the individual to participate in politics without falling prey to the seductions of material self-interest. Significantly, in the debates between the landed interests and the moneyed interests that take center stage in eighteenth-century England, the value of property is presented in terms of its opposition to the fragmented personality typical of the man of commerce. To quote Pocock, «the ideal of the patriot entailed an image of a personality free and virtuous because unspecialized» (109). What makes Schiller’s aesthetic republicanism most innovative, then, is not simply that art is incorporated into a project of civic education. It is, 274 Matt Erlin rather, that art fulfills a function that is structurally analogous to the function of the landed property in republican theory. Art, or aesthetic experience, is identified with a unity of personality and a universal perspective opposed to the fragmentation brought about by the modern division of labor. In fact, under the right circumstances, it enables one to recover that unity in the midst of commercial society, thus potentially resolving what historians of political thought have identified as tension between agrarian and commercial paradigms of individualism. Accessing the aesthetic island becomes a matter of temporal compartmentalization rather than spatial displacement, and it can thus coexist with a commercial society. From this perspective, Douglas Moggach is right to argue that Schiller’s «aesthetic program is predicated on a new understanding of the demands of modernity,» demands that he confronts with «a redefined sense of virtue» (526). According to Moggach, Schiller’s Briefe seek to provide a new universal (i.e. aesthetic) basis for political unity in a society where individuals are increasingly differentiated by function rather than rank. I would agree in principle. However, the manner in which Schiller appropriates and resignifies the elements of the republican program suggests a somewhat different conception of its practical implications. Schiller’s aesthetic ideal does indeed have universal applicability in theory - anyone can access the aesthetic island. In a number of passages, however, he seems to suggest that only a select few are actually capable of doing so under the current circumstances. He does, after all, refer in his final letter to the aesthetic state as existing «in einigen wenigen auserlesenen Zirkeln» (Briefe 218) - one thinks here of classical Weimar. A similarly exclusive group is suggested by his comments in the essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, where he explains that the capacity for a proper appreciation of poetry can only develop among «einer Klasse von Menschen,» which «ohne zu arbeiten, tätig ist, und idealisieren kann, ohne zu schwärmen» and which combines «alle Realitäten des Lebens mit den wenigstmöglichen Schranken desselben» (Dichtung 356). Although Schiller in both cases presents these groups as ideal rather than actually existing communities, the language used, especially in the second example, is certainly evocative of an aristocratic class. While both texts remain vague on this issue, such comments raise the question whether participation in the aesthetic state does not have as its precondition access to some kind of aesthetic estate, however that might be conceived. While it seems anachronistic to criticize Schiller on this count, we can certainly regret his failure to endorse the more radical variants of republican theory in circulation at the time. We should also recognize, however, that his ambivalence was typical of broader European debates about republicanism in the Schiller’s Island 275 Fig. 3: Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des Deutschen Instituts für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung 276 Matt Erlin period. More problematic is Schiller’s failure to elucidate any mechanism of mediation by which aesthetic experience, understood as a return to a state of determinability, is transformed into a capacity for real political action. Schiller’s reflections, in other words, seem to end at the moment of arrival on the island. We never really discover what skills are to be acquired there or exactly how and when we know that it is time to return to society (see fig.-3). More could be said regarding the precise character of Schiller’s appropriation of the republican tradition, especially as regards the complex constellation of republicanism, commerce, and landed property evoked by his concluding remark on «auserlesenen Zirkeln.» In my own concluding remarks, however, I want to shift gears and try to link matters of political content to those of aesthetic form, returning to the assertion I made at the outset regarding Schiller’s originality. As mentioned above, Beiser notes that «Schiller’s distinctive contribution to [the republican] tradition is his insistence on the preeminent importance of aesthetic education» (126). Even if we ignore previous philosophical articulations of the idea of aesthetic education, after considering the literary examples of Wieland’s Der goldne Spiegel and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, we can hardly find anything innovative in Schiller’s insistence on aesthetic education as a training ground for political virtue. After all, what is the reader of Robinson Crusoe or Der goldne Spiegel experiencing if not moral-political instruction by way of aesthetic experience? The protagonist learns to become a virtuous citizen or citizen-ruler through his isolation, and the reader participates virtually in the process. What is pathbreaking in the Briefe, however, is that Schiller takes the moral-political instruction coupled with a specific thematic and narrative trajectory and transfers it to aesthetic experience as such. To be more specific, what I am arguing here is that in Schiller the primitive isolation - reeducation - return structure that defines the plot of the Crusoe narrative and its derivatives undergoes a process of universalization, whereby it becomes associated with all encounters with genuine works of art. To my mind, the most intriguing way to approach this phenomenon is to take a detour through Adorno, namely through his assertions regarding the form/ content relationship in the artwork as a site where broader historical shifts become visible. Adorno’s key idea in this context is that of new aesthetic forms as «niedergeschlagene Inhalte,» precipitated or sedimented contents, something he first articulated in his Philosophie der neuen Musik in 1948 and that reappears in his Ästhetische Theorie and the fragments on Beethoven. Admittedly, the precise meaning of the phrase is somewhat elusive. In the Philosophie der neuen Musik he writes that there is «keine Verhärtung der Form, die nicht als Negation des harten Lebens sich lesen ließe» (46), and in Schiller’s Island 277 the Beethoven fragments he describes syntactic relationships in the Second Symphony as a sedimentation of parodic elements that previously figured as part of the content. Nonetheless, as the second example makes clear, Adorno’s basic assertion is that the content elements of artworks (e.g., parody) can over time become diffused into the formal structures of new works (e.g., syntax). The most helpful elaboration and extension of Adorno’s idea can be found in Peter Szondi’s Theorie des modernen Dramas, where the author expands Adorno’s brief remarks into a full-blown theory of generic transformation. For Szondi, the formal innovations of twentieth-century drama appear as so many sedimentations of a late nineteenth-century crisis in interpersonal communication that appeared as a theme in the works of that period. To give a concrete example, dramatists in the nineteenth century found it increasingly necessary to take up the theme of the isolated individual confronting an alien world, but this content threatened to burst the formal frame of a classical drama, which relied on a particular view of character and the role of dialogue as well as an organic relationship among various dramatic elements. After a period of crisis, however, the new theme eventually finds formal accommodation in the Stationendrama of Expressionism. Such sweeping interpretations can of course be challenged on a variety of levels. Nonetheless, whatever its flaws, I think Adorno’s and Szondi’s idea of a historical sedimentation of content provides a helpful framework for making sense of Schiller’s model of the aesthetic. In the Briefe, an outcome that had been associated with a specific storyline - namely, the salutary impact of an idealized recapitulation of the development of the species - has been transformed into a structural element in all aesthetic experience. There is a twist, however. Szondi’s model is heavily indebted to a Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, according to which an original harmony of form and content gives way to a state of tension in which new content puts pressure on the form, until finally «die formal fungierenden Inhalte sich vollends zur Form niederschlagen und damit die alte Form sprengen» (76). Both he and Adorno proceed from a conception of art as a space in which social antagonisms return as immanent problems of form. I am sympathetic to this reading, and it may in fact be possible to situate Schiller’s Briefe within such a framework. My current interpretation of the work, however, understands the phenomenon of sedimented content in less doctrinaire terms, focusing not so much on social antagonisms as on artistic opportunities. Keeping in mind the predominantly didactic orientation of Enlightenment literature, whether in the form of Staatsromane intended to cultivate republican-minded rulers, or of more broadly pedagogical Robinsonaden like Campe’s, one can view Schiller’s generalization of the recovery 278 Matt Erlin of totality through art as an emancipation of the artist. While the extent of Schiller’s republican commitments may always remain an open question, there can be little doubt that he was committed to his own aesthetic production. I want to suggest, and I choose this word deliberately, that the Briefe signal a moment in the history of German literature when literature’s didactic aims, understood here specifically in terms of the cultivation of virtue in a situation of uneven historical development, migrates from theme to form, thereby freeing the author to address topics as he sees fit without renouncing his claim to contribute to these aims. From this perspective, the emergence of aesthetic autonomy appears not as the renunciation of literature understood in terms of political or moral utility, but rather as its sublation. Notes 1 For a discussion of the Marxist line of criticism see Sharpe 86-94. Recent examples of more sympathetic, historically informed analyses include the essays discussed in this contribution as well as the essays on the Briefe included in High, Martin, and Oellers. The latter, however, tend to emphasize philosophical and scientific intertexts and focus primarily on German debates. 2 An important earlier inquiry is Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment. 3 For a relevant discussion of how the island functions more generally as «Keimzelle und elementare Einheit in verschiedenen Reflexionszusammenhängen und Diskursen des 18. Jahrhunderts» and marks «den Nullmeridian einer genetischen Entwicklung» compare Vogl 186-90. 4 For a general discussion of Enlightenment republicanism with an eye toward actually existing republics see Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophie der neuen Musik. Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969. Beiser, Frederick. Schiller as Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Berghahn, Klaus L. «Ästhetische Reflexion als Utopie des Ästhetischen.» Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie. Ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982. Church, Jeffrey. «Friedrich Schiller on Republican Virtue and the Tragic Exemplar.» European Journal of Political Theory 13.1 (2014): 95-118. Cruise, James. Governing Consumption: Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the «Origins» of Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1999. D’Alembert, Jean le Rond. «Geneva.» Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Letter to d'Alembert and Writings on the Theater. Ed. and trans. Allen Bloom, Charles Butterworth and Christopher Kelley. Lebanon, NH: New England UP, 2004. 239-49. Schiller’s Island 279 Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Michael Shinagel. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. High, Jeffrey L., Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers, eds. Who is this Schiller Now? Essays on his Reception and Significance. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600 -1740. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Meek, Ronald. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Moggach, Douglas. «Schiller, Scots and Germans: Freedom and Diversity in the Aesthetic Education of Man.» Inquiry 51.1 (2008): 16-36. -. «Schiller’s Aesthetic Republicanism.» History of Political Thought 28.3 (2007): 520-41. Oz-Salzberger, Fania. Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Robertson, John. «The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition.» Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatierff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Schiller, Friedrich. «Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen.» Schillers Werke. Vol. 4. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1966. -. «Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.» Schillers Werke. Vol. 4. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1966. Sharpe, Lesley. Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995. Schmidt, Alexander. «The Liberty of the Ancients? Friedrich Schiller and Aesthetic Republicanism.» History of Political Thought 30. 2 (2009): 286-314. Schneider, Helmut J. Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner. Berlin: Berlin UP, 2011. Szondi, Peter. Theorie des modernen Dramas. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1956. Venturi, Franco. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. Vogl, Joseph. Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen. Zurich: diaphanes, 2004. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. Wezel, Johann Karl. Robinson Krusoe. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1990. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Der goldne Spiegel und andere politische Dichtungen. Ed. Herbert Jaumann. Munich: Winkler, 1990.
