The Rudolf Steiner Archive

19. Schiller's Work and Its Evolution

[ 1 ] We have seen how Schiller grew out of the ideas of the 18th century, how the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment took root in his soul. They had already taken on their distinctive form by the time he left the Karlsschule and had written the essays mentioned earlier. If we want to characterize these views in a single word, we can say that they concerned the emancipation of the individual. This liberation from age-old traditions goes even further.

[ 2 ] When people in the Middle Ages, before the Enlightenment, reflected on their relationship to themselves, to nature, to the universe, and to God, they found themselves placed within this universe. They worshiped the same God outside who lived within their own souls; the same cosmic forces they found in nature were at work within the human soul; there was a certain unity that could be seen in the laws of the universe and in human nature. One need only recall figures such as Giordano Bruno. This monistic conviction regarding the connection between nature and humanity is evident in his writings. Thus, there was no separation between what is called a moral imperative and the objective laws of nature.

[ 3 ] This contrast arose only later, when nature was excluded from divine influence. The ideas that emerged from materialism recognized no connection between nature and moral sensibility—that which human beings develop within themselves as a moral imperative. From this arose what came to be called Rousseauism. At its very core, it is a revolutionary sentiment, a protest against the entire course of development up to that point. It teaches that when we consider humanity’s call for freedom and its demand for morality, we find a profound dissonance. It asks: Can there really be a difference between the objective world and human nature such that people must yearn to break free from the entirety of culture?

[ 4 ] These intellectual storms found expression in the young Schiller’s worldview. In his three early plays, this yearning takes on a new form. In The Robbers, Fiesco, and Intrigue and Love, we see vividly portrayed, with immense pathos, the demand that human beings must take action to bring about this harmony. The character of Karl Moor is portrayed as a man who carries within himself the conflict between objective order and human demands, and who feels called upon to bring about this harmony between nature and himself. His tragedy arises because he believes he can restore the law through lawlessness and arbitrariness. — In Fiesco, the longing for freedom is thwarted by ambition. The ideal of freedom is lost due to this disharmony in the soul of the ambitious Fiesco, who cannot find his place within the order of the moral ideal. — In Kabale und Liebe, the demands of human nature among the rising bourgeoisie stand in opposition to the demands of the world as expressed by the ruling classes. — The connection between moral ideals and universal worldviews had been lost. This dissonance resounds magnificently, despite all the youthful immaturity, in Schiller’s early dramas.

[ 5 ] People of Schiller’s temperament find it harder to discover themselves than those of a straightforward, simple, and naive nature; just as natural development shows that lower creatures require fewer preparatory stages than highly developed animals. Great personalities are characterized by the fact that they must undergo the most diverse transformations, because their innermost essence must be drawn from deep within. Those who possess great potential—those born with the promise of genius—will find it difficult to find their way and will have to work their way through manifold initial stages, as embryonic development in higher animal species shows us by way of analogy.

[ 6 ] What Schiller lacked was knowledge of the world and of human nature. His early plays reveal Schiller with all the shortcomings that resulted from this, but also with all his virtues, which are rarely seen in the same way later on. — This judgment is made from a certain vantage point: one must recognize what one owes to Schiller’s greatness. Yet it could not remain that way for long. Schiller had to move beyond this narrow horizon, and now we see how, in the fourth of his dramas, Don Carlos, he works his way toward a different perspective. We can view Don Carlos from a dual perspective: first, from Carlos’s point of view, and second, from that of the Marquis Posa. Schiller himself tells us how his interest initially lay with the youthful, fiery Carlos and then shifted to the cosmopolitan Posa. This signifies a profound transformation in Schiller’s own personality.

[ 7 ] Schiller had been invited to Dresden by his friend Körner so that he could work in peace there. It was there that he became acquainted with a worldview that would have a profound influence on his own personality: Kantianism. Schiller’s nature was such that this engagement with Kant became essential for him, and we will come to understand his point of view even more deeply as we examine the influences that shaped him at that time.

[ 8 ] At that time, there were two very distinct currents in German intellectual life. One current is that which finds its most thorough expression in Herder’s Ideas on the History of the Philosophy of Mankind. The second is Kantian philosophy. In Herder, we find the longing to place humanity within the whole of nature and to understand it from that perspective. It is this striving for unity that makes Herder appear to us as a modern thinker. What today rebels against Kantianism—which, as academic philosophy, still holds great sway—with its dualism, is already present in Herder’s metacriticism. Everything encompasses a wealth of great ideas; there is a striving for unity between nature and humanity. From the lowest product of nature all the way up to human thought, a law prevails. What manifests itself in humanity as the moral law is, in a crystal, the very law of form. A fundamental development runs through all that exists, so that what takes shape as a flower in a plant develops into humanity in human beings. It is the worldview that also emerged in Goethe, which he expressed in his Faust with the words:

How everything weaves itself into a whole!
One thing works within the other and lives...

[ 9 ] and which he depicts in his “Hymn to Nature.”

[ 10 ] Goethe is completely consumed by this quest for unity, as expressed by Giordano Bruno, the Pythagorean. He places himself entirely within this current of thought:

What would a God be who merely pushed from the outside,
Who made the universe run in circles on His finger,
It befits Him to move the world from within,
To cherish nature within Himself, and Himself within nature.
So that what lives, weaves, and is within Him,
Never lacks His power, never His spirit.

[ 11 ] This is the monistic school of thought, which was still foreign to Schiller at that time. For him, duality—dualism—still prevailed.

[ 12 ] In his Critique of Pure Reason and his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant set a clear limit on human cognitive capacity. Human cognitive capacity extends only as far as the understanding reaches. There can only be the external world, but it does not extend to the essence of things. What a thing-in-itself is remains hidden behind appearances; humans must not even speak of it. But there is something within human beings that cannot possibly be merely an appearance. This is the moral law. On the one hand: the world of appearances; on the other hand: the moral law, the categorical imperative, the “Thou shalt,” which is beyond reproach, which is sublime beyond cognition and cannot be conceived as an appearance. Thus, in Kant’s philosophy, we are confronted not only with the duality we saw earlier, but the entire world of human intellectual life is divided into two halves: that which is to be transcendent above all criticism—the moral law—is not to be knowledge at all, but practical faith, which has no laws of knowledge, but merely moral postulates. Thus, Kantianism appears as the most stark exposition of dualism.

[ 13 ] Before Kant, there was a science of external phenomena, followed by a science of reason that, through an innate faculty, could penetrate to God, the soul, and immortality: this is how Wolff’s philosophy presents itself. Kant, who studied the English sensualists Hume and Locke, consequently began to harbor doubts on this point. He asked himself: Where does this lead if one must constantly examine the highest concepts—God, freedom, and immortality—for their rationality? — He explains in the introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason: “I therefore had to set aside knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Because one ought to believe—and so that one may believe—he dethroned knowledge. He wanted to proceed from unquestionable foundations and therefore says: Knowledge cannot penetrate to these things at all, but the “Thou shalt” speaks so sternly that the harmony which man is powerless to find must be brought about by God. This leads to postulating a God. As physical beings, we are confined within limits, yet as moral beings we must be free. This creates an irreconcilable dualism, but no balance between humanity and nature.

[ 14 ] Schiller, who at that time, by his very nature, clung to the contrast between nature and humanity, depicts in Don Carlos humanity’s rise above all of nature toward the ideals. He does not ask what is possible, but only asks: “You must.” In Don Carlos, Schiller does not offer us a critique of court life. This takes a back seat to practical moral postulates. “Become the kind of person whose principles of action could become universal laws of humanity,” Kant had demanded—and in the Marquis Posa, the cosmopolitan idealist, Schiller articulates the demand for the independence of the ideal from everything that springs from nature.

[ 15 ] By the time Don Carlos was completed, Schiller stood in the sharpest possible contrast to the worldviews of Goethe and Herder, and at the beginning of his life in Weimar, no rapprochement with them could therefore take place. Now, however, Schiller has become a reformer of Kantianism: he now strives for monism, but finds unity only in the aesthetic realm—in the problem of beauty. He shows us how human beings only fully realize themselves when they elevate nature to their own level and incorporate morality from above into their nature. The categorical imperative does not force him under a yoke; rather, he voluntarily serves what is contained in the “Thou shalt.” Thus Schiller rises to his full stature by transcending Kant. He turns against Kant, who seeks to make man not a free being but a slave, bowed under the yoke of duty. It became clear to him that something entirely different lives within human beings than this submission to a “Thou shalt.” In monumental sentences, he expresses how he approaches what constitutes Goethe’s and Herder’s worldview: “I gladly serve my friends, yet I do so, alas, out of inclination, and so it often gnaws at me that I am not virtuous.”

[ 16 ] Kant disparaged what people do out of inclination—what they do voluntarily—and, in contrast, praised what they do out of duty as the higher. Kant addresses, in a passionate apostrophe, the strict duty that is not supposed to hold any allure. Schiller lifts humanity out of its weakness by allowing the moral law to become the law of its own nature. Through the study of history, through sincere affection and devotion to human life, he arrived at that lost harmony and, with it, an understanding of Goethe.

[ 17 ] Schiller beautifully describes Goethe’s approach in his memorable letter of August 23, 1794: “For a long time now, though from a considerable distance, I have been observing the course of your mind and noting the path you have charted for yourself with ever-renewed admiration. You seek the essence of nature, but you seek it by the most arduous path, one that any weaker force would surely avoid. You take all of nature as a whole in order to arrive at the individual light; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the basis for explaining the individual.”

[ 18 ] Schiller had thus reached the height to which he was destined to develop. While he himself had started from duality, he had now arrived at the unity between humanity and nature. This led him to the style of creativity that had characterized him in recent years, since the mid-1890s, and to his friendship with Goethe. It was a historic friendship, because it sought not only happiness for the two of them alone, but was also fruitful for the world, for humanity. In what we have in Goethe and Schiller, we have not only Goethe and Schiller, but we also have a third element: Goethe plus Schiller. — Anyone who follows the course of spiritual life sees in this a being that could only come into being because, within the selfless friendship and mutual devotion, something unfolded that stood as a new being above the individual personality. This mood will provide us with the proper transition to Goethe and what he was to mean for Schiller.