The Rudolf Steiner Archive

26. Schiller and Idealism (Aesthetics and Morality)

[ 1 ] Today, during the final class, I would like to address a specific question that ties in with the lecture on Schiller’s influence on the present. The question of German aesthetics is of interest to us here because Schiller is closely associated with the founding of the science of aesthetics. Aesthetics is the science of beauty.

[ 2 ] We have seen how Schiller approached the concept of beauty during various periods of his life. Schiller viewed beauty as something possessing a very special cultural value. The extent to which this represented something truly unique is revealed to us by the science of aesthetics as we know it today—a discipline that is only about one hundred and fifty years old. Of course, Aristotle had already written on poetics, but for centuries, views on the subject remained stagnant. We know that even Lessing frequently drew on Aristotle. It was not until the 18th century, emerging from Wolff’s philosophy, that Baumgarten wrote a book on beauty, Ästhetica, in 1750. He distinguishes the Beautiful from the True in that, as he says, the True contains a clear idea, while the Beautiful embodies unclear, confused ideas. It was not long before Schiller that such ideas could emerge. Now, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment itself, we have a kind of aesthetics, but for him it was all merely theory; he never gained a vivid understanding of what beauty is; he never traveled more than three miles from his birthplace, Königsberg, and never saw any significant work of art; thus, he wrote solely from the standpoint of abstract philosophy. It was Schiller who first grasped this problem in a vivid and lively way in his work Aesthetic Letters.

[ 3 ] What was the nature of the problem back then? Goethe looked upon Greece with melancholy; Winckelmann, too, gazed longingly back to the time when humans recreated the divine in their works of art. Schiller, as well, was consumed by this longing during his second period. This is expressed in The Gods of Greece. What, after all, is it other than a religious trait that underlay Greek drama? At its core lies the mystery—the secret of the god who becomes human, who suffers, dies, and rises again as a human being. What stirred the soul in this process 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, was to consist in striving for the purification of these passions through the presentation of actions that arouse fear and pity. It was difficult to understand what was meant by this. Lessing himself reflected deeply on the matter. In the 19th century, a rich body of literature emerged on the subject. Entire libraries have been written about the word “catharsis.” It was not understood because people did not know where it originated.

[ 4 ] In Aeschylus’s drama, one can still discern traces of the drama of the gods. At the center of the plot stands Dionysus as the great dramatic figure; the chorus surrounding him accompanies the action. This is how Edouard Schur& brought the mystery drama back to life. The dramatic ritual had the very specific purpose of leading people to a higher level of existence.

[ 5 ] It was said that human beings are subject to passions; through their lower nature, they are bound to them; but they can rise above them if the higher nature that lives within them is purified; they can elevate themselves by contemplating the divine model. This kind of presentation was intended to make it easier for people to better themselves than can be achieved through teaching. For, as Schopenhauer says: Morality is easy to preach, but it is difficult to justify. — It was in a later epoch of humanity that Socrates’ view emerged that virtue could be taught. But it is something that lives within man, something as natural to him as eating and drinking; he can be led to it when the divine within him is awakened by the example of the suffering God. This purification through the divine example is called “catharsis.” Thus, fear and compassion were to be evoked. Ordinary compassion, which is tied to the personal, is to be elevated to great, impersonal compassion when one sees God suffering for humanity.

[ 6 ] Then the dramatic plot was humanized, and in the Middle Ages we see how morality emancipated itself and emerged as an independent force. Thus, what had been vividly alive in the mystery plays was later developed in a one-sided manner within Christianity. The Greeks saw with their own eyes the god who rose from humiliation. In the Mysteries, virtue was not merely preached, but brought before people’s eyes.

[ 7 ] Bringing this back to people’s understanding, reuniting these two things, was something that lived very intensely within Schiller. The essence of his poetry was the longing to reconcile these two: sensuality and morality. Strict morality, as conceived by Kant, meant 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 so purified that it itself would appear as duty. That is why he also revered Goethe so much, seeing in him a perfect union of sensuality and morality. He sought this union of the sensual and the moral in beauty. For because Schiller possessed, to a special degree, a German trait—the aesthetic conscience—he wanted art to serve the purpose of elevating humanity to a higher existence. In our classical era, there was a strong sense that beauty was not meant to fill idle hours, but rather that it was the bridge between the divine and the sensual. And Schiller came to the conclusion that he found freedom here. Inclination is no longer suppressed; he says that a person who must be virtuous in spite of his inclinations still stands on a low level. No, his inclinations must be developed in such a way that he acts virtuously of his own accord. Earlier, in his essay “The Theater as a Moral Institution,” he had still preached something akin to the austere Kantian morality.

[ 8 ] The secret of the master lies in the triumph of form over substance. What, after all, is the substance of poetry? What is the correct perspective from which to view beauty? — As long as I am interested in a single, particular face, I have not acquired the true artistic vision; there is still a clinging to the subject matter. — “Consider the ‘what,’ but consider the ‘how’ even more!” — As long as the poet still shows that he hates the villain out of a sense of personal interest, he is still clinging to the subject matter, not to the form; he has not yet attained the aesthetic perspective. Only then has he advanced to this perspective, when the villain is portrayed in such a way that the natural order carries out the judgment, not the poet himself. Then the karma of the world is fulfilled; then world history becomes the Last Judgment. The poet steps back and observes world history objectively. Thus is fulfilled what Aristotle already stated: that poets are truer than history. In history, one cannot always grasp the entire course of events; what lies before us 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.

[ 9 ] This gave rise to a pure, noble conception of art; purification—catharsis itself—transcends sympathy and antipathy. The viewer is to 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. Within a narrow framework, the playwright shows us how guilt and atonement are intertwined; he depicts in detail what truth is, yet imbues this truth with a universally valid character. Goethe expresses this by calling beauty a manifestation of the laws of nature, which would never find expression without beauty.

[ 10 ] Goethe and Schiller sought to find a form of realism, but an idealistic realism. Today, people believe that realism can be found through an accurate depiction of nature. Schiller and Goethe would have said: That is not the whole truth; sensory nature represents only a part of what is perceptible; the spiritual is missing from it; one could only accept it as truth if one were to incorporate the entire tableau of nature into a single work at once; yet sensory nature is always only a fragment of reality. Because they strove for truth, they did not accept the immediate truth of nature.

[ 11 ] Thus Schiller and Goethe strove to awaken idealism in their time. This idealism had existed before; in Dante we find depicted not the external reality that surrounds us, but rather what takes place within the human soul. Later, people wanted to see the spiritual externalized before their eyes. In The Grand Kophta, Goethe depicted how those who materialize the spirit are prone to delusions. Schiller, too, grappled with the materialization of the spiritual. At that time, there was also much exploration in this direction. Much of what is known today as spiritualism was of great interest to broad circles back then. Thus arose the profound Geisterseher (The Spirit-Seer), an engagement with these currents. Before the time when he had, through Kantianism and his artistic work, struggled his way to higher perspectives, Schiller described the dangers to which one is exposed who seeks the spiritual in the external world rather than within oneself. Thus the Geisterseher came into being.

[ 12 ] A prince who has become 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 proclaimed 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 into a mental state that makes him receptive to a spirit apparition. The séance is underway, but suddenly a stranger intervenes, exposes the conjurer, and then himself causes an apparition to take the place of the impostor’s, one that delivers an important message to the prince. The prince is torn by doubts; the stranger is the same man who made the prophecy to him. But soon the doubting prince suspects that the two were in cahoots, since the first conjurer is arrested but soon disappears. New, inexplicable events lead him to seek a solution to all these mysteries; in doing so, he becomes completely dependent on a secret society; yet he loses all moral grounding. The novel was never completed, but it presents, in a deeply moving way, the struggle of a seeker of the spiritual; we see how the longing for the spiritual leads a person astray when he seeks it in the external world. Not the one who clings to the sensual—nor even the one who demands to see the spiritual appear as something sensual—can penetrate to the spiritual. The spiritual is meant to reveal itself in the human soul.

[ 13 ] This is the true secret of the spiritual. That is why the artist first perceives it as beauty. Beauty, then, conquered and permeated by the spirit, becomes truly present in the work of art. Thus, beauty is the worthy material of the spiritual. At first, for Schiller, beauty was the only means through which the spiritual could reveal itself. He looked back with wistfulness on the Greek era, when the possibility of a different awakening of the spiritual existed. Humanity had elevated itself to the status of a god by bringing the divine down, allowing it to become human and, through it, to elevate itself. Now humanity was to rise once more to the divine by overcoming the material. Thus, in his dramas, Schiller strove ever higher, until the physical fell further and further away from him, until what Goethe called out to him—“Far behind him in insubstantial gleam / lay that which subdues us all, the common”—had become the full truth for him. Goethe did not use the word “common” here in a contemptuous or base sense; what is meant here is the universal human condition, the ordinary nature of humankind, above which Schiller had risen. Thus, as a true seer of the spirit, Schiller rose to the contemplation of the spiritual.

[ 14 ] He should stand before us as a role model. That alone should have been the purpose of these lectures—as far as was possible in such a short time—to trace Schiller’s struggling soul as it rises to ever higher spiritual insight, seeking to grasp the spiritual in order to imprint it upon the sensory. In this struggle, one recognizes Schiller, for in him Goethe’s words are truly fulfilled:

Only he deserves freedom as much as life itself,
who must win it anew every day.

[ 15 ] Thus Schiller rose to become the master of aesthetic, spirit-filled form.