BERNSTEIN, J. M._significant Stone Medium and Sense in Schiller

J. M. Bernstein

Significant Stone: Medium and Sense in Schiller

Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts bieteneine handfeste Neuformulierung der Kernelemente von Kants ästhetischer Theo-rie; gleichwohl dominiert Kants Theorie die gegenwärtige Diskussion auf demGebiet der Kunsttheorie und Ästhetik. Nach einer kurzen und bündigen Darstel-lung von Schillers zentralen Einwänden gegen Kants Theorie – an erster Stelle ihrVersagen, unserer besonderen Stellung als autonome Wesen gerecht zu werden,sowie ihr Unvermögen, die Eigenschaften der Gegenstände, die uns zu ästheti-schen Urteilen veranlassen, zu explizieren – lege ich dar, dass Schiller die Mängelder Kantischen Lehre vorgreifend in seinen Kallias-Briefen und überzeugend inseinen Ästhetischen Briefen behebt. Genauer besteht meine Absicht darin, dasKernargument von Schillers Ästhetischen Briefen auf eine solche Weise zu rekon-struieren, dass die Funktion des Mediums Kunst und die Notwendigkeit des ästhe-tischen Scheins die Angelpunkte werden, um die sich das Argument dreht. Daswird plausibel, wenn der Begriff des Mediums Kunst ein Potential der Bedeutsam-keit der materiellen Natur aufweisen kann, dass andernfalls durch ihre kausaldeterminierte Verfasstheit ausgeschlossen wäre; und wenn der Begriff des ästheti-schen Scheins eine Form der Beziehung zwischen Subjekt und Objekt ausmachenkann, die weder eine des Wissens noch eine des Handeln (nach Normen der Moral)ist.

I. Art and Emptiness

In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller attempts to demonstratethe historical necessity of our undergoing some form of aesthetic education ifthe constitutive ends of human reason and happiness are to become possible.What remains shocking in Schiller’s argument for the necessity of an aestheticeducation is that he accepts Kant’s contention that aesthetic judgments of tasteneither provide us with knowledge nor are they explicitly action guiding (in theway the categorical imperative is action guiding); aesthetic judgments concerndirectly neither how the world truly is nor what we ought to do. If what is trueor false, on the one hand, or morally obligated or prohibited on the otherexhaust how items can be cognitively significant, then from an empirical per-spective, aesthetic judgments are peculiarly empty; and it is through or on thisemptiness that our moral and political fate depends.

How can artworks mean, how can they be provide for the necessary trans-formation of our self-understanding and cultivation of our sensibility if they arebarred from directly participating in the forms of cognitive and moral purposesthat transcendentally constitute our relations to experience in general? Art canbe directly epistemically empty and morally idle and yet significant because,

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Schiller contends, its ambitions are essentially reflective, almost philosophical:aesthetic judgments concern how who we are as free, self-determining beingssubject to unconditional moral imperatives can possibly inhere in a causallydetermined world that, prima facie, expels freedom and meaning from its pre-cincts, that is, aesthetic judgments tacitly address the apparently insuperabledualism between freedom and causality, between autonomous subjectivity and amechanically governed material world. Two theses emerge directly from thisstatement of Schiller’s project: First, if aesthetic judgments – or their standardobjects, works of art – bracket both empirical truth and moral normativity, thenthey seem fated to inhabit a domain that is neither empirically real nor trans-cendentally ideal; the aesthetic domain is one of semblance (Schein) – a termused by Schiller to precisely capture the idea of how an item might appear in theworld whose significance nonetheless escapes standard epistemic and moralcategorization.1 Second, if semblances are to be the bearers of possibilities notvouched safe humankind in its engagements with the material world, then thematerial world of semblances must be discontinuous with the empiricallyknown material world. The standard term for the material bearer of aestheticexperience is the medium of art. Art mediums, I shall argue, are the domain ofmaterial nature conceived of as – nonetheless – hospitable to human freedomand meaning; art is the rewriting of material nature as purposive and meaning-ful, or, more accurately, as materially inviting purposiveness and meaningful-ness into itself.2 Art mediums exemplify an escape from the disenchantment ofnature without abrogating the authority of natural science.

On the face of it, this second thesis seems obvious: if artworks are enduringobjects designed for extended acts of perceptual attention, then their sensorycharacter must allow them to be understood in non-causally reductive ways.The question then arises: what is at stake in regarding something that is notintrinsically meaningful, say a piece of marble, as meaningful, say, a shiningimage of the human body? Clearly, something about the way in which we canlegitimately regard the domain of art as a world of semblances that stands apartfrom both empirical knowledge and moral action is going to be necessary if artmediums as conceptions of material nature hospitable to human meaning aregoing to be rationally possible. In brief, a defense of the necessity of our havingan aesthetic education through art is going to have to depend on a defense of thenecessity of semblance.3

Significant Stone: Medium and Sense in Schiller 163

1 From here on whenever I speak of items or works “appearing” thus and so, what isbeing flagged is Schillerian Schein and not Kantian Erscheinung. Exactly why the notion of semblance is important is fleshed out in section III below.

2 For this way of setting up and reading aesthetic theory, see my Introduction to Bern-stein, 2003.

3 In stating the thesis this way, I am of course flagging what I take to be the cornerstoneof Adorno’s conception of art and aesthetic education; for this, see Bernstein, 1997.



My intention in this essay is to reconstruct the core argument of Schiller’sAesthetic Letters in a manner in which the roles of art mediums and the neces-sity of semblances become the pivots on which its argument turns. I shallfurther want to claim that understood aright, Schiller’s conception of art forgesa plausible conception of what we now conceive of as artistic modernism; had I the space, I would even want to claim that this Schillerian modernism providesa standing rebuke to the postmodernism of the Schlegel brothers’ Jena romanti-cism, and hence postmodernism generally, that, arguably, was intended to be thecompletion of the aesthetic program Schiller inaugurated.4

II. Of Freedom in Appearance

In order to accurately engage Schiller’s ambitions in the Aesthetic Letters weneed some sense of their philosophical orientation. The Aesthetic Letters con-tinue the reformulation of Kant’s aesthetic theory that Schiller had begun in his“Kallias Letters.”5 Although always operating within the boundaries of Kant’scritical philosophy, the “Kallias Letters” can be interpreted as urging a three-fold critique of Kant’s aesthetic theory.6 Schiller finds Kant’s account lacking ininwardness (the way works address our subjectivity, call it forth), depth (thesense that in beauty we experience an objectified “fullness of meaning” which isnot capable of being translated into exhaustively discursive terms), and, objec-tivity (aesthetic pleasure is a response to intrinsic features of objects in relationto our general capacity for response).7 Kant’s theory of judgments of taste, thecornerstone of his conception of beauty, fails of inwardness because, as thedifferent deductions of the possibility of judgments of taste reveal, it concernsthe universally shared subjective conditions for objective judgments of nature.Roughly, Kant’s claim is that in a judgment of taste there occurs an harmoniza-tion of imagination and understanding through the reflective awareness of aunity of a sensory manifold without any concept so unifying it; this state of har-mony can be licensed as one that ought to be felt as pleasurable by all othersonly if the work of imaginative/reflective unification performs the necessaryantecedent to determinative judgments generally. Primarily, then, for Kantjudgments of taste form a contextualization and underwriting of epistemic sub-jectivity; but epistemic subjectivity relates to the understanding (Verstand and

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4 This essay was originally part a longer essay that included a critique of Jena romanti-cism. That critique has now appeared independently; see Bernstein, 2006.

5 In Bernstein, 2003, xviii–xxii I offer a précis of the text that dovetails with the argu-ment of this paper. A translation, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to GottfriedKörner,” trans. Stefan Pollan, appears on pp. 145–184.

6 I am here following the persuasive analysis of Henrich, 1982.7 The notions of inwardness, depth, and objectivity are Henrich’s, 1982, pp. 240–242.



not Vernunft, reason), and even for Kant the understanding concerns only ourcapacity to encounter mechanical nature. Mechanical nature is revealed inaesthetic judging as intrinsically hospitable to our epistemic needs for judgingit, for forming empirical concepts and, in reflective judging more broadly, con-structing a hierarchical, deductive science. But even with the purposive, teleo-logical supplement that allows mechanical nature to be conceived in its order-liness as “for the sake of” human understanding, for Schiller this is still coldcomfort. If even for Kant the real subjectivity of the subject lies in its freedomand autonomy, then the fact that what gets affirmed in aesthetic pleasure isfundamentally related to mechanical nature, and hence to what extrudes sub-jectivity from the external world makes the judgment of beauty add insult (fit-ness) to the original injury of expulsion.

The issue of depth is similarly thin gruel: while we find relief, alias pleasure,in the affirmation of nature as suitable to the needs of epistemic subjectivity,nature so understood is still antithetic to human subjectivity; judgments of tastemay legitimate an “as if” judgment of nature as teleologically ordered, but notso in a way hospitable to the concerns of practical life, hence as mattering tohow we conceive of our lives as having or lacking meaning. Thus it is the veryemphases of Kant’s account that make unintelligible why beauty should beabsorbing, why it should feel indefinitely gripping, a subject for on-going con-templation and reflection, why it might appear to possess a satisfying fullness ofmeaning. Hence, Schiller’s accusation of Kant’s theory as lacking inwardness isa claim that the presupposed teleological orienting of nature in judgments ofnatural beauty at bottom leaves nature as disenchanted as before, and as a con-sequence fails to call forth or engage our (actual) subjectivity. A thought whichgets underlined in the accusation of lack of depth: because nothing of the mean-ing of human freedom in the context of nature reaches expression in Kant’saesthetic formalism, then it leaves unexplained why beauty should be foundexpressive of meaningfulness, however indeterminate that meaningfulness is inaesthetic contexts. Finally, drawing these two threads together, Schiller findsKant’s aesthetic theory still too subjective, still too focused on what is merelysubjective – the harmony of imagination and understanding –, still, essentially,about the effect an object has on the cognitive faculties, rather than about responding to intrinsic features of fully worldly objects, encountering andbeing attuned to objects in a manner that relates as much to some characteristicaspect of them as to our capacity for response. This is just another way of say-ing that for Kant while judgments of beauty can be objective, speak with a universal voice, beauty itself is not a property or feature of objects, despite itsbeing a response to something about them.8 Kant downplays that aboutness,


8 For an illuminating critique of Kant’s deduction of taste along this line see Ameriks,1983.



Schiller will heighten it, letting the sting of the difference from actual empiricalproperties fall on the issue of semblance.

In the “Kallias Letters,” Schiller engineers a transformation of Kant’s theoryby making two simple substitutions: in place of aesthetic judgments derivingfrom the relation between the understanding and the imagination, they concernthe work of reason; in place of the mere form of purposiveness, by which Kantmeans, again, the reflective experience of a sensory manifold as unified and uni-fiable without being subsumed under a concept, Schiller substitutes an object’sappearing as if its states and character were not externally caused, but if notrequiring external explanation then as if it were self-explanatory, and hence as ifits apparent order were determined by an internal necessity, a law of its own.But to say an object appears as if it were not externally determined is thus equivalent to saying that aesthetic form relates to an object appearing as if self-determining or autonomous. The two substitutions emphatically converge onthe concept of freedom: beauty is the appearance of self-determination innature. Notice how neatly these two modest substitutions – which on a fine daycan feel as if they are only minor adjustments to Kant’s doctrine – transform thecharacter of Kant’s theory and allow the original criticisms to be answered: itnow concerns not the fitness of mechanical objects for our capacity to judge butthe great idea of self-determination resonating back to us from certain appear-ances of nature. It is our freedom that is addressed in aesthetic experience; theexperience is ignited by features of objects that allow them to appear as self-determining; and in aesthetic experience natural objects appear art-like, hencerevealing nature as itself purposive, so, however gingerly, lifting the curse ofmechanization.

III. Fragmented Modernity: Form-Drive versus Sense-Drive

Whilst provocative, the argumentation of the “Kallias Letters” remains substan-tively flawed and naive in comparison with the Aesthetic Letters since in theformer Schiller assumes that it is the standpoint of practical reason that seeksimages of itself in the world, and that in finding appearing wholes not requiringexternal determination for their prima facie intelligibility projects freedom onto them – a projection that looks for all the world liked a deluded instance ofanthropomorphism.9 In the latter letters Schiller is forced to acknowledge thatit is freedom or autonomy itself that repudiates the claims of sensibility, thatmodern freedom emerges from the repudiation of its sensible condition, andhence that freedom qua freedom “never becomes manifest” (Schiller, 1967, 3.5;SWN, 20, p. 315): the Terror of the French Revolution is continuous with the

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9 For a fleshing out this criticism see Bernstein, 2003, p. xxii; and Beiser, 2005, pp. 68–74.



transcendental meaning of freedom as that which determines but is never deter-mined, as that which exceeds every sensible actualization. Freedom is sublime.If freedom “never becomes manifest,” it equally follows that any image of free-dom, any sensible determining of it, will be a semblance. The question Schillerpresses in the Aesthetic Letters is whether that appearance, that semblance ismore than a mere illusion, a comforting projection, whether semblance mightbe somehow necessary. In the tenth letter he proposes a soft-edged transcen-dental deduction as the correct strategy: beauty must be shown to be a neces-sary condition for the possibility of humanity, Menschheit (Schiller, 1967, 10.7;SWN, 20, p. 340). The argument is not a transcendental deduction properbecause the end, humanity, is itself only morally or ethically necessary.10 And,as we shall see, even this may be too strong since there is a question about theorigin or source of the very idea of Menschheit. Nonetheless, Schiller here seesthe task of demonstrating the objective value of beauty as requiring the estab-lishing of the necessity of semblance for the possibility of our having an effec-tive conception of humanity. If the “Kallias Letters” focused on the problems ofinwardness and objectivity, the Aesthetic Letters have the depth problem astheir core.

Schiller’s proposing of the form-drive (Formtrieb) and sense-drive (Stoff-trieb) as replacements for Kant’s transcendental distinctions between form andsense (concept and intuition, reason/understanding versus sensibility, freedomand nature) is standardly interpreted as the anthropological replacing the trans-cendental, as if Schiller had simply failed to understand the transcendentalmeaning of Kant’s various distinctions. This seems to me exactly wrong. I readSchiller as a critical theorist avant la lettre; his argument is governed by thequestion: What is the historical meaning of the Copernican turn? What are thehistorical conditions for and the social consequences of the recognition of thetranscendental meaning of reason and freedom? To conceive of transcendentalitems in their social and historical setting is to conceive of them as providingfundamental orientations for social practice. Conceived as normative orienta-tions governing social practice, transcendental forms become drives.11 Hence,drive talk in Schiller is not reductively psychological or anthropological but theattempt to account for the way in which a transcendental claim is experienced asa claim in practice, and what the effects of that experience are. Nonetheless, the


10 This is not to say that humanity is an optional end. I take part of the claim of the firstten letters, which weave together philosophy, social analysis, and philosophicalhistory, to be that we cannot sustain any of our most fundamental moral beliefs –about freedom, equality, suffering, dignity – without adopting humanity as an end(the recurrent “morality must become nature” argument); and hence to deny the notion of humanity amounts to coming into profound and deracinating contradictionwith ourselves.

11 Beiser, 2005, pp. 139, 146–7 argues persuasively that Schiller borrowed his drive theory not from Fichte but from Reinhold, 1789.



logical force of those claims derives, at least in part, from the fact that the stakesare transcendental. This is why the Terror of the French Revolution matters totranscendental philosophy: its violence is logically synonymous with the raw orunmediated or direct claim of freedom in relation to sensibility, freedom’snecessary repudiation of its dependence on the sensible for its meaning (Schiller1967, 3.4, 4.3; SWN, 20, pp. 314–315, 316–317); the normativity of freedom is itstranscendence of sensibility, its never being fully realized or exemplified in anyempirical complex.

To be sure, in transforming sense from faculty (sensibility), psychologicalcontent (the inclinations), and the content (or matter) of form into the sense-drive, Schiller is giving to sense a claim and meaning that it does not prima facie possess in Kant, or rather a claim which only the logic of Kant’s aesthetictheory acknowledges, albeit insufficiently. Hence, Schiller’s drive theory ori-ginates in the need to explain how Kant’s transcendental account of understand-ing and reason could require the precise supplementation it receives in hisaesthetic theory. Only Kant’s aesthetics reveals the claim of sense which thetranscendental authority of the forms of reason and understanding appear tosuppress. It is thus the meaning of that claim, its transformations and fate, thatare the concern of the philosophical and historical narrative of the AestheticLetters.12 The sensuous drive, sinnlicher Trieb, and the form-drive are them-selves deduced from the (practical) “I think.” Assume that human dignity isgrounded in rational personality as an atemporal power for rational activity; thematter that rational activity works upon is provided from without throughsensory affection. From this thin basis can be derived two fundamental laws ofour sensate-rational nature, laws that explicate the kind of connectedness thatmust exist between the two parts of our nature. Since rational personality is apotential for a certain type of activity, then what is mere form must becomeworld, so making our potential for rational personality actual (subject mustbecome substance). Working from the opposite direction, everything in manthat is mere world, given, must be destroyed and brought within the domain

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12 That this is what the Aesthetic Letters are all about becomes more visible from the per-spective of the opening arguments of On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, where Schil-ler should be interpreted as demonstrating how unavoidable the notion of the naive is,say via the normative unavoidability of the claim for what is childlike; and thenceshowing how that unavoidability is to be construed as a claim for “nature” which isincompatible with mechanical nature. Our very self-consciousness, our sentimentalself-understanding, is only intelligible in contrast to its lack, where that lack as exem-plified by the Greeks relates to some notion of naturalness or attunement with thenatural world (including our own bodies and feelings) that has been lost. The loss, sointerpreted, becomes the governing theme of early Hölderlin, who thought of himselfas explicitly following Schiller in this regard. My hypothesis is that the tragic Hölder-lin got Schiller right, seeing through Schiller’s moralistic rhetoric to the dark logiclying just beneath the surface.



of form – an insistence upon absolute Formalität (Schiller 1967, 11.9; SWN, 20,p. 344; substance must become subject). The sense-drive and the form-drive arethe means through which these two laws become actual, whilst not, I think,being intended as direct expressions of them.

The sense-drive, Schiller maintains, has the task of setting man within thelimits of time, turning him into matter; materialization thus becomes a funda-mental orientation of subjectivity rather than solely a threat to it. Matter is thecontent of time, what occupies time; what the drive hence demands is that timeshall have content, that there shall be change. By this route, Schiller finds hisway back to Kant: “this state, which is nothing but time occupied by content, iscalled sensation” (Schiller 1967, 12.1; SWN, 20, p. 344). Whilst the view of sen-sation is Kantian, the underlying drive is not; the drive represents the claim ofsensation, the desire for the moment, the desire to relish moments, have them,live them, let them be all, cognitively and affectively. So the sense-drive is morethan the drive for self-preservation, and although it feeds empiricism, hedonismand vulgar eudaimonism (it is the ground or fundament of their claim, why theycan so much as appear to have a claim to rational attention), it is not reducible topositivist atomism, a pleasure-pain calculus or blind self-indulgence. The sense-drive is the expression of our finitude, the claim of content in relation to form,the demand of (for) cases in relation to law. The particular can matter for Schil-ler since there is a demand for actualization, for form to be realized, where it isthe actualization or realization itself that is the point of the form: the individualcase matters because it is an actualization of form rather than being merely amoment in which form is realized; only empirical determinacy adequatelyachieves the promise formal indeterminacy. Hence, Schiller’s elaboration ofKant is to contend that if the reason-sense or form-content distinction is itselftranscendental, then each component, sense and reason, must each be creditedwith a rationality potential (for that is what the drives qua transcendental orien-tations have revealed themselves to be) that is necessary for our sensate-rationalnature as a whole, that is irreducible, and that is not derivable from its opposite;and hence the rationality of the whole depends on providing space for theactualization of the potential of each component. (By providing sensatenesswith transcendental authority, Schiller explains what earlier writers suspect butleave almost unintelligible: why sensible realization, say in arbitrary signstaking on the appearance of natural signs in poetry, should be equivalent to asensuous enlivening rather than material mortification.)

The provision of a rationality potential for both form and sense is not Kant,although it can sound very proximate. Because the drives are irreducible andnon-derivable rationality potentials, then their coordination cannot be thoughtthrough the standard models of synthesis or subordination: the first wouldassume ultimate reducibility, the second a priori hierarchy. So, “subordinationthere must, of course, be; but it must be reciprocal” (Schiller 1967, 13.2fn.;SWN, 20, p. 348). In a nutshell, this is Schiller’s ultimate critique of Kant, since




the critiques of pure and practical reason each do turn on the subordination of sense by form (intuitions by concepts, inclinations by the moral law). Theemptiness of concepts without intuitions provides an empirical constraint onwhat makes concepts cognitively worthy without explicating how intuitions arethe substantive contents of intuitions. The moral law is more than a constrainton what maxims can be morally worthy; moral worthiness has its unique sourcein the moral law. It is not that Kant ignores the claims of sense; rather, Schiller iscontending, by making subordination uni-directional, from form to sense, thatKant construes the claim of sense from the perspective of form, making senseform’s puppet, the voice of sense a work of ventriloquism. Said differently, theepistemic constraints of Kant’s theory mandate that sense be theoretically inert,hence without orientational significance. In claiming that if sense is a structuralfeature of cognition it must have transcendental significance, Schiller critique ofKant reaches into the deepest stratum of Kant’s dualism. Hence, to insist uponreciprocal subordination is to seek a mode in which the claim of sense appearsfrom its own perspective, not without form but wherein form is its vehicle.Such is the claim of the (modern/modernist) work of art.

The idea of reciprocal subordination sounds eloquently harmonizing, andperhaps is meant to so sound; but before helping ourselves to this idea, someobstacles to it need limning. The first is this: although beauty is indeed meant asthe link between the two drives, between thinking and feeling, yet, insists Schil-ler, “between these two there is absolutely no middle term […] Beauty […]unites two conditions which are diametrically opposed and can never becomeone” (Schiller 1967, 18.2, 4; SWN, 20, p. 366). Beauty is to be a weird sort of tertium quid, uniting what are logically opposed and cannot be made one. Asirreducible rationality potentials, the drives cannot be dialectically synthesized.Hence, whatever beauty is, it is not the dialectical overcoming of the division.Keeping in mind the permanent opposition between sense-drive and form-drive, and the consequent impossibility of creating a unity that is not a dia-lectical sublation of them is central to appreciating how dark Schiller’s vision is.Further, noting how paradoxically he formulates the task of beauty – to unitewhat is permanently opposed – underlines the logical stress he places on hisanalysis.

Second, although the transcendental presentation of the drives makes itappear as if they must be fully equally, this is not in fact the case. There is a pri-ority of form over content for us and it is that priority which is the explanationfor the failure of the French Revolution, the brutality of the state, the fragmen-tation of our humanity through the division of labor, the barbarism of class ofdifference (Schiller 1967, 5 and 6; SWN, 20, pp. 319–321 and 321–328). Thispriority, call it the fact of modernity, has been historically engendered. Thiswould be bearable if the historical fact were a brute contingency or reversible. Itis not quite either. The process of civilization necessitates the delegitimation ofthe sense-drive as a condition for the historical emergence of the transcendental

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claim of the form-drive, and hence for the coming-to-be of natural science,rational (egalitarian) morality, and the idea of a liberal state (Schiller 1967, 6.1,8–15; 20.3; 24.4; SWN, 20, pp. 321, 324–328; 374–375; 390). Schiller does not tireof commenting upon the fact that rational personality and the ideas associatedwith it could arise only through an antagonism which entailed the tearing ofman out of nature altogether and the systematic severing of the claim of thesense-drive; that fragmentation and suffering are the conditions under which aconception of a rational whole emerges; that the logic which has the species pro-gressing while the lot of the individual disintegrates is unavoidable; and, finally,that only through the excision of all givenness, all determination, can the idea ofrational autonomy assert itself. The rational force of modernity is, let us say, thesublimity of rational freedom, and it is that which provides for the priority ofform over sense. To the degree to which we cannot rationally forgo the claimsof natural science, rational morality, and the liberal state, then, however balefulthe social consequences, we cannot quite conceive of overturning that priority.Modernity is the de-legitimation of the sense-drive and the corollary de-author-ization of nature as a source of independent claims; this is the second limb to adark construal of Schiller, and the half-truth that is misrepresented by Kant’suni-directional model.13 The achievements of rational modernity for him pos-sess an intrinsic and ineliminable moment of violence; since that moment is butthe flip-side of what really are the unsurpassable achievements of modernity,then the correction of that violence (what an aesthetic education might provide)cannot be conceived of as an utter or complete logical transformation of theterms making modernity possible. Holding on to a dark reading of Schillermeans holding true to his aporetic conception of modernity whose Janus face,both rational and deracinating, is empirically correctable but not fully trans-formable.

The fact of modernity is the de-authorization of the claims of nature andsensibility; the historical authorization of form occurs through the de-author-ization and de-legitimation of sense (the disenchantment of nature). Even theoriginal statement of the form-drive expresses this thought: in accordance withthe law of absolute formality, man is to “exterminate (vertilgen) everything inhimself that is mere world” (Schiller 1967, 11.9; SWN, 20, p. 344; trans. amend-ed). When Schiller goes on to state that there is no necessary conflict between


13 Sometimes Schiller writes as if political utopia would be the reversal of this hierarchy;but his best thoughts in this area suggest only that the rational claim for political utopia is consequent upon the claim of the work of art, its demonstration of a rationalsurplus beyond rationalized modernity, entailing thereby that rational modernity isnot fully rational in itself. But, I am contending, his analysis of beauty insists upon thepermanence of the opposition between the drives and the continuance of hierarchy.The fact that the hierarchy is historical and not a priori, pace Kant, is the wriggle roomSchiller names utopia.



the drives, his formulation is accordingly askew: “The form-drive insists onunity and persistence – but it does not require the condition to be fixed as wellas the Person, does not require the identity of sensation” (Schiller 1967, 13.2;SWN, 20, p. 347; trans. amended). This is misleading, and Schiller must know it;what the insistence of the form-drive entails is not the identity of sensation, as ifwe could have just one sensation forever, which makes no sense, but, whatresults from subordination, “uniformity” (Schiller, 1967, 13.2fn.; SWN, 20, pp. 347–348), for sense to be exhausted by the identity of the concept coveringit, hence not for time to stop, but for change to be empty, time meaninglessexcept as the transformation of world into form.14 Whither then the claim ofsense, the claim of sensuous nature and finitude, and hence of us as possessing asensate-rational nature?

If philosophy were to attempt to restore the claim of sense through rationaldemonstration, the attempt would necessarily be self-defeating; the deductionwould reveal sense to be deducible from and by reason, hence not independent.The authority of sensate nature, nature as the internal correlative of sensoryawareness, can only be restored in a manner that itself acknowledges the claimof sensuousness. But this cannot be the direct or immediate claim of sensuous-ness, for that claim is the one that has been already thoroughly repudiated bythe demands of formality. Hence the claim for sensate nature must be one for itas part of a whole, thus as coordinated with form. Within a modernity that isfragmented into various specializations, art is that fragment of the whole whosetask it is to restore to it the wholeness the other arts have destroyed (Schiller,1967, 6.15; SWN, 20, p. 328); artists are specialists in the overcoming of speciali-zation. Schiller is systematically unclear about the status of this thesis, a lack ofclarity which affects the Aesthetic Letters generally. Throughout the text hesystematically conflates the thesis that art (art beauty) is that through which theclaim of sensate nature is revealed as possessing a defused or lost authoritywhich we cannot do without, with the thesis that there is an independentlyexisting rational idea of sensate-rational humanity whose motivational author-ity is re-established through the arts. In the first case, art does the revealing, andphilosophy is the handmaiden whose task is to elaborate the experience of art as

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14 This still does not state the problem satisfactorily. What Schiller means to say, I think,is that the general orientation or logic of each drive is incommensurable with theother, but that does not entail the impossibility of there being particular states ofaffairs in which the force demanding subordination in each is not canceled. One wayof reading the play-drive is that it relates form to sense without the subordinatingforce of the drives operating; it is the force of the play-drive that puts the force of theother two drives out of play, so to speak. So the notion of the play-drive just is theattempt to find a force sufficient to counter the subordinating tendencies of the otherdrives without canceling them as drives. The account of the “lipstick thesis” belowattempts to locate the domain of the play-drive, without providing a direct elaborationof it as a drive.



revealing a lost rationality potentiality; in the second case, art is a means to anend that is philosophically and rationally independent of art. His specializationargument and his philosophical history make only the art-first version plau-sible.

IV. Medium and Semblance

“Humanity has lost its dignity,” Schiller asserts in the ninth letter, “but art hasrescued it and preserved it in significant stone (in bedeutenden Steinen). Truthlives on in the illusion [of art], and it is from this copy or after-image (aus demNachbilde), that the original image (Urbild) will once again be restored” (Schil-ler, 1967, 9.4; SWN, 20, p. 334). Artists are those who imprint spirit “upon silentstone (in den verschwiegnen Stein), or pour it into the sober mould of words”(Schiller, 1967, 9.6; SWN, 20, p. 334). Unpacking the relation between silent andsignificant stone on the one hand, and significant stone and truth ensconced inillusion on the other, is the key to the elaboration of art as revealing the lost theauthority of sensate nature. Let us think about illusion first.

Three theses are entangled in Schiller’s understanding of illusion. When Wil-kinson and Willoughby hesitate over the translation of Nachbilde by offeringboth “copy” and “after-image,” they are latching onto a productive ambiguityin Schiller. Notoriously in the Aesthetic Letters, and elsewhere, Schiller presentsthe Greeks as expressing “natural humanity,” combining the “first youth of theimagination with the manhood of reason” (Schiller, 1967, 6.2; SWN, 20, p. 321);in their art, “however high the mind might soar, it always drew matter lovinglyalong with it” (Schiller, 1967, 6.3; SWN, 20, p. 322). Greek art, he seems to bearguing, expresses the emphatic humanity of Greek social life, with the con-tinuing harmony of matter with ideal in art the expression of their achievementof a unity of reason with nature. In the tenth letter, however, after arguing thatthere is not a single instance in which the diffusion of aesthetic culture has gonehand in hand with freedom and civic culture (Schiller, 1967, 10.4; SWN, 20, pp. 338–339), he asserts that the Golden Age of Greek art only occurs when thestrength and freedom of Greek political life disappeared. The Greeks, Schiller iscontending, were (like) a work of art, and only had art in the emphatic sensewhen their natural humanity, which involved the interweaving of art, religion,and politics, collapsed. Art is still mimetic for Schiller, however awkwardly thatthought fits with everything else he wants to say about art; but it is also an after-image of the work of art the Greek people were – albeit a work of art created, inpart, by Winckelmann’s and his retrospective constructions. The disjoining ofart from politics is what gives art its political meaning: art stands in for anabsent politics. One level of the illusoriness of art hence relates to it represent-ing or standing in for what does not exist humanly, that the very being of artspeaks to a political absence, and that hence there is only art in the emphatic




sense when life itself has been disrupted, fragmented, ruined, stopped living(Schiller, 1967, 15.3; SWN, 20, p. 355). Hence, the routine idea of art imagina-tively presenting what is existentially absent becomes here the presentation ofthe absence of what is existentially significant. Art is memory, and throughbeing memory it becomes the promise of another history.15 At any rate, theclaim of sense is a claim of a lost naturalness, or, if that notion of loss dependstoo heavily on believing too much about the Greeks, then at least the thoughtthat we experience the lack of nature, the defusing of its claim by rational form,as a loss of our relation with nature, a loss that we experience individually in theemergence of adult reflective autonomy out of childhood (naive, natural) spon-taneity.16

But this leads to the second level of semblance. There is art proper only if artis a specialization, an autonomous sphere of activity. What establishes art’sautonomy? And, a related question: what preserves art from the corruption surrounding it? Art’s autonomy depends upon its taking a distance from theneeds of daily life, hence as absenting itself from the demands of all purposiveactivity (Schiller, 1967, 9.5; SWN, 20, p. 334); hence the autonomy of art, theappearance of art as art, is historically produced and conditioned. What is in-volved in this autonomy is even more radical than it appears as first blush: beauty is without result for the understanding or the will; it “accomplishes noparticular purpose, neither intellectual nor moral” (Schiller, 1967, 21.4; SWN,20, p. 377); this is the emptiness of art I mentioned at the opening of this essay.Aesthetic autonomy entails semblance; semblance is a corollary of autonomy.Art is semblance, then, in the sense that it is a claim for significance that is with-out binding empirical or practical content. Art is the semblance of significance(this is just what an experience of beauty is) whose significance, whatever it is, islodged in it being pure semblance.

This is the riddle of semblance that Schiller addresses in letters twenty-sixand twenty-seven. Although Schiller circles valiantly around the problem in letter twenty-six – “semblance […] we love just because it is semblance, and not because we take it to be something better” (Schiller, 1967, 26.5; SWN, 20, pp. 399–400); semblance stands to actuality as form to body (Schiller, 1967,26.6; SWN, 20, p. 400) – his searches there move across already familiar terrain.More is risked in the following letter.

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15 For a rich prosecution of this claim with respect to Schiller, see Horowitz, 2006.16 I am assuming here that Schiller came to feel that his original conception of Greek

naturalness was a fiction, a work of art, and hence constructed the notion of the naiveas a conception of naturalness that would enable him to connect something aboutchildlike spontaneity with our appreciation of the Greeks. So much might be inferredfrom the positioning of the concept of nature and the general argumentation of OnNaïve and Sentimental Poetry, a work published directly after the Aesthetic Letters.



Wherever, then, we find traces of a disinterested and unconditional appreciation ofpure semblance, we may infer that a revolution of this order has taken place in hisnature, and that he has started to become truly human. Traces of this kind are,however, actually to be found even in his first crude attempts at embellishing hisexistence, attempts made even at the risk of possibly worsening it from a materialpoint of view. As soon as ever he starts preferring form to substance, and jeo-pardizing reality for the sake of semblance (which he must, however, recognize assuch), a breach has been affected in the cycle of his animal behavior, and he findshimself set upon a path to which there is no end. (Schiller, 1967, 27.1; SWN, 20, p. 405)

Like much in the Aesthetic Letters, this is warmed-over Rousseau, and indeedSchiller’s narrative will resolutely track Rousseau’s, but here the thought hasalmost the opposite meaning to that which it comes to have in the Discourse onInequality. In his lectures on the Aesthetic Letters, Gregg Horowitz expressedSchiller’s thought as: civilization begins with lipstick.17 Schiller is here sug-gesting that the break with animality occurs not under the aegis of high idealsfor which we might risk our life, making the break with nature the direct tri-umph of the form-drive over the sense-drive,18 but rather in adorning ourselvesfor others, making ourselves over into an appearance for others’ delight. If thereis a sexual subtext to such embellishment, it does not make the embellishmentreductively means-ends rational since this is a self-presentation for the delightof the other, for the other’s eye and senses, and hence its success depends uponits subverting of the self-interest it serves: the other’s eye is my measure. Whatmatters in adornment, as Rousseau kept moaning about, is not who you are butsolely how you appear. Adornment then opens up the space in which our andthe other’s practical engagements with the world are bracketed for the sake ofappearance, and that appearance for the other, the other’s for me.19


17 Lectures delivered at Vanderbilt University in the Fall Semester, 2000. In his lectures,Horowitz argued brilliantly for a “dark” reading of Schiller; the memory of those lectures has been in my mind throughout the writing of these pages, which wouldhave been impossible without them; in the case of this essay, my debt to him is evenmore thorough-going than usual. The explicit ‘lipstick thesis’ proved too unforget-table not to cite directly. For indications of his own working out of a “dark” Schillersee Horowitz, 2006.

18 Since the triumph of the form-drive over the sense-drive itself contains something violent, is coercive and subordinating, then, Schiller is arguing, we need to look else-where for the origin of truly non-dominating forms of comportment. Hence the lip-stick thesis is coordinate with Schiller’s critique of Kantian moral freedom as itselfrepressive and dominating.

19 Note that adornment not only opens up a space of appearance for appearance’s sake,but demonstrates how the sexual interest driving it is truly and necessarily sublated (sub-limated) by the self-display. The account, then, manages to explicate the disinterested-ness of taste (appearance for appearance’s sake) without denying the ultimate interestit serves. Freud could not have handled the complexity here any better. There is a



Holding the three part analysis of semblance in mind should make theconnection between silent and significant stone less opaque. Schiller’s puzzle,again, turns on the claim for rational modernity transpiring through the delegi-timation of the claims of sense. The delegitimation is not anodyne because,uninhibited by any competing claim, rational form contains a violent and de-humanizing aspect. From the lipstick thesis we can infer that in the absence of acompeting claim the form-drive is, despite itself, a form of instrumental ration-ality; it sacrifices sense to form, and considers matter solely as means to the realizing of form. Only through beautiful semblance, from adornment to art, isa fully non-instrumental relation to the other first opened up; the relation canbe non-instrumental because there is nothing (else) at stake. Beauty is sem-blance for semblance’s stake: what lodges a claim to our attention is withoutpurpose; that being without purpose, that detachment from the urgencies ofacting and knowing, is art’s terrible amoralism. As Schiller underlines, the non-instrumental stance that beautiful semblance enables hardly makes beauty andart ethical in themselves; we know too well that aesthetic culture and barbarismcan happily co-exist. This is in part why art needs philosophy: art cannot expli-cate the rationality potential it in fact exemplifies because its morality, its claim,always transpires through its amorality, through its bracketing of the demandsof explanatory knowing and sublime freedom.

Under the conditions of rational modernity, the claims of sense, its ration-ality potential, can only appear as semblance. The illusion perpetuated by thebeauty of the work of art, its dynamic self-sufficiency, is that there is no anta-gonism between the sense-drive and the form-drive, that form and sense can bemutually re-enforcing, reciprocally subordinating. Significant stone is the imageof reciprocal subordination. What is signified by it is just this: significance canbe (almost) self-sufficiently embodied in stone. A piece of marble is chiseled; inthe chipping and breaking off of bits of matter, silent stone becomes significant;that becoming as the sheer, because purposeless, imprinting of form upon mat-ter is the claim of sensate-rational humanity against its modern deformation. Tosay of the stone that it is silent is to regard it as not now speaking; silent stone isnot raw material, sheer stuff, dead matter; silent stone is stone waiting to speak,ready for meaning. Significant stone is what reveals its origin as silent stone; significant stone constitutes its origin as silent stone. This is what I meant earlierwhen I claimed that an art medium reveals or salvages nature as not merelymechanical, but as also a potential for meaning, a meaning that needs just ‘this’material realization, just ‘this’ material complexion to have the exact sense andauthority it does have. In Schiller’s terms, silent stone awaiting voice – the re-

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question, to which I have no answer, about how Schiller construed the relation be-tween sexual interest, on the one hand, and the play-drive on the other since both concern the interest/force necessary for bracketing the contest between the other twodrives.



velation of nature as a having a potential for meaning – is the achievement ofsignificant stone, what significant stone reveals or brings to pass. Hence thecurious emptiness of artistic semblance turns on significant stone being, finally,the revelation of silent stone – the emptiness of art is that resounding silence;this is another way in which art’s emptiness is a fullness of meaning. Sculptingdoes not rescue the stone from its silent condition, giving it voice; rather, it givesit back its silence, its semantic discretion (Verschwiegenheit).20 Which is why, asmodern art progresses, it can be so resolutely become about itself; art concernsnothing but the relation between matter and form überhaupt; because it is ingeneral, then explicit themes and topics eventually fade as being parochial, onlythe claim of art in general and as such remaining. But because it is in general andas such it contains a further illusion, namely, to possess, however opaquely, themeaning of humanity. Because art does concern the general relation betweenform and sense, freedom and nature, thought and feeling (where each of theseare different modalities of the form-drive in relation to the sense-drive), then itmust feel as if any particular beauty reveals something of the truth of humanityas such, the truth of our sensate-rational nature: the fit of form and matter hererevealing the meaning of form and matter in general.21

But this is semblance: the form-drive and the sense-drive are logically inde-pendent; hence, there is no ideal notion of their overall harmony or unification(that is what it means to say they are wholly independent), they are in conflict,form has subjugated sense, and any image of the unity or harmony can only bea bit of semblance. That semblance, turning the thought over one more time, isall that is available to check the claim of the form-drive since it reveals, say inthe mode of a promise, that the conflict is not necessary. Schiller’s characteriza-tion of significant stone thus can be read as a radical vindication of the idea that


20 Schiller is less explicit about this than I am here claiming. His typical way of statingthe thought is to say that the artist is in fact as violent toward his material as theinstrumentally rational artisan, but pretends that matter means more, and that he pro-tects the “freedom of the material” (Schiller, 1967, 4.4; SWN, 20, p. 317) through de-ception, so that the work appears as if the artist has yielded to the material. My cor-rective is only to suggest that the deception and the appearance of yielding arenecessary for art, it is precisely how the moment of sensuousness can be effectivelypresent in works. So the deception and appearance of yielding are constitutive compo-nents of art’s semblance character. But this is just to say that the notion of silent stoneis a matter of semblance and can for us only be that. Artisanal violence as brute indif-ference is thus intelligible as the logical precedence of form over silence: because formconstitutes silence as its origin, then prior to the realization of some form there isnothing for an artist to be sensitive to. In art the fit between form and matter is neces-sarily retrospective: actuality precedes possibility.

21 The fragility of the exercise is exquisite: since it is the work that reveals and constitu-tes its medium as founding, a potentiality for meaning, then each work must pretend aground which its very achievement reveals as hollow. Which is why the authority ofworks depends on their being semblances. Semblance is the substance of the aesthetic.



meaning can be sensibly embodied in a non-reductive, non-instrumental wayjust in case sensible material can be seen as a potential for meaningfulness. Artforms can check rational form through making possible the difference betweensilent stone and dead matter: the difference between those two being the idea ofthe medium, and hence of what it is for art to be medium dependent, for what itis for art practices to be practices within a medium. And the difference betweendead matter and silent stone yielding, finally, the difference between freedom asemphatic, sublime transcendence to every material determination (the subordi-nation of dead matter) and freedom as a potentiality for sensible expression (thegrace of the moral within the sensible; grace as the significant stone of morallife).22 Call that the difference between terror and republican virtue.23 In check-ing our instrumental comportment toward the world, in suspending the exclu-sive claims of the sense-drive (as expressed in the life of the sensualist) andform-drive (the life of the zealot, the fanatic), we become determinable oncemore, and it is this state of determinability which performs a prelude to thepolitical freedom that modernity has thus far missed. Art’s educative function isits capacity to yield a different orientation toward the world than that dictatedby the form-drive or the sense-drive on its own by providing the experience ofa different relation to things, and thereby enabling us to perceive the violence of each in its exclusion from the other. Because, again, the effective (trans-cendentally vindicable) rationality potential of sensibility and material naturehave been de-legitimated, then, Schiller must be arguing, only art, semblance,can make possible a different, non-dominating orientation toward the world(including toward one another). That is the truth that lives in illusion, in sem-blance.

V. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art24

Although it will take the remainder of the letters to unpack its consequences,significant stone’s revelation of silent stone, which is equally silent stone’s stand-ing as an after-image of a lost unity with nature, a lost politics, is the performa-tive center of Schiller’s account of the relation between form and sense in art,and hence the vindication of the idea of the medium as the revelation of nature

178 J. M. Bernstein

22 Grace is the crucial concept in Schiller’s critique of Kant’s dualism of moral law andnatural inclination in Anmut und Würde, Grace and Dignity (1793). It intends the ideathat the inclinations are themselves utterly harmonious with the requirements of themoral law; grace is thus a notion of moral beauty. One might say that when grace ispresent there is a reciprocal subordination of moral law and inclination in moralaction rather than a unidirectional determination of sense by the moral law. This is thesense of grace I am playing on in this sentence.

23 On Schiller’s republicanism, see Beiser, 2005, pp. 128–129.24 For this idea generally, see Danto, 2004, esp. pp. 1–22.



as (still) a potential for meaning. Curiously, in his only direct discussion ofartistic mediums, Schiller loses this thought; in losing the thought of the mean-ing of mediums he simultaneously suppresses the very idea of aesthetic educa-tion. Diagnosing how and why will help to make the thought of artistic medi-ums clearer, and preserve the original, educative intention of the argument.Begin with the perfectly legitimate thesis that when perceiving a painting orhearing a piece of music the medium is absorbed in the form, hence we perceivethe (painted) face not paint (color and line) on canvas, I hear the melody notseparate musical instruments or sounds. Of course, what I actually see is apainted face and hear musical sounds, but there has always been the pressure totreat mediums the way propositional thought treats its various material means:as a matter of indifference. At its worst, this can lead to the suggestion that themedium is nothing but a distorting influence to be sublated by the freedom ofthe imagination. Schiller seems to be adopting precisely this idea of Lessing’s inthe “Kallias Letters.” There he argues that an object may be said to be “freelydepicted” only if its presentation does not suffer from interference by the natureof the depicting matter: “The nature of the medium or the matter must thus becompletely vanquished by the nature of the imitated […] In an artwork, thematter (the nature of the imitating [object]) must lose itself in the form (the imitated [object]), the body in the idea, the reality in the appearance” (Schiller,2003, p. 179; SWN, 26, p. 224). Nor is this just a manner of speaking; after press-ing the point that the representing medium must shed and deny its own nature,he stipulates that the “nature of the marble, which is hard and brittle, must fullydisappear into the nature of flesh which is flexible and soft, and neither feelingnor the eye may be reminded of its disappearance” (Schiller, 2003, p. 180; SWN,26, p. 225) – as if we somehow fail to notice that the statue before us is made ofmarble.

In the Aesthetic Letters this becomes the thesis that each medium, and thusevery actual work of art, possesses a “definite bias” – eigentümlichen Richtung,a peculiar or specific orientation – that marks its departure from the ideal of a pure aesthetic experience (Schiller, 1967, 22.4; SWN, 20, p. 380). So Schiller contends that the medium of music gives it an affinity to the senses, while themedium of poetry yields to the play of the imagination, and the medium ofsculpture, in virtue of its precision, borders on the austerity of science. To hiscredit, Schiller does not attempt to generate, at least here, a hierarchy of the arts;their diversity in the light of the distinctness of their mediums is to be recogniz-ed. But, too emphatically to tolerate: the difference of mediums, their emphaticplurality, replicates the very fragmentation of the subject that art as a whole ismeant to resist – a thought that haunts the recognition of art being mediumbound, since medium plurality appears to replicate the very problem to whichrecourse to mediums was suppose to resolve. Rather than conceiving of the artstaking up the burden of this fragmentation by returning to each sense it intrin-sic dignity and letting the plurality of the arts become the bearer of lost unity,




excellence in art becomes for Schiller expressly resistance to the bias a mediumrepresents, e.g., “poetry, when most fully developed, must grip us powerfully asmusic does, but at the same time, like the plastic arts, surround us with sereneclarity” (Schiller, 1967, 22.4; SWN, 20, p. 381). As a bit of normative criticismthis is at best vacuous, at worse baleful. Its balefulness is conceptual in origin. Ineffect, Schiller produces an Idea of The Aesthetic, capital letters and neon lights,that every actual work must necessarily fail because it is produced in this or thatmedium.

The Idea of The Aesthetic relates to the issue of the depth noted at the be-ginning of section II – depth as the sense that in beauty we experience an objec-tified “fullness of meaning” which is not capable of being translated into ex-haustively discursive terms. If inwardness in art is answered through the idea offreedom in appearance, depth now is to concern “Supreme Reality (höchsteRealität)” (Schiller, 1967, 22.1; SWN, 20, p. 379). Theoretically, Schiller achievesthis thought by a simple false inference: from the thought that beauty is indeter-minate, without a concept, that it exemplifies the harmonization or collabora-tion of sense and form in general and in principle, and engages with a self-suf-ficient whole (binding inwardness to depth), it is inferred that in the state ofexperiencing beauty we experience the unconditioned potentiality of humansubjectivity unadorned; the experience of beauty is the revelation of the mean-ing of subjectivity as such. The aesthetic mode of the psyche is to be lookedupon

as a state of Supreme Reality, once we have due regard to the absence of all limita-tion and to the sum total of the powers which are conjoined within it […] for a dis-position of the psyche which contains within it the whole of human nature, mustnecessarily contain within it in potentia every individual manifestation of it as well[…] [T]he aesthetic alone leads to the absence of all limitation. Every other stateinto which we can enter refers us back to a preceding one; the aesthetic alone is awhole in itself, since it comprises within itself all the conditions of both its originand its continuance. Here alone do we feel reft out of time, and our human natureexpresses itself with a purity and integrity, as though it had as yet suffered noimpairment through the intervention of external forces. (Schiller, 1967, 22.1; SWN,20, p. 379; my emphasis)

Everything occurs by noting the features of aesthetic experience, but eliminat-ing from the description all the complexities that make it possible, and thenreifying the result into a distinct object: human subjectivity as such. What Schil-ler forgets here and throughout the twenty-second letter is that art is illusion,that it does not really contain all the conditions of its origin and continuance,that art as art only emerges under specific conditions, and hence the purity ofthe aesthetic always refers back to that from which it withdraws. Further, inbeing an indeterminate actualization of form and sense the psyche does not con-tain within it in potentia every individual manifestation as well; more plausiblyit contains none. It is this Idea that is then wheeled out as the measure of actual,

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medium-bound aesthetic experiences, the Idea of The Aesthetic conquering andvanquishing each aesthetic experience: “Since in actuality no purely aestheticeffect is ever met with (for man can never escape his dependence upon con-ditioning forces), the excellence of a work of art can never consist in anythingmore than a high approximation to that ideal of aesthetic purity” (Schiller, 1967,22.4; SWN, 20, p. 380). An analogous argument occurs at the beginning of thesixteenth letter when Schiller argues that the Idea of Beauty refers to a perfectequilibrium, which as such is one and indivisible, whereas in experience beautyis always oscillating, unstable, inclining toward form or toward matter, thus isalways either more or less releasing or tensing, melting or energizing (Schiller,1967, 16.1–3; SWN, 20, pp. 360–362).

My criticism of Schiller here is continuous with the standard and valid com-plaint that he swerves from the legitimate notion of the aesthetic as a conditionfor humanity, its educative function, to illegitimately considering it the end ortelos of humanity. Although that shift does occur, I have been urging that itsexplanation turns on Schiller’s placement of art in relation to philosophy: auto-nomous art is educative in relation to a philosophy that is itself a product of thefragmentation and specialization that is the hallmark of modernity, while thevarious idealizations of art and beauty depend on subsuming them within aSupreme Reality, the Idea of human nature as the perfect harmonization andunification of the two drives (Schiller, 1967, 14.2; SWN, 20, pp. 352–353) – for-getting that the drives cannot be dialectically unified and harmonized.25

What is even worse about Schiller’s various employments of rational ideas –recalling that even for him rational ideas are the exemplary products of theform-drive in relation to the sense-drive – is that they entail the effective sup-pression of what art and the aesthetic are all about, namely, a revelation of thecompatibility of our highest ideals, our powers of forming, with their sensibleand material conditioning. So, the parenthetic statement that “man can neverescape his dependence upon conditioning forces,” which is meant to demon-strate the failure of actual aesthetic experiences in relation to the ideal, in effectis a denial of aesthetic experience: the mutual conditioning of form and sense.


25 One might say that while the actual content of Schiller’s theory is darkly modernistand anti-foundational, the meta-philosophy of the Aesthetic Letters is foundational,with the former aspect converging with the educational project and the latter with theutopian teleology. There is a simple explanation for the slide from one to the other:Schiller could not conceive how art could be educative without presupposing a philo-sophically well-founded teleology, despite the fact that his conception of the aestheticemerges from the precise absence of such a teleology. What is important for the pur-poses of my argument is that Schiller’s teleology – which has in its use of Ideas a re-cognizable Kantian pedigree – gets all its authority from his Idea of the Aesthetic. Thepatent unacceptability of this Idea makes the utopian strain in Schiller otiose. Themodest critical teleology of aesthetic education itself is the natural successor to theimplicit but indeterminate teleological impetus of the two orienting drives.



Nor can Schiller’s thought be helped here by the claim that he means externalconditioning forces, not materiality and sensibility as such, since it is exactly theconditioning of mediums which is at issue here. The philosophical idea of artthus licenses the repudiation of art, the repudiation of sense and matter.26

Works Cited

Ameriks, Karl (1983): “Kant and the Objectivity of Taste,” in British Journal ofAesthetics, 23, pp. 3–17.

Beiser, Frederick (2005): Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination, Oxford.Bernstein, J. M. (1997): “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the

Possibility of Ethics,” in Huhn, Tom/Zuidervaart, Lambert (eds.), The Semblanceof Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Cambridge, MA, pp. 177–212.

Bernstein, J. M. (ed.) (2003): Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge.Bernstein, J. M. (2006a): Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning

of Painting, Stanford.Bernstein, J. M. (2006b): “Poesy and the Arbitrariness of the Sign: Notes for a Critique

of Jena Romanticism,” in Kompridis, Nikolas (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism,London, 143–172.

Danto, Arthur (2004): The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York.Henrich, Dieter (1982): “Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthe-

tics,” in Cohen, Ted/Guyer, Paul (eds.), Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, Chicago, pp. 237–257.

Horowitz, Gregg M. (2006): “The Residue of History: Dark Play in Schiller and He-gel,” International Yearbook of German Idealism, 4, pp. 179–198.

Reinhold, K. L. (1789): Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsver-mögens, Jena.

Schiller, Friedrich (1962 ff.): Schillers Werke (Nationalausgabe), ed. Wiese, Benno von,Weimar. (Cited as SWN, volume and page number).

Schiller, Friedrich (1967): On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters,trans. and ed. Wilkinson, E. & Willoughby, L. A., Oxford. (Bilingual edition inGerman and English; reference is to letter and paragraph).

Schiller, Friedrich (2003): “Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Kör-ner,” trans. Bird-Pollan, Stefan in Bernstein, 2003, pp. 145–183.

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26 For saving me from error and providing all the German-language references, I want to thank my research assistant Rocio Zambrana. Fred Rush’s pointed but delicate editorial questions forced me to clarify my argument – something for which both Iand the reader can be grateful.



Documents

BERNSTEIN, J. M._significant Stone Medium and Sense in Schiller