Friedrich Schiller and the Aestheticizing of Sentiment

Abstract

Schiller’s attempt to resolve the contradictions of sentiment produced one of the best accounts we have of the relation of the moral and the aesthetic. His immediate point of departure was Kant. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788), along with his Grounding for a Metaphysics of Morals (1785), had provided a radical criticism of the tradition of moral sentiment including the notion of moral sense. He argued that morality is a ‘categorical imperative’ independent of feeling so that, even if an impulse of feeling should lead to moral action, it is only the recognition of the imperative which makes the feeling moral. To speak of ‘moral feeling’, therefore, is at best a potentially misleading shorthand and, since feeling in itself is not merely unreliable, but is actually outside the realm of the ethical, it is dangerous to accept it even as a supplement to the ethical which it may actively undermine.