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Schiller does feel that German culture has a unique role to play, but it
is a role in the history of humankind as a whole. For Schiller, the
German cultural nation is striving to be representative of universal
humanity. The achievements of German culture are conceived along
the model of the culture of classical Greece, a cosmopolitan rather than
a national legacy. Following Kant s principle, Schiller links the develop-
ment of all sides of the individual human personality with the develop-
ment of a collective humanity. For Schiller, these two developments will
come together in the developed state that is posited as the result of the
aesthetic education.
But what precisely does Schiller mean by state ? In English, the
word state can apply to both an individual and a group, and from this
one can arrive at two di erent meanings, state as the condition of an
individual (as in a person s moral state), and state as a political collective.
As I will show in the discussion of Coleridge in the next chapter, the
English word constitution has the same central ambiguity. Wilkinson and
Willoughby point out that Schiller maintains a distinction in his Ger-
man terminology between Stand (= condition) and Staat (= political
state). And their precision on this point is an important rebuttal to
critics who attempt to criticize Schiller for shifting from one sense of the
word state to the other to suit his argument. Still, the issue remains that
Schiller is clearly trying to argue for an essential connection between
Stand and Staat. The central argument of the Aesthetic Letters is, after all,
that the aesthetic education will in uence the Stand of the individual in
such a way as to make possible the true political Staat. But critics have
argued that in the Aesthetic Letters we never get to the political state, that
instead we remain in the aesthetic state as a condition of mind, and that
instead of being a means to a political end, the aesthetic state of mind
becomes an end in itself.
A central passage will illustrate why Schiller is open to this kind of
criticism. In the twentieth letter, Schiller discusses the process of attain-
ing human freedom. The individual starts under the control of the
sensuous drive: The sensuous drive . . . comes into operation earlier
than the rational, because sensation precedes consciousness (AL, . ).
In order for the individual to attain human freedom, it is necessary that
Reason is to be a power, and a logical or moral necessity to take the
Romanticism, aesthetics, and nationalism
place of that physical necessity (AL, . ). But, Schiller argues, one
cannot simply superimpose the formal drive over the sensuous drive:
Man cannot pass directly from feeling to thought; he must rst take one step
backwards, since only through one determination being annulled again can a
contrary determination take its place. In order to exchange passivity for
autonomy, a passive determination for an active one, man must therefore be
momentarily free of all determination whatsoever, and pass through a state
[Zustand] of pure determinability. AL, .
Schiller goes on to identify the aesthetic state as this state of mind free of
all determination:
Our psyche passes, then, from sensation to thought via a middle disposition in
which sense and reason are both active at the same time. Precisely for this
reason, however, they cancel each other out as determining forces, and bring
about a negation by means of an opposition. This middle disposition, in which
the psyche is subject neither to physical nor to moral constraint, and yet is
active in both these ways, pre-eminently deserves to be called a free disposition;
and if we are to call the condition of sensuous determination the physical, and
the condition of rational determination the logical or moral, then we must call
this condition of real and active determinability, the aesthetic. AL, .
In this passage we see what appears to be two di erent accounts of
freedom in the aesthetic state. On the one hand, it seems that aesthetic
freedom means being free of all determination, that is, being free from
both physical and moral restraint. It is this sense of freedom that has led
critics to condemn Schiller s aesthetics as being escapist or immoral. It is
the interpretation of aesthetic autonomy that we see in the Decadents
and in strains of aesthetic modernism.
But if we closely follow the particulars of Schiller s argument here, we
can see that he is not arguing for an escape into the aesthetic sphere, and
the corollary doctrine of art for art s sake. For the sense of autonomy the
subject discovers in the aesthetic sphere comes from feeling the sensuous
and the formal drive reconciled, not in escaping from both of them. For
Schiller, one cannot escape either drive without also ceasing to be
human. One must attend to the second part of the sentence: The
psyche is subject neither to physical nor to moral constraint, and yet is
active in both these ways. The psyche feels free by not feeling subjected to
the two drives; it feels itself to actively will both of the drives which now
seem harmonious.
This moment of complete equilibrium of the two drives and feeling of
human freedom characterizes the ideal aesthetic state of mind. And
Schiller s aesthetic state
instead of being a fantasy world into which one permanently escapes,
Schiller describes it as an ideal that can never actually be achieved:
Since in actuality no purely aesthetic e ect is ever to be met with (for
man can never escape his dependence upon conditioning forces), the
excellence of a work of art can never consist in anything more than a
high approximation of that ideal of aesthetic purity (AL, . ). Aes-
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