Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
and the will preserves an entire freedom between them both. It is
therefore the will that conducts itself like a power--as the basis of
reality--with respect to both these impulses; but neither of them can by
itself act as a power with respect to the other. A violent man, by his
positive tendency to justice, which never fails in him, is turned away
from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a
strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power
than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of
self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob man of his internal
freedom.
An external necessity determines our condition, our existence in time, by
means of the sensuous. The latter is quite involuntary, and directly it
is produced in us we are necessarily passive. In the same manner an
internal necessity awakens our personality in connection with sensations,
and by its antagonism with them; for consciousness cannot depend on the
will, which presupposes it. This primitive manifestation of personality
is no more a merit to us than its privation is a defect in us. Reason
can only be required in a being who is self-conscious, for reason is an
absolute consecutiveness and universality of consciousness; before this
is the case he is not a man, nor can any act of humanity be expected from
him. The metaphysician can no more explain the limitation imposed by
sensation on a free and autonomous mind than the natural philosopher can
understand the infinite, which is revealed in consciousness in connection
with these limits. Neither abstraction nor experience can bring us back
to the source whence issue our ideas of necessity and of universality:
this source is concealed in its origin in time from the observer, and its
super-sensuous origin from the researches of the metaphysician. But, to
sum up in a few words, consciousness is there, and, together with its
immutable unity, the law of all that is for man is established, as well
as of all that is to be by man, for his understanding and his activity.
The ideas of truth and of right present themselves inevitable,
incorruptible, immeasurable, even in the age of sensuousness; and without
our being able to say why or how, we see eternity in time, the necessary
following the contingent. It is thus that, without any share on the part
of the subject, the sensation and self-consciousness arise, and the
origin of both is beyond our volition, as it is out of the sphere of our
knowledge.
But as soon as these two faculties have passed into action, and man has
verified by his experience, through the medium of sensation, a
determinate existence, and through the medium of consciousness its
absolute existence, the two fundamental impulses exert their influence
directly their object is given. The sensuous impulse is awakened with
the experience of life--with the beginning of the individual; the
rational impulsion with the experience of law--with the beginning of his
personality; and it is only when these two inclinations have come into
existence that the human type is realized. Up to that time, everything
takes place in man according to the law of necessity; but now the hand of
nature lets him go, and it is for him to keep upright humanity, which
nature places as a germ in his heart. And thus we see that directly the
two opposite and fundamental impulses exercise their influence in him,
both lose their constraint, and the autonomy of two necessities gives
birth to freedom.
LETTER XX.
That freedom is an active and not a passive principle results from its
very conception; but that liberty itself should be an effect of nature
(taking this word in its widest sense), and not the work of man, and
therefore that it can be favored or thwarted by natural means, is the
necessary consequence of that which precedes. It begins only when man is
complete, and when these two fundamental impulsions have been developed.
It will then be wanting whilst he is incomplete, and while one of these
impulsions is excluded, and it will be re-established by all that gives
back to man his integrity.
Thus it is possible, both with regard to the entire species as to the
individual, to remark the moment when man is yet incomplete, and when one
of the two exclusions acts solely in him. We know that man commences by
life simply, to end by form; that he is more of an individual than a
person, and that he starts from the limited or finite to approach the
infinite. The sensuous impulsion comes into play therefore before the
rational impulsion, because sensation precedes consciousness; and in this
priority of sensuous impulsion we find the key of the history of the
whole of human liberty.
There is a moment, in fact, when the instinct of life, not yet opposed to
the instinct of form, acts as nature and as necessity; when the sensuous
is a power because man has not begun; for even in man there can be no
other power than his will. But when man shall have attained to the power
of thought, reason, on the contrary, will be a power, and moral or
logical necessity will take the place of physical necessity. Sensuous
power must then be annihilated before the law which must govern it can be
established. It is not enough that something shall begin which as yet
was not; previously something must end which had begun. Man cannot pass
immediately from sensuousness to thought. He must step backwards, for it
is only when one determination is suppressed that the contrary
determination can take place. Consequently, in order to exchange passive
against active liberty, a passive determination against an active, he
must be momentarily free from all determination, and must traverse a
state of pure determinability. He has then to return in some degree to
that state of pure negative indetermination in which he was before his
senses were affected by anything. But this state was absolutely empty of
all contents, and now the question is to reconcile an equal determination
and a determinability equally without limit, with the greatest possible
fulness, because from this situation something positive must immediately
follow. The determination which man received by sensation must be
preserved, because he should not lose the reality; but at the same time,
in so far as finite, it should be suppressed, because a determinability
without limit would take place. The problem consists then in
annihilating the determination of the mode of existence, and yet at the
same time in preserving it, which is only possible in one way: in
opposing to it another. The two sides of a balance are in equilibrium
when empty; they are also in equilibrium when their contents are of equal
weight.
Thus, to pass from sensation to thought, the soul traverses a medium
position, in which sensibility and reason are at the same time active,
and thus they mutually destroy their determinant power, and by their
antagonism produce a negation. This medium situation in which the soul
is neither physically nor morally constrained, and yet is in both ways
active, merits essentially the name of a free situation; and if we call
the state of sensuous determination physical, and the state of rational
determination logical or moral, that state of real and active
determination should be called the aesthetic.
LETTER XXI.
I have remarked in the beginning of the foregoing letter that there is a
twofold condition of determinableness and a twofold condition of
determination. And now I can clear up this proposition.
The mind can be determined--is determinable--only in as far as it is not
determined; it is, however, determinable also, in as far as it is not
exclusively determined; that is, if it is not confined in its
determination. The former is only a want of determination--it is without
limits, because it is without reality; but the latter, the aesthetic
determinableness, has no limits, because it unites all reality.
The mind is determined, inasmuch as it is only limited; but it is also
determined because it limits itself of its own absolute capacity. It is
situated in the former position when it feels, in the second when it
thinks. Accordingly the aesthetic constitution is in relation to
determinableness what thought is in relation to determination. The
latter is a negative from internal and infinite completeness, the former
a limitation from internal infinite power. Feeling and thought come into
contact in one single point, the mind is determined in both conditions,
the man becomes something and exists--either as individual or person--by
exclusion; in other cases these two faculties stand infinitely apart.
Just in the same manner the aesthetic determinableness comes in contact
with the mere want of determination in a single point, by both excluding
every distinct determined existence, by thus being in all other points
nothing and all, and hence by being infinitely different. Therefore if
the latter, in the absence of determination from deficiency, is
represented as an empty infiniteness, the aesthetic freedom of
determination, which forms the proper counterpart to the former, can be
considered as a completed infiniteness; a representation which exactly
agrees with the teachings of the previous investigations.
Man is therefore nothing in the aesthetic state, if attention is given to
the single result, and not to the whole faculty, and if we regard only
the absence or want of every special determination. We must therefore do
justice to those who pronounce the beautiful, and the disposition in
which it places the mind, as entirely indifferent and unprofitable, in
relation to knowledge and feeling. They are perfectly right; for it is
certain that beauty gives no separate, single result, either for the
understanding or for the will; it does not carry out a single
intellectual or moral object; it discovers no truth, does not help us to
fulfil a single duty, and, in one word, is equally unfit to found the
character or to clear the head. Accordingly, the personal worth of a
man, or his dignity, as far as this can only depend on himself, remains
entirely undetermined by aesthetic culture, and nothing further is
attained than that, on the part of nature, it is made profitable for him
to make of himself what he will; that the freedom to be what he ought to
be is restored perfectly to him.
But by this something infinite is attained. But as soon as we remember
that freedom is taken from man by the one-sided compulsion of nature in
feeling, and by the exclusive legislation of the reason in thinking, we
must consider the capacity restored to him by the aesthetical
disposition, as the highest of all gifts, as the gift of humanity. I
admit that he possesses this capacity for humanity, before every definite
determination in which he may be placed. But, as a matter of fact, he
loses it with every determined condition into which he may come; and if
he is to pass over to an opposite condition, humanity must be in every
case restored to him by the aesthetic life.
It is therefore not only a poetical license, but also philosophically
correct, when beauty is named our second creator. Nor is this
inconsistent with the fact that she only makes it possible for us to
attain and realize humanity, leaving this to our free will. For in this
she acts in common with our original creator, nature, which has imparted
to us nothing further than this capacity for humanity, but leaves the use
of it to our own determination of will.
LETTER XXII.
Accordingly, if the aesthetic disposition of the mind must be looked upon
in one respect as nothing--that is, when we confine our view to separate
and determined operations--it must be looked upon in another respect as a