Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller
ends, as far as these are revealed, under a visible form, to our faculty
of seeing and observing. When, then, we speak of beauty, we neither take
into consideration the justness of the aims of nature in themselves, nor
formally, the degree of adaptation to the principles of art which their
combination could offer. Our contemplative faculties hold to the manner
in which the object appears to them, without taking heed to its logical
constitution. Thus, although the architectonic beauty, in the structure
of man, be determined by the idea which has presided at this structure,
and by the ends that nature proposes for it, the aesthetic judgment,
making abstraction of these ends, considers this beauty in itself; and in
the idea which we form of it, nothing enters which does not immediately
and properly belong to the exterior appearance.
We are, then, not obliged to say that the dignity of man and of his
condition heightens the beauty of his structure. The idea we have of his
dignity may influence, it is true, the judgment that we form on the
beauty of his structure; but then this judgment ceases to be purely
aesthetic. Doubtless, the technical constitution of the human form is an
expression of its destiny, and, as such, it ought to excite our
admiration; but this technical constitution is represented to the
understanding and not to sense; it is a conception and not a phenomenon.
The architectonic beauty, on the contrary, could never be an expression
of the destiny of man, because it addresses itself to quite a different
faculty from that to which it belongs to pronounce upon his destiny.
If, then, man is, amongst all the technical forces created by nature,
that to whom more especially we attribute beauty, this is exact and true
only under one condition, which is, that at once and upon the simple
appearance he justifies this superiority, without the necessity, in order
to appreciate it, that we bring to mind his humanity. For, to recall
this, we must pass through a conception; and then it would no longer be
the sense, but the understanding, that would become the judge of beauty,
which would imply contradiction. Man, therefore, cannot put forward the
dignity of his moral destiny, nor give prominence to his superiority as
intelligence, to increase the price of his beauty. Man, here, is but a
being thrown like others into space--a phenomenon amongst other
phenomena. In the world of sense no account is made of the rank he holds
in the world of ideas; and if he desires in that to hold the first place,
he can only owe it to that in him which belongs to the physical order.
But his physical nature is determined, we know, by the idea of his
humanity; from which it follows that his architectonic beauty is so also
mediately. If, then he is distinguished by superior beauty from all
other creatures of the sensuous world, it is incontestable that he owes
this advantage to his destiny as man, because it is in it that the reason
is of the differences which in general separate him from the rest of the
sensuous world. But the beauty of the human form is not due to its being
the expression of this superior destiny, for if it were so, this form
would necessarily cease to be beautiful, from the moment it began to
express a less high destiny, and the contrary to this form would be
beautiful as soon as it could be admitted that it expresses this higher
destination. However, suppose that at the sight of a fine human face we
could completely forget that which it expresses, and put in its place,
without chancing anything of its outside, the savage instincts of the
tiger, the judgment of the eyesight would remain absolutely the same, and
the tiger would be for it the chef-d'oeuvre of the Creator.
The destiny of man as intelligence contributes, then, to the beauty of
his structure only so far as the form that represents this destiny, the
expression that makes it felt, satisfies at the same time the conditions
which are prescribed in the world of sense to the manifestations of the
beautiful; which signifies that beauty ought always to remain a pure
effect of physical nature, and that the rational conception which had
determined the technical utility of the human structure cannot confer
beauty, but simply be compatible with beauty.
It could be objected, it is true, that in general all which is manifested
by a sensuous representation is produced by the forces of nature, and
that consequently this character cannot be exclusively an indication of
the beautiful. Certainly, and without doubt, all technical creations are
the work of nature; but it is not by the fact of nature that they are
technical, or at least that they are so judged to be. They are technical
only through the understanding, and thus their technical perfection has
already its existence in the understanding, before passing into the world
of sense, and becoming a sensible phenomenon. Beauty, on the contrary,
has the peculiarity, that the sensuous world is not only its theatre, but
the first source from whence it derives its birth, and that it owes to
nature not only its expression, but also its creation. Beauty is
absolutely but a property of the world of sense; and the artist, who has
the beautiful in view, would not attain to it but inasmuch as he
entertains this illusion, that his work is the work of nature.
In order to appreciate the technical perfection of the human body, we
must bear in mind the ends to which it is appropriated; this being quite
unnecessary for the appreciation of its beauty. Here the senses require
no aid, and of themselves judge with full competence; however they would
not be competent judges of the beautiful, if the world of sense (the
senses have no other object) did not contain all the conditions of beauty
and was therefore competent to produce it. The beauty of man, it is
true, has for mediate reason the idea of his humanity, because all his
physical nature is founded on this idea; but the senses, we know, hold to
immediate phenomena, and for them it is exactly the same as if this
beauty were a simple effect of nature, perfectly independent.
From what we have said, up to the present time, it would appear that the
beautiful can offer absolutely no interest to the understanding, because
its principle belongs solely to the world of sense, and amongst all our
faculties of knowledge it addresses itself only to our senses. And in
fact, the moment that we sever from the idea of the beautiful, as a
foreign element, all that is mixed with the idea of technical perfection,
almost inevitably, in the judgment of beauty, it appears that nothing
remains to it by which it can become the object of an intellectual
pleasure. And nevertheless, it is quite as incontestable that the
beautiful pleases the understanding, as it is beyond doubt that the
beautiful rests upon no property of the object that could not be
discovered but by the understanding.
To solve this apparent contradiction, it must be remembered that the
phenomena can in two different ways pass to the state of objects of the
understanding and express ideas. It is not always necessary that the
understanding draws these ideas from phenomena; it can also put them into
them. In the two cases, the phenomena will be adequate to a rational
conception, with this simple difference, that, in the first case, the
understanding finds it objectively given, and to a certain extent only
receives it from the object because it is necessary that the idea should
be given to explain the nature and often even the possibility of the
object; whilst in the second case, on the contrary, it is the
understanding which of itself interprets, in a manner to make of it the
expression of its idea, that which the phenomenon offers us, without any
connection with this idea, and thus treats by a metaphysical process that
which in reality is purely physical. There, then, in the association of
the idea with the object there is an objective necessity; here, on the
contrary, a subjective necessity at the utmost. It is unnecessary to say
that, in my mind, the first of these two connections ought to be
understood of technical perfection, the second, of the beautiful.
As then in the second case it is a thing quite contingent for the
sensuous object that there should or should not be outside of it an
object which perceives it--an understanding that associates one of its
own ideas with it, consequently, the ensemble of these objective
properties ought to be considered as fully independent of this idea; we
have perfectly the right to reduce the beautiful, objectively, to the
simple conditions of physical nature, and to see nothing more in beauty
than effect belonging purely to the world of sense. But as, on the other
side, the understanding makes of this simple fact of the world of sense a
transcendent usage, and in lending it a higher signification inasmuch as
he marks it, as it were, with his image, we have equally the right to
transport the beautiful, subjectively, into the world of intelligence.
It is in this manner that beauty belongs at the same time to the two
worlds--to one by the right of birth, to the other by adoption; it takes
its being in the world of sense, it acquires the rights of citizenship in
the world of understanding. It is that which explains how it can be that
taste, as the faculty for appreciating the beautiful, holds at once the
spiritual element and that of sense; and that these two natures,
incompatible one with the other, approach in order to form in it a happy
union. It is this that explains how taste can conciliate respect for the
understanding with the material element, and with the rational principle
the favor and the sympathy of the senses, how it can ennoble the
perceptions of the senses so as to make ideas of them, and, in a certain
measure, transform the physical world itself into a domain of the ideal.
At all events, if it is accidental with regard to the object, that the
understanding associates, at the representation of this object, one of
its own ideas with it, it is not the less necessary for the subject which
represents it to attach to such a representation such an idea. This
idea, and the sensuous indication which corresponds to it in the object,
ought to be one with the other in such relation, that the understanding
be forced to this association by its own immutable laws; the
understanding then must have in itself the reason which leads it to
associate exclusively a certain phenomenon with a certain determined
idea, and, reciprocally, the object should have in itself the reason for
which it exclusively provokes that idea and not another. As to knowing
what the idea can be which the understanding carries into the beautiful,
and by what objective property the object gifted with beauty can be
capable of serving as symbol to this idea, is then a question much too
grave to be solved here in passing, and I reserve this examination for an
analytical theory of the beautiful.
The architectonic beauty of man is then, in the way I have explained it,
the visible expression of a rational conception, but it is so only in the
same sense and the same title as are in general all the beautiful
creations of nature. As to the degree, I agree that it surpasses all the
other beauties; but with regard to kind, it is upon the same rank as they
are, because it also manifests that which alone is perceptible of its
subject, and it is only when we represent it to ourselves that it
receives a super-sensuous value.
If the ends of creation are marked in man with more of success and of
beauty than in the organic beings, it is to some extent a favor which the
intelligence, inasmuch as it dictated the laws of the human structure,
has shown to nature charged to execute those laws. The intelligence, it