The special subject of the greater part of the letters and essays of
Schiller contained in this volume is Æsthetics; and before passing to
any remarks on his treatment of the subject it will be useful to offer a
few observations on the nature of this topic, and on its treatment by
the philosophical spirit of different ages.
First, then, æsthetics has for its object the vast realm of the
beautiful, and it may be most adequately defined as the philosophy of
art or of the fine arts. To some the definition may seem arbitrary, as
excluding the beautiful in nature; but it will cease to appear so if it
is remarked that the beauty which is the work of art is higher than
natural beauty, because it is the offspring of the mind. Moreover, if,
in conformity with a certain school of modern philosophy, the mind be
viewed as the true being, including all in itself, it must be admitted
that beauty is only truly beautiful when it shares in the nature of
mind, and is mind’s offspring.
Viewed in this light, the beauty of nature is only a reflection of the
beauty of the mind, only an imperfect beauty, which as to its essence is
included in that of the mind. Nor has it ever entered into the mind of
any thinker to develop the beautiful in natural objects, so as to
convert it into a science and a system. The field of natural beauty is
too uncertain and too fluctuating for this purpose. Moreover, the
relation of beauty in nature and beauty in art forms a part of the
science of æsthetics, and finds again its proper place.
But it may be urged that art is not worthy of a scientific treatment.
Art is no doubt an ornament of our life and a charm to the fancy; but
has it a more serious side? When compared with the absorbing necessities
of human existence, it might seem a luxury, a superfluity, calculated to
enfeeble the heart by the assiduous worship of beauty, and thus to be
actually prejudicial to the true interest of practical life. This view
seems to be largely countenanced by a dominant party in modern times,
and practical men, as they are styled, are only too ready to take this
superficial view of the office of art.
Many have indeed undertaken to defend art on this score, and to show
that, far from being a mere luxury, it has serious and solid advantages.
It has been even apparently exaggerated in this respect, and represented
as a kind of mediator between reason and sense, between inclination and
duty, having as its mission the work of reconciling the conflicting
elements in the human heart. A strong trace of this view will be found
in Schiller, especially in all that he says about the play instinct in
his “Æsthetical Letters.”
Nevertheless, art is worthy of science; æsthetics is a true science, and
the office of art is as high as that assigned to it in the pages of
Schiller. We admit that art viewed only as an ornament and a charm is no
longer free, but a slave. But this is a perversion of its proper end.
Science has to be considered as free in its aim and in its means, and it
is only free when liberated from all other considerations; it rises up
to truth, which is its only real object, and can alone fully satisfy it.
Art in like manner is alone truly art when it is free and independent,
when it solves the problem of its high destination—that problem whether
it has to be placed beside religion and philosophy as being nothing else
than a particular mode or a special form of revealing God to
consciousness, and of expressing the deepest interests of human nature
and the widest truths of the human mind.
For it is in their works of art that the nations have imprinted their
favorite thoughts and their richest intuitions, and not unfrequently the
fine arts are the only means by which we can penetrate into the secrets
of their wisdom and the mysteries of their religion.
It is made a reproach to art that it produces its effects by appearance
and illusion; but can it be established that appearance is
objectionable? The phenomena of nature and the acts of human life are
nothing more than appearances, and are yet looked upon as constituting a
true reality; for this reality must be sought for beyond the objects
perceived immediately by the sense, the substance and speech and
principle underlying all things manifesting itself in time and space
through these real existences, but preserving its absolute existence in
itself. Now, the very special object and aim of art is to represent the
action and development of this universal force. In nature this force or
principle appears confounded with particular interests and transitory
circumstances, mixed up with what is arbitrary in the passions and in
individual wills. Art sets the truth free from the illusory and
mendacious forms of this coarse, imperfect world, and clothes it in a
nobler, purer form created by the mind itself. Thus the forms of art,
far from being mere appearances, perfectly illusory, contain more
reality and truth than the phenomenal existences of the real world. The
world of art is truer than that of history or nature.
Nor is this all: the representations of art are more expressive and
transparent than the phenomena of the real world or the events of
history. The mind finds it harder to pierce through the hard envelop of
nature and common life than to penetrate into works of art.
Two more reflections appear completely to meet the objection that art or
æsthetics is not entitled to the name of science.
It will be generally admitted that the mind of man has the power of
considering itself, of making itself its own object and all that issues
from its activity; for thought constitutes the essence of the mind. Now
art and its work, as creations of the mind, are themselves of a
spiritual nature. In this respect art is much nearer to the mind than
nature. In studying the works of art the mind has to do with itself,
with what proceeds from itself, and is itself.
Thus art finds its highest confirmation in science.
Nor does art refuse a philosophical treatment because it is dependent on
caprice, and subject to no law. If its highest aim be to reveal to the
human consciousness the highest interest of the mind, it is evident that
the substance or contents of the representations are not given up to the
control of a wild and irregular imagination. It is strictly determined
by the ideas that concern our intelligence and by the laws of their
development, whatever may be the inexhaustible variety of forms in which
they are produced. Nor are these forms arbitrary, for every form is not
fitted to express every idea. The form is determined by the substance
which it has to suit.
A further consideration of the true nature of beauty, and therefore of
the vocation of the artist, will aid us still more in our endeavor to
show the high dignity of art and of æsthetics. The history of philosophy
presents us with many theories on the nature of the beautiful; but as it
would lead us too far to examine them all, we shall only consider the
most important among them. The coarsest of these theories defines the
beautiful as that which pleases the senses. This theory, issuing from
the philosophy of sensation of the school of Locke and Condillac, only
explains the idea and the feeling of the beautiful by disfiguring it. It
is entirely contradicted by facts. For it converts it into desire, but
desire is egotistical and insatiable, while admiration is respectful,
and is its own satisfaction without seeking possession.
Others have thought the beautiful consists in proportion, and no doubt
this is one of the conditions of beauty, but only one. An
ill-proportioned object cannot be beautiful, but the exact
correspondence of parts, as in geometrical figures, does not constitute
beauty.
A noted ancient theory makes beauty consist in the perfect suitableness
of means to their end. In this case the beautiful is not the useful, it
is the suitable; and the latter idea is more akin to that of beauty. But
it has not the true character of the beautiful. Again, order is a less
mathematical idea than proportion, but it does not explain what is free
and flowing in certain beauties.
The most plausible theory of beauty is that which makes it consist in
two contrary and equally necessary elements—unity and variety. A
beautiful flower has all the elements we have named; it has unity,
symmetry, and variety of shades of color. There is no beauty without
life, and life is movement, diversity. These elements are found in
beautiful and also in sublime objects. A beautiful object is complete,
finished, limited with symmetrical parts. A sublime object whose forms,
though not out of proportion, are less determined, ever awakens in us
the feeling of the infinite. In objects of sense all qualities that can
produce the feeling of the beautiful come under one class called
physical beauty. But above and beyond this in the region of mind we have
first intellectual beauty, including the laws that govern intelligence
and the creative genius of the artist, the poet, and the philosopher.
Again, the moral world has beauty in its ideas of liberty, of virtue, of
devotion, the justice of Aristides, the heroism of Leonidas.
We have now ascertained that there is beauty and sublimity in nature, in
ideas, in feelings, and in actions. After all this it might be supposed
that a unity could be found amidst these different kinds of beauty. The
sight of a statue, as the Apollo of Belvedere, of a man, of Socrates
expiring, are adduced as producing impressions of the beautiful; but the
form cannot be a form by itself, it must be the form of something.
Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral
beauty which is the basis, the principle, and the unity of the
beautiful.
Physical beauty is an envelop to intellectual and to moral beauty.
Intellectual beauty, the splendor of the true, can only have for
principle that of all truth.
Moral beauty comprehends two distinct elements, equally beautiful,
justice and charity. Thus God is the principle of the three orders of
beauty, physical, intellectual, and moral. He also construes the two
great powers distributed over the three orders, the beautiful and the
sublime. God is beauty par excellence; He is therefore perfectly
beautiful; He is equally sublime. He is to us the type and sense of the
two great forms of beauty. In short, the Absolute Being as absolute
unity and absolute variety is necessarily the ultimate principle, the
extreme basis, the finished ideal of all beauty. This was the marvellous
beauty which Diotimus had seen, and which is described in the Banquet of
Socrates.
It is our purpose after the previous discussion to attempt to elucidate
still further the idea of art by following its historic development.
Many questions bearing on art and relating to the beautiful had been
propounded before, seen as far back as Plotinus, Plato, and Socrates;
but recent times have been the real cradle of æsthetics as a science.
Modern philosophy was the first to recognize that beauty in art is one
of the means by which the contradictions can be removed between mind
considered in its abstract and absolute existence and nature
constituting the world of sense, bringing back these two factors to
unity.
Kant was the first who felt the want of this union and expressed it, but
without determining its conditions or expressing it scientifically. He
was impeded in his efforts to effect this union by the opposition
between the subjective and the objective, by his placing practical
reason above theoretical reason, and he set up the opposition found in
the moral sphere as the highest principle of morality. Reduced to this
difficulty, all that Kant could do was to express the union under the
form of the subjective ideas of reason, or as postulates to be deduced
from the practical reason, without their essential character being
known, and representing their realization as nothing more than a simple
_you ought_, or imperative “Du sollst.”
In his teleological judgment applied to living beings, Kant comes, on
the contrary, to consider the living organism in such wise that, the
general including the particular, and determining it as an end,
consequently the idea also determines the external, the compound of the
organs, not by an act springing from without but issuing from within. In
this way the end and the means, the interior and exterior, the general
and particular, are confounded in unity. But this judgment only
expresses a subjective act of reflection, and does not throw any light
on the object in itself. Kant has the same view of the æsthetic
judgment. According to him the judgment does not proceed either from
reason, as the faculty of general ideas, or from sensuous perception,
but from the free play of the reason and of the imagination. In this
analysis of the cognitive faculty, the object only exists relatively to
the subject and to the feeling of pleasure or the enjoyment that it
experiences.