L’article étudie le traitement par Schiller de la pulsion de jeu (Spieltrieb) comme d’une troisième pulsion suspendant et transcendant dans le plaisir esthétique nos deux tendances sensible et raisonnable. Puisque la pulsion de jeu schillérienne transforme des inclinations matérielles en un plaisir pris à la forme, créant un amour de la beauté et du sublime, et puisqu’elle est l’indice du progrès moral au sein de la société, elle excède – telle est ma thèse – le domaine kantien de l’expérience esthétique. (...) Mais surtout, Schiller considère que la liberté humaine est le produit de l’expérience esthétique, par où l’individu surmonte, moyennant le jeu, l’oppression exercée par les contraintes sociales. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics from a compatibilist point of view. I shall argue that it is Schiller’s conception of individual self-determination that motivates his aesthetic critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. Schiller conceives of aesthetic self-determination in terms of a compatibilism between reason and nature. As such, Schiller’s aesthetics can be interpreted as an ontological category. His concepts of love, play and the aesthetic state must therefore be understood in terms of volitional structures that describe human freedom in nature, (...) history and society. (shrink)

Schiller was one of many early post-Kantians who wrestled with Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, a doctrine that continues to puzzle commentators today. Schiller’s own explanation of why we are prone to pursue happiness without restriction is, I argue, subtle and multilayered: it offers us a new genealogy of reflective agency, linking our tendency to egoism to the first emergence of reason within human beings. On the reading I defend, our drive for the absolute does not lead us directly to (...) moral autonomy; rather, it misleads us to seek the absolute in the field of our own impulses and inclinations. However, since this detour is the result of cognitive error, it involves no willful subordination of the moral law to self-love, and so nothing that bears the guilt of evil. (shrink)

The central concern of this paper is to explore the efforts of Schiller's post-Kantian idealism and Marcuse's critical theory to develop a new conception of free human experience. That conception is built on the notion of play. Play is said to combine the human capacities for physical pleasure and reason, capacities which the modern world has dualized. Analysis of their respective accounts of play reveals its ambivalent form in the work of both philosophers. Play supports the ideal of ‘freedom from (...) necessity’, understood as a release from all external constraint. But it also appears to serve as a model for ‘freedom as a higher necessity’. In the case of Schiller, the ambivalence encompasses idle play and an obligation to make ourselves worthy of freedom. For Marcuse, play represents a kind of libidinal idleness while also underpinning a non-alienated conception of labour. (shrink)

A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. Friedrich Schiller advanced a version of this criticism to which Kant publicly responded. Recent commentators have emphasized the role that Kant’s reply assigns to the pleasure that accompanies successful moral action. In contrast, I argue that Kant’s reply relies primarily on the sublime feeling that arises when we merely contemplate the moral law. In fact, the pleasures emphasized by other recent commentators depend on this sublime (...) feeling. These facts illuminate Kant’s views regarding the relationship between morality, freedom, and the development of moral feelings. (shrink)

This article outlines arguments in Schiller's major philosophical works, including his writings on tragedy, "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" and "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.".