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Arts & Communication Sublime and education in Schiller

through life. The one […] eases the bonds of necessity summons up all the power of this faculty to portray
for us, and in the midst of joy and levity it guides us the sensuously infinite so that, when this effort
to those dangerous places where we must act as pure nevertheless fails, he might feel that much more
spirits and lay aside everything corporeal, in other keenly the superiority of his ideas over the best
words, it leads us to the knowledge of truth and to that the sensuous side of his nature is capable of
the exercise of duty. Here, it abandons us, since its accomplishing. 51
realm is only the world of the senses and its earthly Through this function of imagination, the sublime
wings cannot carry it beyond this world. However, gains a pivotal importance in Schiller’s new educational
then another genius steps forward, a strong-armed project, prefiguring the dynamic role of the negative in
genius, serious and silent, that carries us across the Hegel’s dialectic, which Schiller will further foreshadow in
dizzying depth. 49 his essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. 52,53 From the
Beyond its poetic dimension, this passage aligns teleological viewpoint, indeed, the sublime emerges as the
5
beauty and the sublime in the same process from nature engine driving the entire path toward the ideal, enabling
to spirit that we already underscored in On the Pathetic, the subject to pursue the harmony between humanity and
in the context of Schiller’s reflection on the role of nature that, in the experience of beauty, we contemplate
imagination in the sublime. The inclusion of the sublime only momentarily as an idea. With a reconciliation yet to
in his new pedagogical project, indeed, directly relies come, the esthetic experience of the sublime bridges the
on the estheticizing faculty of imagination, opening the gap between the real and the ideal, delivering man the
possibility of conceiving beauty and the sublime as two concrete horizon to realize his destination. In Concerning
sides of a single ideal since Schiller’s early 1793 essay. In the Sublime, world history as a whole thus becomes a
Concerning the Sublime, Schiller defines the education “sublime object,” insofar as it symbolizes humanity’s
to the sublime as the asymptotic tension toward the process of realizing freedom within the realm of nature. 54
“transformation” (Aufhebung) of the “actual suffering” into On closer examination, the lack of a thorough
a “sublime emotion”, attributing to the spectacle of tragedy exposition of the sublime in the Letters on the Aesthetic
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the therapeutic quality of a medicine, which deprives Education does not suggest its exclusion from Schiller’s
fate of its absolute power on humanity and converts the pedagogical project. Instead, it hints at Schiller’s process
representation of suffering and death into an element of of rethinking the relationship between beauty and the
vital opposition for the subject. By transfiguring evil into sublime toward a complete esthetic education. Already in
an object of esthetic enjoyment, the sublime becomes the 1795 essay, the theme of “ideal beauty” (Idealschöne)
the experience from which the subject draws the moral – echoed as well in Concerning the Sublime – was a clue
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strength to overcome the conflictual dimension of reality:
supporting this thesis. In this passage from the Aesthetic
Without fear and quivering with pleasure, he Education, beauty and the sublime are compared to “two
[man] draws nearer to these images of horror6 opposite forms of humanity – in which we can recognize
produced by his imagination and he deliberately the naive and the sentimental – disappearing in the unity
of the ideal man,” just as the opposition between the two
5 This passage represents the prose adaptation of the poem esthetic phenomena dissolves in the ideal beauty. Under
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Beauty and Sublime (Schön und Erhaben), published in this light, beauty and the sublime, naive and sentimental,
December 1795 in “Die Horen” and later republished with appear as two fundamental attitudes of the self, in unity or
the title The Two Guides of Life (Die Führer des Lebens).
The close affinity of the composition with this excerpt from opposition with the world, which man must acknowledge
Concerning the Sublime further strengthens the argument in their dialectical relationship and reconcile within
for dating the latter after the Aesthetic Education, published himself as two sides of the same whole.
in the same year as the composition.
6 In this passage, Schiller’s description of the sublime pleasure 5. Conclusion
is close to Burke’s definition of the sublime as “delightful The analysis of the relationship between beauty and the
horror,” a concept that Schiller encountered since his sublime in Schiller’s works has uncovered a deep process
youthful reading of Burke’s Enquiry; E. Burke (1957), A of reworking that spans through his entire production, so
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. London: Dodsley, p.73. For Burke’s what initially appeared as a simple dichotomy unfolds as a
influence on Schiller’s concept of the sublime and on his sophisticated dialectic. Schiller’s reflection on the sublime
interpretation of the Kantian sublime, see P. Barone (2004), develops in the middle ground between 18th-century
Schiller und die Tradition des Erhabenen. Berlin: Schmidt esthetics and Hegelian philosophy of art, acting as a bridge
Verlag, p.52–108. connecting these two esthetical epochs. As a playwright,

Volume 2 Issue 3 (2024) 5 doi: 10.36922/ac.2942