In addition to Schelling and Hegel, for whom, as has been said, the
_Critique of Judgment_ seemed the most important of the three Critiques,
we must now mention the name of a poet who showed himself as great in
philosophical as in aesthetic achievement.
_Friedrich Schiller_ first elaborated that portion of the Kantian
thought contained in the _Critique of Judgment_. Before any professional
philosopher, Schiller studied that sphere of activity which unites
feeling with reason. Hegel talks with admiration of this artistic
genius, who was also so profoundly philosophical and first announced the
principle of reconciliation between life as duty and reason on the one
hand, and the life of the senses and feeling on the other.
To Schiller belongs the great merit of having opposed the subjective
idealism of Kant and of having made the attempt to surpass it.
The exact relations between Kant and Schiller, and the extent to which
the latter may have been influenced by Leibnitz and Herder, are of less
importance to the history of Aesthetic than the fact that Schiller
_unified_ once for all art and beauty, which had been separated by Kant,
with his distinctions between adherent and pure beauty. Schiller's
artistic sense must doubtless have stood him here in good stead.
Schiller found a very unfortunate and misleading term to apply to the
aesthetic sphere.
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