Hans Feger

Friedrich Schiller’s significance for philosophy was established in an irrefutable way by the Neo-Kantians. Following Kuno Fischer’s brilliant lectures in Jena in 1858 under the title of “Schiller as Philosopher” and Friedrich Albert Lange’s development of the “standpoint of the ideal” from Schiller’s philosophic poetry in the last part of his Geschichte des Materialismus (1866, 2nd edition 1873/75), many thinkers including Karl Vorländer (1894), Eugen Kühnemann (1895), Bruno Bauch (1905), Wilhelm Windelband (1905) and Ernst Cassirer (1916, 1924) underscored the value of Schiller’s philosophy and also made clear that his philosophy cannot be approached independently of his poetry and his dramatic work. While Rüdiger Safranski’s biography (2004) finds the vital impulse for the emergence of German idealism from this melding of Schiller’s philosophy and poetry, the seminal studies of Dieter Henrich (Grundlegung aus dem Ich, 2004) and Manfred Frank (“Unendliche Annäherung”. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik, 1997) on the origins of German idealism did not indicate that Schiller had contributed in an essential way to German idealism. This contrast in the evaluation of Schiller’s credentials in this regard can be drawn back to the fact that the relationship between idealism and realism in Schiller is not determined, as with Kant, in relation to the concept of knowledge, but from the viewpoint of beauty and the sublime, which combine reason and nature in such a way that idealizes reality. The centrepiece of Schiller’s philosophy is the poetic imagination. To this extent, Schiller anticipates in a basic way the later movement of philosophical Romanticism.

Wie nah sind sich Literatur und Philosophie? Die beiden Disziplinen stehen für ganz unterschiedliche Formen der Welterkenntnis und der Erkenntnisvermittlung. Doch ohne das Verständnis des jeweils anderen Bereiches kommen die literaturwissenschaftliche und die philosophische Analyse schnell an ihre Grenzen. Dass es zahlreiche Berührungspunkte zwischen Literatur und Philosophie gibt, zeigt dieses Handbuch. In 16 ausführlichen Kapiteln schafft es einen Überblick über Problemkonstellationen, bei denen die Trennung beider Fachgebiete relativiert oder aufgehoben ist.

The discourse on freedom that Kant unfolds in his writings on the history of philosophy, especially in his essay Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784), is a constitutive component of the moral perspective whose key concept is the notion of freedom. This is why critical philosophy, as Kant says, has its own “chiliastic expectation”, and the critical philosopher is a prophet who himself “occasions und produces the events he predicts”. Questions concerning the proper use of freedom – how does freedom position itself in the individual ethics of each person when he/she wants to act morally, how does it position the community in legal ethics when it merges in a liberal state through the peacemaking function of the law, or how does the community of states position itself in international law when, with cosmopolitan intent, freedom devotes itself to a utopian peace mission – these are always questions concerning the concept of freedom which has emerged from a critical process of arbitration.

The discourse on freedom that Kant unfolds in his writings on the history of philosophy, especially in his essay Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784), is a constitutive component of the moral perspective whose key concept is the notion of freedom. This is why critical philosophy, as Kant says, has its own “chiliastic expectation”, and the critical philosopher is a prophet who himself “occasions und produces the events he predicts”. Questions concerning the proper use of freedom – how does freedom position itself in the individual ethics of each person when he/she wants to act morally, how does it position the community in legal ethics when it merges in a liberal state through the peacemaking function of the law, or how does the community of states position itself in international law when, with cosmopolitan intent, freedom devotes itself to a utopian peace mission – these are always questions concerning the concept of freedom which has emerged from a critical process of arbitration.

That which I always already am, without having to do it - the transcendental status of corporeality - is prefigured in Nietzsche’s theory, according to which every authentic philosophy is first of all to be thought “under the guidance of the body.” Nietzsche criticized philosophy’s forgetting of the living body long before a phenomenological difference was made between the living body and the dimensional body; he proposed that thinking be based on differences and not on oppositions. This turn toward the living body in philosophy can be described as a turn of aesthetics. As a discipline, aesthetics had originated as a theory of sensual perception. Through Nietzsche, it discovered the space of the living and feeling body as the foundational basis for philosophical knowledge.