Chris Bailes

Schiller�s Beautiful Ethics

In Schiller’s poem The Ideal and the Actual Life, he aestheticizes his philosophical thoughts presented in Aesthetic Education of Man by making them appealing to the ear and the imagination of the reader. Beauty, in the form of poetry, is therefore used to communicate the value of itself. We find this especially true in the ninth stanza of the poem in which we find art conquering the controls of temporality, and the real world in which we find ourselves enslaved, “Onward, O child of art! and lo!/Out of matter which thy pains control...” Art leads us to the sphere of beauty where the “pangs, the cars, the weary toils it cost/Leave not a trace when once the work is done”. The work of art takes us to a higher realm in which we no longer find our sensual longings burdensome. In the poem Schiller suggests that we can actually leave the discord here on earth and achieve a state of bliss elsewhere. This escape from earth involves a rejection of the yoke that sensual pleasures places around the neck of the subject, “Cast from thee, earth, the bitter and the real” and instead a call for the striving towards greater things, “High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring/Into the realm of the ideal!” The realm of the ideal is the realm in which we gain a grasp on beauty thereby transcending the necessity of physical constraints and impulses, but not by ignoring them outright or by continually struggling against them.

In The Ideal and the Actual Life Schiller is promoting a view that runs contradictory to Kantian thought. Kant sees moral obedience as constant battle between the requirements of duty on the one side, and the inclinations of our will that run counter to duty on the other. Hence Schiller’s ethics are the exact opposite in at least one sense, namely, Schiller’s ethics, as implied in the poem, seek to avoid conflict between duty and inclinations by bringing a person into harmony where his or her inclinations are naturally in accord with the demands of duty. Kantian ethics, however, are much more austere since no attempt is made to reconcile duty with inclination; duty is simply expected to trump all inclination, which involves self-renunciation on the part of the ethical subject. Schiller alludes to the Kantian ethical position in the poem, “If human sin confronts the rigid law/Of perfect truth and virtue, awe/Seizes and saddens thee to see how far/Beyond thy reach, perfection….” Schiller’s criticism against Kant’s ethics can then be seen as a rejection of the attainability of the requirements for moral obedience. Since duty is a merely cognitive concept, acting solely based upon what our cognition suggests is logical would be a gross neglect of our emotive nature and turn us into automatons (my word choice). Such Kantian perfection is not only unattainable, according to Schiller’s poem, it is also undesirable, as argued in Aesthetic Education of Man.

Beauty is portrayed in Schiller’s poem as the goal for which one ought to aim, not a strict allegiance to duty, “Bright from the hilltops of the beautiful/Bursts the attained goal!”. Hence it is assumed (precariously) that somehow beauty will mollify the wants of our sensuous nature and bring us to a state of drunken bliss in which we can only then be moral. Perhaps, this is a cynical reading of Schiller’s poem but out of respect for Schiller it is fair to mention that there is something positive behind his thoughts that might be of value if understood in a different way than Schiller understands it, namely, the reconciliation of the purely carnal interests of man, i.e., the desire for sex, food, drugs, etc., with the moral principles that are so often antithetical to our carnal interests. That is to say, we often find ourselves in situations where being moral conflicts with our sensual desire, just as Kant emphasizes. But what happens too often is that a person either becomes overly moral from a rigorous adherence to duty, as Kantian ethics calls for, thereby missing out on experiencing the pleasures of life, or on the other hand one minimizes ethics in favor of personal satisfaction, an obvious critique of Schiller’s ethics implied in the poem analyzed here. It appears as if Kant and Schiller represent two ethical extremes that might better be reconciled by my postulation, namely, we could reject Schiller’s aesthetic/ethical principle that tries to bring harmony by uniting the two through beauty and replace it instead with a purely ethical principle that satisfies both the demands of logic and the lust of our senses. This could serve as an addendum to either Schiller’s ethics or Kant’s, and it might look something like the following: one ought to indulge his sensual appetites so long as the action itself, or the consequences of the action, do not harm others, or himself, or violate the applicable ethical theory. The importance here is to emphasize the word ‘ought’ as opposed to ‘is allowed to….’ This ‘ought’ implies that we are actually failing morally whenever we do not satisfy our carnal interests when the conditions suggest that we should. By neglecting our sensual nature we become what Schiller refers to in the Aesthetic Education of Man as a barbarian who, as a result, cannot empathize with fellow mankind because of the intellectual aloofness created by neglecting our sensual impulses. Following this maxim would ensure the fulfillment of both our sense impulses and our form impulses, with neither of them holding predominance over the other, thereby rendering Schiller’s escape from the “bitter and the real” as suggested in The Ideal and the Actual Life unnecessary.

THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL LIFE.

Forever fair, forever calm and bright,

Life flies on plumage, zephyr-light,

For those who on the Olympian hill rejoice—

Moons wane, and races wither to the tomb,

And 'mid the universal ruin, bloom

The rosy days of Gods—With man, the choice,

Timid and anxious, hesitates between

The sense's pleasure and the soul's content;

While on celestial brows, aloft and sheen,

The beams of both are blent.

Seekest thou on earth the life of gods to share,

Safe in the realm of death?—beware

To pluck the fruits that glitter to thine eye;

Content thyself with gazing on their glow—

Short are the joys possession can bestow,

And in possession sweet desire will die.

'Twas not the ninefold chain of waves that bound

Thy daughter, Ceres, to the Stygian river—

She plucked the fruit of the unholy ground,

And so—was hell's forever!

The weavers of the web—the fates—but sway

The matter and the things of clay;

Safe from change that time to matter gives,

Nature's blest playmate, free at will to stray

With gods a god, amidst the fields of day,

The form, the archetype 39, serenely lives.

Would'st thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?

Cast from thee, earth, the bitter and the real,

High from this cramped and dungeon being, spring

Into the realm of the ideal!

Here, bathed, perfection, in thy purest ray,

Free from the clogs and taints of clay,

Hovers divine the archetypal man!

Dim as those phantom ghosts of life that gleam

And wander voiceless by the Stygian stream,—

Fair as it stands in fields Elysian,

Ere down to flesh the immortal doth descend:—

If doubtful ever in the actual life

Each contest—here a victory crowns the end

Of every nobler strife.

Not from the strife itself to set thee free,

But more to nerve—doth victory

Wave her rich garland from the ideal clime.

Whate'er thy wish, the earth has no repose—

Life still must drag thee onward as it flows,

Whirling thee down the dancing surge of time.

But when the courage sinks beneath the dull

Sense of its narrow limits—on the soul,

Bright from the hill-tops of the beautiful,

Bursts the attained goal!

If worth thy while the glory and the strife

Which fire the lists of actual life—

The ardent rush to fortune or to fame,

In the hot field where strength and valor are,

And rolls the whirling thunder of the car,

And the world, breathless, eyes the glorious game—

Then dare and strive—the prize can but belong

To him whose valor o'er his tribe prevails;

In life the victory only crowns the strong—

He who is feeble fails.

But life, whose source, by crags around it piled,

Chafed while confined, foams fierce and wild,

Glides soft and smooth when once its streams expand,

When its waves, glassing in their silver play,

Aurora blent with Hesper's milder ray,

Gain the still beautiful—that shadow-land!

Here, contest grows but interchange of love,

All curb is but the bondage of the grace;

Gone is each foe,—peace folds her wings above

Her native dwelling-place.

When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light,

With the dull matter to unite

The kindling genius, some great sculptor glows;

Behold him straining, every nerve intent—

Behold how, o'er the subject element,

The stately thought its march laborious goes!

For never, save to toil untiring, spoke

The unwilling truth from her mysterious well—

The statue only to the chisel's stroke

Wakes from its marble cell.

But onward to the sphere of beauty—go

Onward, O child of art! and, lo!

Out of the matter which thy pains control

The statue springs!—not as with labor wrung

From the hard block, but as from nothing sprung—

Airy and light—the offspring of the soul!

The pangs, the cares, the weary toils it cost

Leave not a trace when once the work is done—

The Artist's human frailty merged and lost

In art's great victory won! 40

If human sin confronts the rigid law

Of perfect truth and virtue 41, awe

Seizes and saddens thee to see how far

Beyond thy reach, perfection;—if we test

By the ideal of the good, the best,

How mean our efforts and our actions are!

This space between the ideal of man's soul

And man's achievement, who hath ever past?

An ocean spreads between us and that goal,

Where anchor ne'er was cast!

But fly the boundary of the senses—live

The ideal life free thought can give;

And, lo, the gulf shall vanish, and the chill

Of the soul's impotent despair be gone!

And with divinity thou sharest the throne,

Let but divinity become thy will!

Scorn not the law—permit its iron band

The sense (it cannot chain the soul) to thrall.

Let man no more the will of Jove withstand 42,

And Jove the bolt lets fall!

If, in the woes of actual human life—

If thou could'st see the serpent strife

Which the Greek art has made divine in stone—

Could'st see the writhing limbs, the livid cheek,

Note every pang, and hearken every shriek,

Of some despairing lost Laocoon,

The human nature would thyself subdue

To share the human woe before thine eye—

Thy cheek would pale, and all thy soul be true

To man's great sympathy.

But in the ideal realm, aloof and far,

Where the calm art's pure dwellers are,

Lo, the Laocoon writhes, but does not groan.

Here, no sharp grief the high emotion knows—

Here, suffering's self is made divine, and shows

The brave resolve of the firm soul alone:

Here, lovely as the rainbow on the dew

Of the spent thunder-cloud, to art is given,

Gleaming through grief's dark veil, the peaceful blue

Of the sweet moral heaven.

So, in the glorious parable, behold

How, bowed to mortal bonds, of old

Life's dreary path divine Alcides trod:

The hydra and the lion were his prey,

And to restore the friend he loved to-day,

He went undaunted to the black-browed god;

And all the torments and the labors sore

Wroth Juno sent—the meek majestic one,

With patient spirit and unquailing, bore,

Until the course was run—

Until the god cast down his garb of clay,

And rent in hallowing flame away

The mortal part from the divine—to soar

To the empyreal air! Behold him spring

Blithe in the pride of the unwonted wing,

And the dull matter that confined before

Sinks downward, downward, downward as a dream!

Olympian hymns receive the escaping soul,

And smiling Hebe, from the ambrosial stream,

Fills for a god the bowl!