Skip to main content

Schiller's philosophy

Friedrich schiller.jpg

This will be the last post in which I'll be working from Leon Chai's book on the connections between Europe's romantics and America's Renaissance figures, because I am near finished with said book.  For one of my earlier invocations of Chai, go here.

That scholar's summary of Schiller's philosophy is as follows: "For Schiller, there is a pathetic, moving eloquence [in the relation of consciousness and object]: never can the object attain the nature of the idea, in which reposes the infinitude of the purely ideational. Consciousness here embodies, implicitly, a state of striving or aspiration: having informed or identified itself with an object, it then attempts in relating that object to an idea to pass from finite to infinite, the transcend the material element of its own content through realization of the purely ideational."

What the heck does that mean? I don't know.

To those of us who aren't ever going to be tested on our grasp of 19th century German philosophy, there is a simple rule of three. If you don't want to be left out of the smart-kids' conversations entirely, know something about Kant. Know something about Hegel. Know something about Karl Marx. Know the names of at least three German-speaking followers/disciples of each.

I refer here to the "long 19th century," which began for German-speaking people around the time of the Battle of Valmy (1792) and continued until the death of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, the rude start of the slaughters of the 20th. Though most of Kant's work including the Critiques preceded that century even so extended, his work on "Religion within the Bounds of Reason" followed Valmy, as did his political testament, "Perpetual Peace."

My suggestion: economize on your brain power. There are hosts of other 19th century German philosophers the smart kids will mention. You might want to be familiar with the names of at least nine of the non-bold-faceable ones. Just bow your head politely and stroke your chin and wait until talk turns, as it will, to one of the above-named bold faced three.

So, for your use when you happen to find yourself surrounded by members of a philosophy faculty who know these things: here again are the Big Three followed by three of their epigones:

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
  Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805)
  Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814)
  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schilling (1775 - 1854)

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 -1831)
  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772- 1829)
  Heinrich Leo (1799 - 1878)
  Bruno Bauer (1809 - 1882)

Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)
  Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826 - 1900)
  Ferdinand August Bebel (1840 - 1913)
  Rosa Luxemburg (1871 - 1919).

Luxemburg's book on The Accumulation of Capital appeared in 1913, just in time to put a convenient philosophical cap on the "long 19th century" as defined above. Now you know 19th century German philosophy according to the rule of threes!

It doesn't matter all that much what Schiller meant in the stuff above. He is a non-bold-faced name. Just practice the nods.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers