Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Frederick Beiser. Schiller as philosopher: a re-examination. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2005. xiii, 283 p. ISBN 0-19-928282-X (hardback).
Reveiwed by
University of California, Santa Barbara
The main purpose of this book is to reexamine the work of Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), a philosopher whom the author maintains has been misunderstood and largely unexplored in the Anglophone world. Starting with Kuno Fischer’s series of lectures on Schiller’s philosophy given in 1858 celebrating the imminent centennial of Schiller’s birth, the author attempts to return to the older neo-Kantian tradition which has been supplanted by contemporary Kantian scholarship, one that essentially ignores Schiller’s writings and their historical context. The book does not attempt to be a complete study of Schiller’s philosophy; in fact, Schiller’s last great essay Uber naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung is not even examined. Rather, the author limits himself to Schiller’s aesthetic writings.
The book is comprised of eight major chapters, with each chapter containing between seven to fifteen sections. The Introduction focuses on Schiller’s philosophical significance, both in Anglophonia and as a philosopher. Moving from Early Philosophy to An Objective Aesthetic, from Argument and Context of the Asthetische Briefe to Autonomy versus Enlightment, the author guides the reader through his justification for a broader understanding and place for Schiller in the Western intellectual tradition. Besides a well-constructed bibliography and index, there are two major appendices: one on rhetoric and philosophy in Schiller’s essays, and the other on the neo-Kantian interpretation of Schiller.
I found the author’s approach to reexamining Schiller’s contribution to Western philosophy to be interesting and well-researched. He often refers to letters and primary source materials to support his arguments. Overall, I think that the author has done a tremendous job of reintroducing Schiller and his philosophy to the modern world, and hopefully provided another perspective from the deeply critical Kantian, Marxist, and post-modernist attitudes towards Schiller as a philosopher and towards his philosophical contributions.