Paste your essay in here…Schiller proposes a solution to the Kantian dilemma with beauty and the ideal of aesthetic education. Hegel believes that Schiller’s critique of Kant is in the right direction but has not gone far enough.
According to Kant, a good will is one that is governed by reason, which involves being motivated by duty and not by inclinations or what will occur from the situation. A person’s duty is to obey the moral law, expressed by what Kant describes as the “categorical imperative”. The categorical imperative is composed of multiple articulations. One part of the categorical imperative is the Principle of Universalizability, which tell us to Act only in accord to a maxim that you, and others would follow as a universal law. Another part of the categorical imperative tells us to Never treat people as means but treat them as ends in themselves. Their dignity secures them as ends which is found in their freedom. That last part is the Kingdom of ends which is when you, the people, act as legislators and the legislated in the Kingdom of ends. Kantian ethics has many great qualities to it. On the flip side, Kant’s ethics has some serious difficulties of its own. In certain scenarios, like torturing and killing innocent people, can be justified using Kant’s moral ethics. The inability to acknowledge this was one of the main problems with utilitarianism. Another issue is that Kant’s moral guideline cannot help us to resolve conflicts of duty, such as telling you wife she is not fat, when in fact she is. It also discounts moral emotions like appropriate and ethical motives for action. In response to Kant, German philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller critiqued Kant’s categorical imperative, arguing that “such a concept may be appropriate for a servant, but not for the free son of the household” (A Reader’s Guide to Letters on the Aesthetic, First letter, p. 83). Schiller’s cure to the Kantian dilemma is through beauty and the ideal of aesthetic education. Aesthetic Education argues that only the cultivation of aesthetic experience can transform individuals and their society as morality demands of them. Schiller believed that the personality through aesthetic education is a necessary as well as sufficient condition for the achievement of fulfilment with the ethical and political demands of morality, rather than, as Kant believed, just something that may contribute to moral development of the individual.
Schiller presents Kant’s ethical issues to be solved by aesthetic education in multiple ways, but mostly as a political instead of a moral problem. Schiller diagnosis alienation or fragmentation as the distinguishing problem of modernity, “we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of people, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain.” (Schiller, p. 33). Typically this is a problem for human flourishing, and might therefore be considered a moral problem instead of a political problem. Schiller's diagnosis of the source of this problem gives a major role to a specifically political cause. Schiller claims that the complex machinery of the state demands the separation of ranks and occupations. Schiller presents the problem as that of achieving the transition from a less just to a more just state without killing the patient in the process:
The state should not only respect the objective and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honor their subjective and specific character, and in extending the invisible realm of morals take care not to depopulate the sensible realm of appearance. (Schiller, Fourth Letter, p. 19)
Schiller's description of the problem is having the right balance between the universal and the particular. This means not realizing the ideal at the cost of individuals and not focusing on individuals as they currently are, where all concern for the ideal is lost. In Schiller’s philosophy, freedom is obtained when the sensual drive and rational drive are fully integrated, and when the individual can allow both drives to be fully expressed, without being constrained by them, into proper balance with each other. The "play drive" is an aesthetic impulse which allows the individual to overcome inner and outer constraint, and which enables the individual to experience physical and spiritual freedom. The state of true aesthetic freedom is achieved by a process of balancing a passive state of feeling and an active state of thinking/willing. The ethical aesthetic focuses on aesthetic education as an antithesis to the perceived barbaric and savage culture of the times (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter, p. 19.) Schiller claims that the experience of beauty will induce this balance in us, and this is what is needed to be educated in order to experience beauty. What we need and can learn from the aesthetic experience is not to thrust ourselves out upon nature, without even really thinking it through. Later in time, Hegel states that indeed, one should dive into the process of history, lovingly and move towards one’s death. Ultimately, Schelling claims that through the cultivation of our aesthetic awareness, we can learn to be attentive to detail and particularity as well as to principle and generality, and that being attentive is a necessary condition for success. We learn to recognize the circumstances, needs, and feelings of others and thereby to apply our principles to them appropriately.
IDK how to connect the two.
Hegel tries to do philosophically, what Schiller did poetically. Hegel believes that in order to be a subject, one has to be aware of one’s awareness. In order to be human, suffering is involved in the every step in the process of disillusionment. The spirit has many forms, which need to be shed in order for the person to find life again. The observer has to be pulled into what he is describing and mesmerized by what he is doing. This journey, of Alienation (fall), mediation (reconciliation), and transfiguration, is the truth. We eventually come to recognize that the journey is the truth only by taking the journey. In Reason in History, Hegel claims:
The transition of its [Spirit’s] potentiality into actuality is mediated through consciousness and will. These are themselves first immersed in their immediate organic life; their first object and purpose is this natural existence as such. But the latter, through its animation by Spirit, becomes itself infinitely demanding, rich, and strong. Thus Spirit is at war with itself. It must overcome itself as its own enemy and formidable obstacle. Development, which in nature is a quiet unfolding, is in Spirit a hard, infinite struggle against itself. What Spirit wants it to attain its own concept. But it hides it from itself and is proud and full of enjoyment in this alienation from itself. Historical development, therefore, is not the harmless and unopposed simple growth of organic life but hard, unwilling labor against itself. Furthermore, it is not mere formal self development in general, but the production of an end of determined content. This end we have stated from the beginning: it is Spirit in its essence, the concept of freedom. This is the fundamental object and hence the leading principle of development. (Hegel, Reason in History, pp. 69-70).
Hegel believes that self-consciousness is the result of history, guided by the Spirit, which is part of humanity and of which humanity is a part of. The path and result of history is part of Man's freedom, in that humanity, which is part of the Spirit. It is the freely determined actions of individuals which comprise history and make it to be as it ought to be. Since humanity is the embodiment of Spirit, its destiny rests securely in its own hands. This is not to say that the result is happiness or content. In fact, Hegel would argue that the world as it ought to be is simply the present culmination of history, on its course to absolute freedom, guided by Spirit, which embodies humanity in its entirety. It is clear that Hegel intended the scenario to typify certain features of the struggle for recognition. The conflict between master and slave is one in which the historical themes of dominance and obedience are philosophically introduced. This is portrayed in the beginning of The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate:
With Abraham, the true progenitor of the Jews, the history of this people begins, i.e., his spirit is the unity, the soul, regulating the entire fate of his posterity. This spirit appears in a different guise after every one of its battles against different forces or after becoming sullied by adopting an alien nature as a result of succumbing to might or seduction. Thus it appears in a different form either as arms and conflict or else as submission to the fetters of the stronger; this latter form is called "fate." (Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity, p. 182)
Although this specific dialectic of struggle occurs only at the earliest stages of self-consciousness, it nonetheless sets up the main problematic for achieving realized self-consciousness–the gaining of self-recognition through the recognition of and by another, through mutual recognition.
According to Hegel, the relationship between self and otherness is the fundamental defining characteristic of human awareness and activity, being rooted as it is in the emotion of desire for objects as well as in the estrangement from those objects, which is part of the primordial human experience of the world. The otherness that consciousness experiences as a barrier to its goal is the external reality of the natural and social world, which prevents individual consciousness from becoming free and independent. However, that otherness cannot be abolished or destroyed, without destroying oneself, and so ideally there must be reconciliation between self and other such that consciousness can "universalize" itself through the other. In the relation of dominance and subservience between two consciousnesses, the basic problem for consciousness is the overcoming of its otherness, or the achieving of integration with itself. The relation between slave and master leads to a sort of provisional, incomplete resolution of the struggle for recognition between distinct consciousnesses. Hegel asks us to consider how a violent struggle between two distinct consciousnesses, would lead to one consciousness surrendering and submitting to the other out of fear of death. Initially, the consciousness that becomes master proves its freedom through willingness to risk its life and not submit to the other out of fear of death, and thus not identify simply with its desire for life and physical being. Moreover, this consciousness is given acknowledgement of its freedom through the submission and dependence of the other, in which this is a reflection of itself in the subservient one. Adequate recognition requires a mirroring of the self through the other, which means that to be successful it must be mutual. In the ensuing relationship of master and slave, furthermore, the bondsman through work and discipline transforms his subservience into a mastery over his environment, and thus achieves a measure of independence. In objectifying himself in his environment through his labor, the slave in effect realizes himself, with his transformed environment serving as a reflection of his inherently self-realizing activity. Thus, the slave gains a measure of independence in his subjugation out of fear of death. In a way, the master represents death as the absolute subjugator, since it is through fear of this master, of the death that he can impose, that the slave in his acquiescence and subservience is placed into a social context of work and discipline. Yet despite, or more properly, because of this subjection the bondsman is able to attain a measure of independence by internalizing and overcoming those limitations which must be dealt with if he is to produce efficiently. However, this accomplishment, the self-determination of the bondsman, is limited and incomplete because of the asymmetry that remains in his relation to the lord. Self-consciousness is still fragmented, i.e., the objectification through labor that the bondsman experiences does not coincide with the consciousness of the lord whose sense of self is not through labor but through power over the bondsman and enjoyment of the fruits of the bondsman's labor. Only in a realm of ethical life can self-determination be fully self-conscious to the extent that universal freedom is reflected in the life of each individual member of society.