Philosophical letters
Philosophical Letters is the title of a series of fictional letters by Friedrich Schiller (1786) and Christian Gottfried Körner (1789) in which the Enlightenment Raphael tries to cure the young Julius of his theosophical- cosmological enthusiasm.
content
At the center of the part written by Schiller and published in the third Thalia issue in 1786 is Julius, who has distanced himself from his theosophy due to Raphael's teachings, but who has got into an existential crisis as a result.
Reminder
The editor assigns the letters to the epoch of reason: After the "ignorance of half enlightenment begins to give way and only a few want to stop where the coincidence of birth threw them ", the attempt to correct the one-sided is now with the correspondence Mind orientation that the mind controlled heart neglected to be undertaken. “Skepticism and freethinking [are] the fever paroxysms of the human spirit and [ought] to ultimately help to strengthen health through the very unnatural shock they cause in well-organized souls. The more dazzling, the more seductive the error, the more triumph for the truth, the more tormenting the doubt, the greater the call for conviction and firm certainty. "
Julius to Raphael. In October
After Raphael's departure, Julius feels lonely, even heightened by the autumn mood, and remembers the happy time when they “invented the bold ideal of [their] friendship in the black sanctuary of the beeches [...]”. He calls back the "[g] dangerous tall man [s]" so that his "delicate plantings [...] are not gone". His “work in progress” is still “so far from its completion”: “The pillars of your proud wisdom are shaking in my brain and heart, all the splendid palaces that you have built collapse”. Now without the help of his friend, he longs again for the time of underage childhood, which seems to him as “a heavenly time of paradise”, when he stumbled through life blindfolded like a drunkard, day after day, without planning of the next, restricted and protected by the “limits of a fatherly horizon”: “I felt and was happy. Raphael taught me to think and I am on my way to weep for my creation ”. He now sees the loss of the Enlightenment: “You stole the faith that gave me peace. You taught me to despise where I worshiped. A thousand things were so venerable to me before your sad wisdom stripped them ":" Enthusiastic devotion [...] mighty miracle of religion [...] the hope of heaven over the abruptness of destruction [...] the fresh ray of joy in the broken eye of the Doctrine must be divine for dying people. ”Raphael took away his religious enthusiasm and disillusioned him with his message“ [believe] no one but your own reason […] there is nothing sacred but the truth ”. His “happiness is from now on entrusted to the harmonious tact [s] of a sensorium” and he is now afraid that his perception and consciousness might deceive him and not lead him to the truth.
Julius to Raphael
Julius describes the experience of liberation from old bonds of tutelage by reason as the only standard and the associated feeling of happiness. But this freedom of thought is restricted by materialism's thoughts on the "mortal body" with its own needs. Man experiences himself as a double being: " two unlimited desires are too big for his little heart [...] How great the distance between his claims and their fulfillment." Julius now recognizes "[t] he reason is a torch in a dungeon" and wishes back into the security of childlike immaturity who knows nothing about the torch. He reproaches his friend: “If you didn't have a key to heaven, why did you have to kidnap me from earth? “And demands his soul back from him because he is unhappy. Julius concludes. "If the good \ that I think I am doing is all too close \ that borders on bad, I would rather do \ the good not".
Raphael to Julius
In his letter, Raphael reacts to his friend's expected crisis and tries to calm Julius down by comparing his condition with an illness from which he can only recover by himself. He defends his tough pedagogy of the doubt by stating that he only hastened a crisis slumbering in the youth in order to wake him up from a "sweet dream" and to harden him in time. In Julius' “full of youthful vigor”, this phase can best be mastered. Now he could best “survive the“ great struggle, of which the sublime calm of conviction is the price ”. Raphael diagnoses: “You were good out of instinct , out of undeclared moral grace. I had nothing to fear for your morality if a building collapsed on which it was not founded. "He calls him" ungrateful "because he" insults "reason and forgets what joys it has already given him:" Die The level you stood on was not worth yours. The path you climbed was a substitute for everything I stole from you. [...] That warmth with which you grasped the truth may have led your all-devouring imagination to abysses, at which you shudder in shock. "Raphael asks his friend to send him his reflections so that he can better analyze his situation.
Julius to Raphael
Julius sends Raphael a paper from his idealistic theosophical phase, with which he can no longer identify himself after the “bold attack of materialism”, which reinforces his feeling of being uprooted. He hopes that after reading the fragment, the friend will be able to “rekindle the dead spark of enthusiasm” in order to “reconcile him with a genius”.
Theosophy of Julius
The world and the thinking being
In the first section, Julius explains that man can recognize the laws of the divine, animated and diversely networked nature, since as an image of the “sensible being” he is imperfect, but in principle related to him and therefore similar.
He begins with the thesis of the “omnipresence of God”: “The universe is a thought of God” and the elements are ciphers. Therefore, as part of it and as a similarly thinking being, man is able to seek the law in the individual phenomena, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition and in a backward path, from the particular to the general, to the outline of creation reach. This is determined by "harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence". Through “the instrument of nature, through world history”, man as “artist, poet […] abstract thinker” can discuss himself with the infinite. The rebirth of plants in spring is a sign of survival after death.
idea
At the beginning there is the statement: "All spirits are attracted to perfection" and strive for the "highest free expression of their powers", for the expansion of their activities and for the acquisition of enriching properties through "contemplation of the beautiful, the true, the excellent", only omnipotence is reserved for the Creator. Just through perception or admiration, the person becomes a spiritual partner in the felt object, i.e. H. “Owner of a virtue, author of an action, inventor of a truth, owner of a bliss”, and is empowered to “do the same” and to spread it in his surroundings and to find successors, that is, to trigger a chain reaction. The idea of a perfection that was initially alien and our pleasure in it finally unfolds into a “consciousness of our own refinement, our own enrichment”. This creates a feedback between the desire for strangers, e.g. B. Benevolence and love, and own happiness.
love
In this section Julius describes “the most beautiful phenomenon in ensouled creation”, which brings about the “exchange of personality, a confusion of beings” and forms the opposite of egoism and hatred of people: “If every human being loved all human beings, then every single one would have them World. ”In this context he celebrates the spiritual connection with his friend Raphael in the poem“ Friendship ”:“ Isn't this almighty gear that forced our hearts together for the eternal jubilee bond of love? ”The“ philosophy of our times ”contradicts this teaching. who “ridicule this heavenly instinct from the human soul” and “make their own limitation the standard of the Creator”: “Degenerate slaves who cry out to freedom under the sound of their chains.” Julius concludes with the confession: “[ I believe in the reality of unselfish love. [...] A spirit that loves itself alone is a floating atom in immeasurably empty space. "
Sacrifice
Julius investigates the question of whether one can speak of an ennobling the human soul if one sacrifices one's own life for the happiness of another with the prospect of eternal life. This is indeed the noblest level of egoism, but a sacrifice for a lofty ideal, such as the proclamation of the truth for future centuries, must take place without preconditions, unconditionally, without any hope of reward: “The human race that he imagines is himself. It is a body in which its life, forgotten and expendable, swims like a drop of blood - how quickly it will spray it for its health! "
God
Julius begins with the thesis: “All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are two quantities that are perfectly alike. [...] nature is an infinitely divided God. ”If one could summarize these parts, one would arrive at God. Love is, as he illustrates in the poem, “the ladder on which we climb to become God-like.” The second poem “The Triumph of Love” is the “creed of a reason, a fleeting outline [ s] of an undertaken creation ":" Wisdom with the sight of the sun, great goddess, steps back, yield to love. "
In the last part of his letter Julius comments on his draft of a theosophy. Perhaps his mental structure is “a dreamless dream image”, perhaps this world “nowhere but in the brain”. But it could still be possible that his results were correct, because “[our] whole knowledge finally comes down to a conventional deception, as all wise men agree, with which, however, the strict truth can exist. [...] Neither God, nor the human soul, nor the world are really what we think of them. [...] But the power of the soul is peculiar, necessary and always equal to itself: the arbitrary nature of the materials in which it expresses itself does not change the eternal laws. ”Human reason makes the mistake,“ when it helps the nonsensical measures the sensual and applies the mathematics of its conclusions to the hidden physics of the superhuman . [...] Reality is not limited to what is absolutely necessary. [...] In the infinite cracks of nature no activity could be missing, for general happiness no degree of enjoyment was missing. "
Raphael to Julius
In the reply written by Körner in 1789, Raphael explains his educational pedagogy. For him, Julius' theosophy is a system of his youth which, through the connection of “head and heart”, was created for the “needs of a heart” of that time and “deeply rooted” in it. It corresponds to the "goal of earliest education", the "subjugation of the spirit [...] to the rule of opinions ". So with him, as in human history, the natural first object of the spirit of research was the universe, and like many philosophers he used "sleight of hand", "arbitrary" combinations of individual components, incomplete "chain [s] of conclusions", "one-sided experiences To substantiate the hypothesis ”and to conceal the“ opposite phenomena ”in order to conceal the fact that he could not cross the“ limits of human nature ”. He warns him not to fall back into the "state of immaturity" in which he even flaunted his "shackles", which he believed he was wearing "of free choice [-]". Because the "return under the guardianship of a childhood is locked forever".
According to Raphael's plan, he should “achieve a higher freedom of the spirit ” where he “no longer needs such aids [-]. He began by “making Julius aware of the value of self-thinking” and “instilling confidence in [s] one's own strengths”. In this process, however, [s] a fantasy helped more than [s] acumen ”, because it connected him with the beliefs of his childhood. In the next stage, Julius has to review other teaching buildings with "equal impartiality and rigor" before arriving at the "humiliating truth of the limits of human knowledge". Raphael would like to save him from “wasting his strength in the pursuit of an unattainable goal” and, secondly, to help him not to surrender to any resignation, but rather, despite the limitation, to “the germ of higher enthusiasm - the consciousness of the nobility [ s] to animate a soul in [him] ”.
At the end of his letter, Raphael takes up Julius' thoughts on the artist. He warns him not to equate a work of art with creation. Because the universe is sublime as “ life and freedom ” in its individual parts as well as as a whole, but “not a mere imprint of an ideal like the finished work” of a human artist who “despots over a dead matter” and who he uses to “sensualize his ideas ". In this context he contradicts Julius' thoughts on the contemplation of excellent things and encourages him to act creatively: “Indolent amazement at alien greatness can never be of greater merit. The nobler person lacks neither the substances to be effective nor the strength to be a creator himself in his sphere . And this job is also yours, Julius. "
Classification and interpretation
In research, reference is made to the biographical reference of the philosophical letters. Helmut Koopmann and Wolfgang Riedel show similarities between Julius' theosophy and sections of Schiller's second medical dissertation and a letter to his college friend and later brother-in-law Wilhelm Friedrich Hermann Reinwald from 1783. Christiane Krautscheid draws parallels between the correspondence between Julius (= Schiller) and Raphael (= Körner) and the discussions between Schiller and his friend Christian Gottfried Körner v. a. during his time in Leipzig (1785–1787). In the last contribution (1789) Körner's preoccupation with Kant's and Wolff's philosophy becomes clear, to which Schiller reacts in a private letter. The philosophical conversation in the novel Der Geisterseher, which is thematically related to the letters, also arose in this phase .
There are several allusions to the joint project in Schiller's “dramatic joke” Körner's morning , which he wrote on the occasion of his friend's 31st birthday (July 2, 1787). B. a mocking remark about Körner's slow drafting of the Raphael letters.
expenditure
- 3. Thalia booklet , Leipzig, 1786.
- 7. Thalia booklet, Leipzig, 1789.
- Work editions
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Koopmann, Helmut: Schiller's 'Philosophical Letters' - A letter novel? In: Alexander von Borman [ed.]: Knowledge from experience. Work concept and interpretation today . Festschrift for Hermann Meyer for his 65th birthday. Tübingen 1976. pp. 192-216.
- ^ Riedel, Wolfgang: The anthropology of the young Schiller. On the history of ideas in medical writings and the 'Philosophical Letters' . Wuerzburg 1985.
- ↑ Krautscheid, Christiane: Laws of Art and Humanity. Christian Gottfried Körner's contribution to the aesthetics of Goethe's time . Berlin 1998, p. 45 ff.