From the sublime

Friedrich Schiller painting by Anton Graff

On the sublime (for further elaboration of some Kantian ideas ) is the title of a theoretical treatise by Friedrich Schiller that appeared in September 1793 in the journal Neue Thalia .

With the writing he went back to his aesthetic lectures from the winter semester 1792/93 and paraphrased central statements of the Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant . For his collection of smaller prosaic writings from 1801, he dispensed with the first part of the text and only published the second part under the title About the Pathetic . With the text About the Sublime , also published there between 1793 and 1796 , he followed statements in the previous texts, but distanced himself more clearly from Kant in some places.

The double formula of the pathetic shows how Schiller understood the tragic effect: for him the hero's suffering was the test of moral freedom , which is expressed in a sublime disposition .

Content and structure

The text is divided into two sections. In the first part, Schiller defines the sublime , divides it into the two classes of theoretical and practical and explains its mechanism of action, while the second part deals with the practical-sublime , which he subdivides - he distinguishes the contemplative-sublime from the pathetic-sublime .

Right at the beginning he explains the two-step mechanism of action: "We call an object sublime, when our sensual nature feels its limits, while our sensible nature feels its superiority, its freedom from limitations."

In formulaic terms, he repeats the interplay of physical dependence and moral independence on which the mechanism of the pathetically sublime is based, as he later explains. While ideas of infinity are connected with the theoretical variety, in the practical one it is those of pain, horror and fear that contradict existence and are connected with the feeling of danger : "An example of the first is the ocean at rest, the ocean in a storm is an example of the second. ”“ The theoretically sublime contradicts the drive for imagination, the practical and sublime the drive to preserve. ”

After making these distinctions, in the second part he turns to the different objects and postulates three prerequisites, without which a sublime effect would not be possible: The idea of a natural object as power ; the "relation of this power to our physical resilience" and finally the "relation ... to our moral person."

The contemplative-sublime refers to the areas "which show us nothing more than a power of nature that is far superior to ours, but otherwise leave it up to ourselves" to respond to. This class can be called “ contemplative ” because the disasters only play out in the imagination of the beholder.

Vesuvius eruption

Nature has a vast arsenal of overwhelming powers ready: “An abyss that opens up at our feet, a thunderstorm, a burning volcano, a mass of rock that hangs over us as if it was about to fall, a storm on the sea ... raging or poisonous animals, a flood ... "They are transformed into" terrible objects "when the imagination" relates them to the instinct of conservation ", while they become exalted " as soon as reason applies them to its highest laws. "

In the pathetically sublime , power no longer remains in the general aesthetic sphere, but transforms into an objective “power that is perishable to man”, a force that not only shows itself , but also expresses itself hostile and destroys it. This real suffering no longer allows the viewer an elegant distance, since it abolishes the "freedom of the spirit" and, with the rhetorical power of the poet, draws him onto the stage of human suffering.

Finally, Schiller sums up the two central requirements of the pathetically sublime : the idea of ​​suffering, which arouses pity on the one hand, and "the idea of ​​resistance" as an expression of freedom on the other. The first condition makes the object pathetic , the second "makes the pathetic at the same time sublime."

background

Immanuel Kant . Etching by Johann Leonhard Raab

In this early work, Schiller is clearly recognizable as a student of Kant, while a little later he also developed his own theorems, gradually distancing himself, even going over to polemical attacks. As a drama theorist , he can gratefully draw on the Kantian fund. In doing so, he depicts freedom negatively and indirectly, whereby suffering itself is only a means to the higher end of showing moral freedom, while he classifies the mere presentation of the passion as mean .

For Kant, the determinant of the sublime (as well as the beautiful ) was subjective , and thus related to the mind and not to a particular object itself. The idea of ​​sensual impotence in the face of mighty, terrifying nature showed him that there had to be a superior force - the Reason. For him, sublimity was the self-esteem of reason , the human faculty, against which nature seemed almost “small” and “vanishing”. Sublime was thus not the property of colossal natural phenomena, but a predicate of reason, which the mind can "make itself felt."

While the text On the Sublime Kant predominantly paraphrased, Schiller a little later had an Enlightenment criticism under the similar-sounding title On the Sublime , playing philosophical postulates against empiricism, reason against nature and opposing the moral world with the real.

literature

Carsten Cell: From the Sublime (1793) / About the Pathetic (1801) . In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 398–406

Web links

Wikisource: Of the Sublime  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

1. ^ So Peter-André Alt : Schiller. Life - work - time. Second volume, sixth chapter, dramaturgy of moral independence. Pathos and sublime. CH Beck, Munich 2009, p. 87
2. ↑ Carsten Cell, Vom Erhöhene (1793) / On the Pathetic (1801). In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui , Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 400
3. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the Sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 166
4. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 168
5. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the Sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 169
6. ↑ Carsten Cell, Vom Erhöhenen (1793) / On the Pathetic (1801). In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 401
7. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 180
8. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 180
9. ↑ Carsten Cell, Vom Erhöhenen (1793) / On the Pathetic (1801). In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 401
10. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 181
11. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 186
12. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, From the sublime, in: Friedrich Schiller, Complete Works, Volume V, Philosophical Writings, Vermischte Schriften, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 189
13. ↑ Carsten Cell, Vom Erhöhenen (1793) / On the Pathetic (1801). In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 402
14. ↑ Quotation from: Carsten Cell, Vom Erhöhenen (1793) / About the Pathetic (1801) In: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 400