Friedrich Schiller
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 264th anniversary of the birth of Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (10 November 1759–09 May 1805), who was born in Marbach am Neckar, in the Duchy of Württemberg, on this date in 1759.
Arthur Lovejoy named Schiller, along with Herder, Kant, and Lessing as among the prominent eighteenth century progressive philosophers of history:
“A series of eminent German writers between 1780 and 1796 published what may be called progressivist philosophies of history; and these were, of course, intrinsically adverse to most forms of primitivism, and implied the rejection of the assumption of the superiority of ‘nature’ to ‘art.’ The most important of these writings are Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 1780; Herder’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–91, and some parts of the Briefe zu Beforderung der Humanitat, 3te Sammlung, 1794, especially Bk. VI; Kant’s Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher Absicht (1784) and Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte, 1786; Schiller’s Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universal geschichte (1789) and Briefe uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795).”
Schiller’s claim to being a philosopher of history rests primarily upon a lecture delivered on 26–27 May 1789, “What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History?” (the German title is given above by Lovejoy). Some, however, have found philosophy of history in Schller’s dramatic works. In John Neubauer’s 1972 paper, “The idea of history in Schiller’s Wallenstein,”
“History, as it appears in Wallenstein, is then not the manifestation of an ethical order. Does this imply that it has no order whatsoever? By pointing to the stars above and the moral law within, Kant postulated two distinct orders in the universe: a natural and a moral one. Though the parallel is too neat to account for the complexities of the play, for general orientation it might be suggested that Max listens to his heart hoping to find there the moral law of history, while Wallenstein literally reaches for the stars to unravel the mystery of historical time. Events in nature do have a pace of their own, a rhythmic movement in cycles: trees grow according to the passing of seasons, planets orbit according to laws (unknown to Wallenstein but deciphered by Newton half a century after him), and stars form constellations in the sky according to the passage of time. Can it be that human history is merely a chaos & random events where each subsequent deed cancels the effect of the previous one, or is there a yet uncoded ‘natural’ law that gives to events a hidden order and coherence? This is Wallenstein’s metaphysical question which is ignored by all interpreters who see him only as a ‘realist.’ Among the characters of the play only Wallenstein and Max seek an order that would give to the fragmented world of the Thirty Years War an encompassing meaning. True, Wallenstein’s search is guided by ulterior motives as well: to know the rhythm of history means being lord of it. Yet even if coupled with megalomania, the drive is metaphysical.”
Literary critics have found metaphysics in Shakespeare, so we should not be surprised to also find metaphysics in Schiller’s plays; indeed, the temper of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment was to see reason everywhere and in everything. It stands to reason that Schiller would find it in Wallenstein as well. The Enlightenment was, in part, a reaction against the brutality of the Thirty Years War, and insofar as the Enlightenment continues to shape our world today (and I argue that it does), a reaction to the Thirty Years War continues to shape our world today. Today we tend not to see this, as we live in the aftermath of the world wars of the twentieth century, which have shaped our world in visible ways, but we are also shaped by older wars, and the reaction against older wars.
In his recent paper, “Schiller’s Philosophy of History,” Andree Hahmann demonstrates how Schiller’s conception of universal history connects events in a rational system, yielding a coherent whole:
“…the current state of affairs provides the starting point of the universal historian to look for past events that had the highest impact on the development of world history and finally brought about or fundamentally contributed to the determination of the current world state. This is a highly remarkable claim, not only because it nicely depicts Schiller’s above-mentioned constructivist approach to universal history. We can also see more clearly how the teleological principle helps to establish a system from isolated facts by the application of causal laws that are effective in history. It is precisely in the way Schiller applies these causal principles that it becomes most evident how his universal history departs from world history, understood as the sum or collection of all historical facts. For universal history, neither proceeds mechanistically, that is, according to a blind sequence of causes and effects, nor does it abolish these very laws. On the contrary, Schiller repeatedly emphasizes how important causality and the observation that similar causes produce similar effects are for a historian. Yet, universal history and world history, taken as this unspecified sequence of events, diverge in a most important aspect: A universal historian picks out peculiar events from a present-day standpoint. As Schiller stresses, these events even seem to be causally isolated in their own time and happen without any preceding notice. Yet they have the greatest impact on the following time. He illustrates this idea with the help of an example, namely the birth of Jesus Christ which is a most important fact for universal history. A further example of an event that greatly influenced the development of world history is the constitution of the Judaic state. Against the backdrop of these events, we can clearly see how history understood in the widest sense and universal history necessarily break apart: The former has no means to approach this type of events properly: ‘[…] neither in the age in which it appeared, nor in the people among whom it came into being, can one find […] a satisfactory explanation of its appearance.’ Consequently, these events can only be understood as mere chance events. Accordingly, from the point of view of history understood in the widest sense, which takes into account all historical facts in equal measures, history presents itself as a fragmentary or chance assemblage of events. As seen above, Schiller takes this stance towards history to be unworthy of a real philosophic mind, who in turn will connect these events in a rational system — which forms a coherent whole.”
Schiller finds reason in history through a teleological understanding rooted in the present (rather than in the future, as we find in most forms of teleology), which guides the universal or philosophical historian to select those events from the past that proved to be important in the constitution of the present. We could see this as a form of Whiggish history, but we can also see it as a form of rationalism seeking to reconstruct the origins of the present.
In his inaugural lecture, Schiller erects a distinction between what he calls the “bread-and-butter scholar” and the philosophy, as a way to illustrate the search for a more rational and coherent whole in the teeth of hidebound complacency:
“As carefully as the bread-and-butter scholar keeps his discipline clear of everything extraneous, so the philosopher endeavors to expand his, and to restore its connections with the others. I say ‘restore,’ because one discipline has been distinguished from another only by boundaries created by the analytic understanding. Where the bread-and-butter scholar puts asunder, the philosopher joins together. He has early reached the conviction that in the realm of understanding, as in the domain of sensation, everything is interconnected, and his active drive for coherence cannot remain satisfied with fragments. All his efforts are directed toward perfecting his knowledge; in divine discontent he cannot rest until he has ordered all his ideas into a coherent whole, until he locates himself in the exact center of his art, of his science, and from this vantage point surveys with satisfaction its territory. New discoveries in the field of his activity, which are disheartening to the bread-and-butter scholar, delight the philosophical mind. Perhaps they fill a gap which had disfigured the developing totality of his ideas, or fit the last, still missing stone into the edifice of his ideas and complete it. But, on the other hand, should they demolish it — should a new set of ideas, or a new natural phenomenon, or a newly discovered physical law lay waste the structure of his discipline — yet truth is dearer to him than his system, and he will gladly exchange the old defective model for a new and more pleasing one. Indeed, even if no external blow shakes his edifice, he himself, compelled by a ceaselessly operating drive for improvement, is the first to take it apart in order to put it together again more perfectly. Through ever new and ever more gratifying forms of thought the philosophical spirit advances to greater excellence, while the bread-and-butter scholar, in eternal paralysis of spirit, stands guard over the barren monotony of his scholasticism.”
This is the Enlightenment par excellence — a dramatic re-phrasing of Kant’s Sapere aude! History must be taken apart in order to be put back together again more perfectly, and this because of the inner necessity as reason converges on perfection and forces us, in obedience to reason, to revise all that we have done, or even to discard what we have done and start over again. Ideally, this is how science has functioned since the scientific revolution, and this is how Schiller believed that historical reason should also function.
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