Friedrich Schiller — uncritical late Enlightenment philosopher, blind idealist, and dangerously abstract aesthetic thinker? This stereotypically negative classification of the “classical” Schiller was established in the second half of the twentieth century by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Paul de Man, and Terry Eagleton. Schiller clearly defines aesthetic education as a path from barbarism, which he sees as a dangerous product of an incomplete enlightenment, as expressed in his Philosophische Briefe (Philosophical Letters, 1786) and in his essay Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature, 1795–96; 1800). Schiller's post-1945 critics, on the other hand, argue that the fascist barbarism of the twentieth century was conditioned through Enlightenment, idealism, and aestheticization. The connection between Schiller's aesthetic education and twentieth-century German fascism is a highly questionable construct at the very best, as is evident in the comparison of Schiller's remarkably articulate condemnation of the dangers of a partial aesthetic education. Schiller not only addressed his twentieth-century critics; he specifically criticized the political misuse of aesthetics that would inform their responses.

FRIEDRICH SCHILLER — unkritischer Spätaufklärer, blinder Idealist und gefährlicher Ästhetiker. Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Paul de Man und Terry Eagleton ankern ihre Kritik am Klassiker1 Schiller in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts an diese stereotype Negativetikettierung. Adornos und Horkeimers Vorwürfe können allgemein aus ihrem Verständnis der Aufklärung selbst abgeleitet werden, wie es in Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) beschrieben wird. So beginnt das erste Kapitel wie folgt: “Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen.