2 See, e.g., Paton, H.J. The Categorical Imperative (London: Hutchison 1967), 48Google Scholar; Beck, Lewis White A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1960), 231Google Scholar; Simmons, Keith ‘Kant on Moral Worth,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989), 85Google Scholar; Galvin, Richard ‘Does Kant's Psychology of Morality Need Basic Revision?’ Mind 100 (1991) 228.Google Scholar

3 On this, see Beck, 231n.

4 Henceforth GD and AE respectively. I shall employ the following notation for reference to Schiller's works:

5 This theme has been developed at length by Lukacs, Georg Goethe and His Age (New York: Howard Fertig 1978), 69, 89, 124Google Scholar; and The Young Hegel (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1954), 148-66. As Frederick Beiser has pointed out, however, for Schiller the problems of the divided will were a consequence of the social development of civilization per se, and not from the ills of a particular social or economic order (Beiser, Frederick Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992], 104)Google Scholar.

6 It is true that in life … pleasure is ordinarily the motive for which we act according to reason. If morality itself has at last ceased to hold this language, it is to the immortal author of the ‘Critique’ to whom we must offer our thanks; it is to him to whom the glory is due of having restored the healthy reason in separating it from all systems (GD 204/544).

7 This itself represents a weaker endorsement of Kantianism than Schiller had originally intended for the work. According to Hans Reiner, in editing the original draft of the sixth letter to the Duke of Augustenburg, Schiller removed the following lines:

8 As Paul Guyer has convincingly argued, Schiller's conceptions of grace and dignity are best understood as part of a creative defense of Kant's ethics of duty. To state, as Guyer does, however, that Schiller shares Kant's belief that ‘moral approbation is directed most of all precisely to the activity of reason by which we elevate ourselves above passive nature’ glosses Schiller's remarks that such a state cannot in fact express moral freedom. As I shall argue below, Guyer focuses on an important part of Schiller's argument, but one which is inconsistent with his strongest claims against the divided will (Guyer, Paul Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality [New York: Cambridge University Press 1993], 354).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 This marks Schiller's virtue ethics as more sympathetic and less polemical than that of recent critics such as Alasdair Macintyre who have taken Kantianism merely to be an ethics of ‘rules’ (Macintyre, Alasdair After Virtue [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1981], 219)Google Scholar. For accounts that call attention to Kant's emphasis on agency and virtue as opposed to mere ‘rightness,’ see Darwall, Stephen L. ‘Agent-Centered Restrictions from the Inside Out,’ Philosophical Studies 50 (1986) 291–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Louden, Robert B. ‘Kant's Virtue Ethics,’ Philosophy 61 (1986) 473–89Google Scholar; Ameriks, Karl ‘The Hegelian Critique of Kantian Morality,’ in Ouden, Bernard de and Moen, Marcia eds., New Essays on Kant (New York: Peter Lang 1987) 179–212Google Scholar; O'Neill, Onora Constructions of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press 1989), 145–62.Google Scholar

10 As I discuss in section IV, Kant did turn to the issue of the cultivation of desire in his later writings.

11 Schiller's concern with how the agent adheres to the commands of the law is an important forerunner to Nietzsche's critique of ‘listening’ to moral conscience:

12 Taking up the political metaphor, Schiller writes:

13 An action done from duty has to set aside altogether the influence of inclination, and along with inclination every object of the will; so that there is nothing left able to determine the will except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law, and therefore the maxim of obeying this law even to the detriment of all my inclinations (Groundwork 68-9/400).

14 As Kant wrote in response to Schiller's On Grace and Dignity, a ‘fear-ridden and dejected …. frame of mind can never occur without a hidden hatred of the law’ (R 19n/22n). Even in passages such as this, however, Kant links joy in carrying out the demands of the law with a sublime ‘courage.’ As I shall discuss in section II, the sensuous being must experience a certain fear in approaching the majesty of the law which is the basis of respect.

15 I am indebted to David Hills for first impressing the importance of this distinction on me.

16 Schiller put the same point somewhat differently in the thirteenth Letter:

17 This is clearest the nineteenth ‘Letter’ in which Schiller specifically linked his approach to Kant's treatment of time and space in the first Critique (AE XIX.1- 12/129-37).

18 Contrary to a popular line of criticism, Kant clearly held that sensuous nature has a place in moral judgment:

19 See e.g. Stocker, Michael ‘The Schizophrenia of Modem Ethical Theories,’ Journal of Philosophy 63 (1976), 462Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard ‘Persons, Character, and Morality,’ in Rorty, Amelie ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1976), 214Google Scholar; Richard Taylor, Good and Evil, relevant passages reprinted in Sommers, Christina Hoff ed., Right and Wrong (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1986), 65–7Google Scholar; Wolf, Susan ‘Moral Saints,’ The Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982) 419–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Defenses of Kant against this charge include Henson, Richard G. ‘What Kant Might Have Said: Moral Worth and the Over determination of Dutiful Action,’ Philosophical Review 88 (1979) 39–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herman, Barbara ‘On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,’ Philosophical Review 90 (1981), 372–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baron, Marcia ‘The Alleged Moral Repugnance of Acting from Duty,’ The Journal of Philosophy 71 (1981) 359–82Google Scholar; Benson, Paul ‘Moral Worth,’ Philosophical Studies 51 (1987) 365–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jenson, Henning ‘Kant and Moral Integrity,’ Philosophical Studies 53 (1989) 65–77Google Scholar; Packer, Mark ‘Kant on Desire and Moral Pleasure,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989) 429–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simmons, Keith ‘Kant on Moral Worth,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989) 85–100Google Scholar.

21 For further discussion of the evolution of Kant's thought on his own ‘solution’ to the problem of sensuous motivation, see Guyer Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 27-33.

22 Schiller also accepted such a limitation on speculation:

23 Kant reiterates this point with regard to moral education in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone: ‘Even children are capable of detecting the smallest trace of admixture of improper incentives; for an action thus motivated at once loses, in their eyes, all moral worth’ (R 44/53).

24 Thus respect for the law is not the incentive to morality; it is

25 For it is not insofar as he is subject to the moral law that he has sublimity, but rather in so far as, in regard to this very same law, he is at the same time its author and is subordinated to it only on this ground (Kant G 107/440, cf. CPrR 79-80/76-77, 89/87).

26 Paul Crowther interestingly charts the development of Kant's conception of the sublime and its relationship to respect for our moral vocation from its early statement in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) to its treatment in Book II of the third Critique. Specifically, Kant moves from the position in the Observations that great depths, heights, and edifices may give rise to sublimity, to the claim in the second Critique that respect for the moral law alone gives rise to such feelings (CPrR 78-80/76-77), to the more nuanced view that respect- the consciousness of our moral vocation — underpins all experiences of the sublime. See Crowther, Paul The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), 23–8, 131-5Google Scholar.

27 Sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us …. And it is only by presupposing this idea within us … that we can arrive at the idea of the sublimity of that being who arouses deep respect in us, not just by his might as demonstrated in nature, but even more by the ability, with which we have been endowed, to judge nature without fear and to think of our vocation as being sublimely above nature. (Kant CJ 123/264, see also CPrR 89/87)

28 For further discussion of the ‘comparative character’ of the attitude of respect, and how it differs from the harmonious character of virtuous feeling developed by writers such as Hutcheson, see McCarty, Richard ‘Motivation and Moral Choice in Kant's Theory of Rational Agency,’ Kant Studien 85 (1994), 23–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Consistent with the place of the sublime in moral education, Kant further specifies that the cultivation of a virtuous character comes by ‘wonder at its inscrutable source’ (DV201/399-400).

30 Kant reaffirms this in his noteworthy remarks on the duty to sympathy or humanity, where he distinguishes between a merely passive disposition and the actively willed embodiment of reason:

31 Strictly speaking, to honor the moral will as sublime is not to endorse sublime willing, where the latter refers to an agent's conscious attempt sublimely to overcome the determinations of sensuous nature. Kant consistently rejects any conscious endeavor of this kind as an exhortation to self-conceit (CPrR: 86-7 /84-5). It is clear from the context of letter twenty-three, and Schiller's explicit remarks in his long footnote to paragraph 7, however, that it is with our observation or estimation of sublimity and nobility with which he is concerned (AE XXIII.7n/167n).

32 See, for example, Beiser, 101.

33 Schiller employs the concept of ‘play’ in two senses here. On the one hand, the desire for the beautiful is a play-drive in the sense that it finds its satisfaction in various playful spectacles — color, drama, sculpture, music, sport, etc. But the play-drive is also playful in its apprehension of these spectacles, ‘playing on’ the desires embodied in the other drives:

34 Schiller's failure to develop the idea and Kant's rejection of it notwithstanding, the conception of aesthetic freedom developed in the Critique of Judgment may itself be understood to offer a ‘Schillerian’ determination for the moral will. In contrast to the imposed lawfulness of morality, Kant tells us that the judgment of taste displays a ‘lawfulness without a law and a subjective harmony of the imagination with the understanding without an objective harmony’ (CJ 92/241). For Kant, of course (consistent with his arguments discussed above), such an indeterminate judgment is inadequate to generate the respect that must determine the autonomous will:

35 Schiller's lack of clarity on this point has given rise to the charge that two incompatible strains of thought run through the Letters, one that understands the final development of morality as simply surpassing natural and aesthetic motivation, and another that sees aesthetic sensibility synthesizing the natural and the rational. See Lutz, Hans ‘Schillers Anschauungen von Kultur und Natur,’ Germanische Studien 60 (1928) 169–233Google Scholar, cited in Wilkinson and Willoughby, ‘Introduction’ to AE, xlii-xlviii; Miller, 121-4; Steiger, Emil Friedrich Schiller (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag 1967), 87–92Google Scholar.

36 In his description of such surpassing, Schiller employs the verb aufheben in both of it meanings, to preserve as well as to destroy or annul, to describe the aesthetic synthesis. In their commentary to the English translation of AE, Wilkinson and Willoughby cite Letter Eighteen as the probable source of Hegel's more celebrated use of the term (AE: 304-5).

37 The distinction between a Formtrieb and a Stofftrieb occurred in Reinhold's Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (see Beiser, 106). Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves have also argued that Schiller's concept of drives derived from his earlier psychological training at the Karlschule (Dewhurst, Kenneth and Reeves, Nigel Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology, and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press 1978), 356–8).Google Scholar

38 I call speaking (Sprechend) (in its widest sense) every bodily phenomenon that accompanies and expresses a certain condition of mind (Gemütszustand). Thus, according to this definition all the sympathetic movements are speaking, including those which accompany the simple affections of sensibility (GD 194/536).

39 For further discussion of Schiller's development of the concept of ‘appearances’ in his aesthetics and ethics, see Wilkinson, E.M. ‘Schiller's Concept of Schein in the Light of Recent Aesthetics,’ German Quarterly 28 (1955) 219–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Accordingly, Schiller argues that the animals cannot express ‘personality’ but only nature:

41 In the discussion of duties of wide obligation in the Doctrine of Virtue Kant claimed that compliance with the maxims of such duties permit just such ‘latitude (latitudo) ,’ since ‘the law cannot specify precisely in what way one is to act and how much one is to do by the action for an end that is also a duty’ (DV 194/390).

42 G 66/398. Schiller introduced a parallel example in his ‘On the Sublime’ (1801), a later essay in which he appeared to contradict his own requirement of natural dispositions for moral action in ‘On Grace and Dignity’ by stating that some moral acts lack any explanation in the natural world. In an interesting contrast to Kant's former philanthropist who finds himself ‘no longer moved by any inclination’ to aid others, however, Schiller's man of ‘beautiful character’ (schönen Charakter), despite being deprived in Job-like fashion of property, reputation, friends, and family, maintains his ‘joy in the happiness of others’ (Teilnehmung an fremdem Glücke) (S 142/799). His moral dispositions remain intact. This would seem to indicate that for Schiller, the evocation of the sublime in this kind of example follows not from the absence of any natural disposition to perform a specific moral action, but rather from the lack of any self-interested reason for his persistence in the practice of his virtues (Tugenden). The sublime sense of a ‘supersensible world’ is occasioned by the need for an explanation for the persistence of the disposition rather than for the particular act. While such a reading would be consistent with his earlier claim that the rational will must find expression in a sensuous vehicle, however, it conflicts with Schiller's own rather puzzling claim in the same passage that no part of the explanation for the man's acts can be found in his natural condition (S 142-3/799).

43 I have altered the translation of the final sentence of this passage (‘Diese Anforderung macht die Vernunft an die Menschenbildung’), one that the translator inexplicably renders as ‘This is what reason requires in the human face’ (GD 199/540).

44 Schiller generally invokes ‘grace’ (Anmut) in its familiar sense. Sensuous nature can gracefully embody freedom in the manner that spectacles of play, dance, and theatre lend external expression to inner phenomena (see Steiger, 230). Schiller restricts his usage to the term for this classical sense of grace, Anmut, and does not use the term for religious grace, Gnade. In a letter to Goethe in 1795, however, Schiller linked the capacity of sensuous experience to genuinely embody the law to the Christian theological claim that the Holy Spirit permits the incarnation of the Divine in natural form. Maintaining an absolute distinction between the spontaneity of reason and the passivity of sensuous desire, and dismissing the possibility of the mediation of the graces in practical reason (R 19n/22n), Kant rules out the ‘incarnation’ of reason in a ‘free inclination’ (see Reiner, 49).

45 For Kant, the freedom of the experience of the beautiful could serve as the symbol of freedom, whereas the feeling of the sublime (with its implicit subordination of sensuous nature), was grounded in our moral freedom (see n. 24 above). As Frederick Beiser and Paul Guyer have argued, Schiller used Kant's conception of the beautiful in developing an argument against Plato's dismissal of the artists from the political order (Beiser, 98-9, Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 96-7, 117Google Scholar).

46 ‘Yet duty bids us do this [revolution in our disposition], and duty demands nothing of us that we cannot do’ (R 43/52).

47 In this passage from section 49, Kant appears to return to his more familiar conception of virtue as a capacity to suppress sensuous nature and away from the suggestion in section 35 that sensuous nature is itself capable of transformation (DV 250-251/ 457).

48 I am indebted to Richard McCarty for drawing my attention to this aspect of Kant's theory of virtue.

49 See section II above.

50 Kant actually did suggest such a view with his claim that the mind must be able to have ‘before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension (which is empirical) to a transcendental unity’ (137 I A108, see also 152-3/8131-2). Allison, Henry (Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense [New Haven, Cf: Yale University Press 1983]Google Scholar) and Pippin, Robert (Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press 1989]CrossRefGoogle Scholar) have argued that Kant's discussion of the transcendental unity of apperception sometimes appears to imply that the active capacity of the subject to unify the manifold of intuition involves a reflective application of the concepts. If this were the case, however, ‘in any conscious intending, I am aware of my own activity of creating or imposing my order on the world’ (Pippin, 20). Against such a reading, Pippin cites Allison's claim that Kant need only argue for the ‘necessity of a possibility’ of self-conscious attention to the action of representation (Allison, 137). Even if knowledge involves a kind of active judgment in which the agent possesses the capacity to bring to self-awareness in a second order judgment, it does not follow that she must actually form a second-order judgment in every act of knowing.

51 For a discussion of the distinction between rule-following and rule applying in Kant's epistemology, see Pippin, 20-2.

52 Cf. Allison, 137.