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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
I the extensive literature on Schiller of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century shows surprisingly little concern with his philosophy of history. To Körner, who had expressed his reservations concerning his friend's endeavors in this line of thought, Schiller complained: “Du willst mich im Philosophieren über Geschichte noch gar nicht gelten lassen. Meine Uebersicht macht bei vielen Sensation … Bekehre Dich also ja.” Could Schiller make this same complaint today? Until recently students seem to have followed Körner in their reluctance to recognize the value of Schiller's early contribution to the philosophy of history. The reaction of the romantics against the enlightenment's philosophy of history may well have delayed any whole-hearted reception of Schiller into the field. Signal acknowledgment of his historical thinking may have been retarded by the genuine distrust for all speculation on human evolution with which Ranke and Burckhardt have imbued generations of good historians. In our own time an awareness of crisis makes us both tolerant of present-day speculation upon history and its course, and interested in previous philosophies of history. Any efforts we make to grant Schiller's wish to be taken seriously as a philosopher of history (specifically as in his lectures and writings of the years 1789-90) may help us with our own problems. An examination of his ideas might also help to clarify our view of his Weltanschauung, which, as proof of its vitality, is now again being vigorously argued.
1 Schiller's Briefe, herausgegeben und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Fritz Jonas (Stuttgart, 1892), iii, 80.
2 V. H. Tümmler, “Schiller und der Professor historiarum Heinrich. Neue Zeugnisse über Schillers Jenaer Lehramt,” Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der Goelhe-Gesellschaft, xi(1949), 187-204.
3 Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom (New York, 1943), p. 81.
4 From now on referred to as inaugural address.
5 Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. A. Buchenau (Berlin, 1913), iv, 61-62, 163.
6 Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, Säkular-Ausgabe (Stuttgart). All subsequent references in the text will be to this edition.
7 Schillers Geschichtsphilosophie in seinen historischen Werken (Diss. Breslau, 1913).
8 Kleine Schriften (Halle, 1924), i, 43.
9 On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans, and ed. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (Glencoe, Ill., 1949), p. 55.
10 Ibid., p. 157.
11 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Berlin, 1848), p. 41.
12 Richard Fester, “Schillers historische Schriften,” Euphorion, xii (1905), 133.
13 Cf. “When, however, we compare the cultural process in humanity with the process of development or upbringing in an individual human being we shall conclude without much hesitation that the two are very similar, if not in fact the same process” (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, London, 1930, p. 31).
14 The problem on which Schiller puts his finger in Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft continued to occupy his mind and resulted in some of the most original contributions towards the interpretation of cultural revolution in his later work, Die ästhetische Erziehung.
15 Schiller's Briefe, vi, 200.
16 Johannes Scherr, an older mid-19th-century liberal biographer of Schiller, has drawn a parallel between the July 1789 happenings of Versailles and Schiller's lecture. He has not attempted an analysis nor has he actually put his finger on the bourgeois passage, but he has related the Jena lecture to the Versailles happenings and declared both children of the same Zeitgeist: “Welcher Contrast zwischen dieser französischen Scene auf den Strassen von Versailles und jener deutschen im Griesbach'schen Lehrsaal in Jena! und doch waren wieder beide Vorgänge nur verschiedene Erscheinungsformen eines und desselben Geistes der Zeit” (Schiller und seine Zeit, Philadelphia, 1879, p. 300).
17 The medieval problem in the literature of the eighties, as a result of Kant's teleology, has been well examined in an article by Arndt Schreiber, “Das Mittelalter. Universalhistorisches Problem vor der Romantik,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, xxxi (Weimar, 1943). To this study I am greatly indebted.
18 Gottlieb Hufeland, “Ueber den Wert und Nutzen der Geschichte des Abendlandes,” Teutsche Merkur (Weimar, 1788), Part iv, pp. 26, 28.
19 Schiller added the following note clarifying the meaning of the term truth: “Oder was man dafür hielt. Es braucht wohl nicht erst gesagt zu werden, dass es hier nicht auf den Wert der Materie ankommt, die gewonnen wurde, sondern auf die unternommene Mühe der Arbeit; auf den Fleiss und nicht auf das Erzeugnis. Was es auch sein mochte, wofür man kämpfte— es war immer ein Kampf für die Vernunft: denn durch die Vernunft allein hatte man das Recht dazu erfahren, und für dieses Recht wurde eigentlich ja nur gestritten” (xiii, 116).
20 Schiller's Briefe, iii, 333.