Files
Abstract
This project focuses on the afterlife of Friedrich Schiller’s works in 19th and 20th century aesthetic theory, and has two aims: to articulate the central aesthetic concepts presented in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795-96); and to demonstrate their historical significance by analyzing their reception in the early Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, and the New Left. Four interlinked themes are emphasized: the reconciliation of nature and freedom, the appearance of nature in technicity, the anthropological significance of play, and a genre theory keyed to historically shaped forms of consciousness.
These four Schillerian themes are fundamental to a modern conception of art as historical in its essence, as a shared object of attention in which the unfolding of humanity’s self-emancipation is proleptically envisioned in the space of aesthetic experience. Art appears within this conceptual configuration not merely as falling within history, but as a domain of experience in which the historical project of humanity is brought to awareness and advanced. By retracing this conception of art’s historicity across disparate theoretical positions, the dissertation establishes a greater continuity across ideological differences than is generally recognized in the scholarship, and, in particular, it offers an alternative to postmodern and Frankfurt School characterizations of Schiller as the culpable sponsor of an aestheticized politics. Far from offering idealistic fantasies or merely compensatory satisfactions, Schiller’s aesthetic humanism points the way to a critical project, immanent to the artwork, that anticipates a future of non-alienated social relations.