The German Genius

subordinates but to his family as well. More than this, Schiller’s deeper design is to show that weakness is as much the basis of tyranny as is strength. Phillip may have raw political power but he is lonely, jealous, and miserable. 62
    In 1787, the year Don Carlos was performed, Schiller visited Weimar, hoping to meet Goethe. At the time, Goethe was in Italy, but Schiller did succeed in meeting both Herder and Wieland and spent time in the company of Duchess Anna Amalia. Two years later, on Goethe’s recommendation, he was invited to become professor of history at the University of Jena.
    Although Goethe was responsible for Schiller’s presence in Jena, and in Weimar, we now know that, to begin with, each kept his distance. Rivalry, or respect, probably played their part though Schiller certainly thought that Goethe was too self-important. But, early in 1794, Schiller began looking for people to contribute to his periodical, Die Horen (The Horae, 1795–97), and Goethe was, not unnaturally, among those asked. * This got them talking, so that it was natural for them to leave together after a meeting of the Society for Natural Science in Jena. During that conversation, Schiller attacked—but politely, respectfully—Goethe’s notion of a primal plant, the Urpflanze , from which all others are derived. Schiller followed this up with a letter in which he contrasted his own critical-analytical (“sentimental”) approach to reality, with Goethe’s more organic (“naïve”) belief in the simplicity of nature and in natural genius (whose intuitions were implicitly above criticism). Schiller’s argument owed something to his medical training, something to Kant, and something to the German intellectual traditions introduced in Chapter 2, and it won Goethe’s respect: from then on they were firm friends. Although very different, their letters confirm that they subsequently each had a hand in the writing of the other’s works, notably Faust and Wallenstein . 63
    Schiller, probably more than Goethe, was much affected by news of the Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror in France (1793–94). The execution of well over a hundred members of the ancien régime sickened him, as it sickened many other Germans, but he did not follow the path of many fellow intellectuals in Germany, who turned away from the massacres to the inner life. Schiller was not given to Pietistic inwardness or, for that matter, political nihilism. 64 For him, the main threat facing the world was barbarism, which he thought had always been with us, as common in the ancient world as it was in his own time. These reflections led to one of his major theoretical works, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen ( On the Aesthetic Education of Man ), in which Schiller offered an alternative to the predicament he saw around him. For Schiller, education was the best—the only—way forward, but it was to be education of a special kind: it was aesthetic culture that produced the “healthiest” relationship between reason and emotion. For him, art and literature, images and words, offered the best hope of showing how the imagination and the understanding can work collaboratively together, one limiting the other to help us avoid extremes, which Schiller saw as the main problem underpinning barbarity. For Schiller, Bildung of the individual through knowledge of aesthetic culture had an ennobling effect on character. 65
    Though Schiller was not conspicuously Pietist, like Herder he shared Francke’s view that the Creation can be improved upon. Schiller seems to have thought that our minds are divided into two: the instrument of understanding and the imagination. The purpose of imagination, creativity, is to expand understanding and self-awareness. That being so, he distinguished three epochs in the evolution of civilization—the natural state, when the individual is subject to the forces of nature; the moral state, when man has identified the rules of nature and uses those rules as the basis of living together; and the aesthetic state, when he is free of these forces. In the first epoch, raw force prevails; the “ethical” state is governed by law; and in the “aesthetic” state individuals are free to treat each other as in a play—that is, people can choose their own roles. 66 In aesthetic society, beauty “acquaints us with our full potential.”
    This sounds impossibly idealistic, but in Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung ( On