The German Genius

play dramatizes an encounter between Queen Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots in her last days, when she was held captive in the Castle of Fotheringhay. In real life Elizabeth and Mary never met, but the play imagines the meeting and, at the outset, the two queens are “sisters”—they are not, to begin with, complete opposites. As the play develops, however, Elizabeth’s behavior is increasingly governed by her senses, the physical here-and-now, whereas Mary moves to the spiritual/intellectual plane. Although both women are equally formidable, equally noble, equally isolated, Mary’s “state of sublimity” creates a growing—ultimately unbridgeable—gap between the two. Despite her political pre-eminence, Elizabeth, Schiller is saying, is essentially a prisoner of her office, which prevents her from being herself. Mary, though politically emaciated and physically shackled, is still morally free. These two female monarchs, so similar in so many outward ways, have very different inner natures—and that is what counts. 72 Do Elizabeth’s actions against Mary stem entirely from the exigencies of the political situation, or is it more personal and, if so, in what way? Can Elizabeth ever know? Can we ever know? Is such self-knowledge possible?
    For many people, the characters and predicaments of Don Carlos , Wallenstein , and Maria Stuart are even more overwhelming than those of Goethe’s Faust or Werther . Giuseppe Verdi drew on Schiller for four operas ( Luisa Miller , Joan of Arc , I Masnadieri , and Don Carlos ), Beethoven used “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy) in his choral symphony, and Schiller’s poems inspired Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky. More Schiller has been set to music than has Shakespeare.

New Light on the Structure of the Mind
     
    A t one stage in his life, the philosopher Immanuel Kant formed a firm friendship with a certain Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg (the city was a port, with many foreigners). According to Reinhold Jachmann, another friend of the philosopher and one of his earliest biographers, Kant would go to Green’s house almost every afternoon. There, he would “find Green asleep in an easy chair, sit down beside him and, lost in meditation fall asleep himself. Then Bank Director Ruffmann usually came in and followed suit, till finally, at a certain time, Motherby [Green’s partner] entered the room and woke the sleeping company, who then engaged in the most interesting conversation till seven o’clock. They used to part so punctually at seven that people living in the street were in the habit of saying it could not be seven o’clock yet, because Professor Kant had not gone past.” 1
    This story, like so many others about Kant, has been dismissed as fanciful nonsense by his modern biographers. Which means that we now need to doubt all the other colorful details credited to him over the years, such as whether he really was an adept at both billiards and cards but gave up the latter because no one he knew could keep up with him. Did he really move house because the crowing of his neighbor’s cock disturbed him—only to occupy a mansion too near the prison, where the singing of the prisoners’ choir was likewise distracting? And no doubt he didn’t always match his waistcoats to the colors of the flowers in season, as some “observers” have said. No matter. Kant was still an original genius in all manner of ways. Ernst Cassirer said that the fundamental “spiritual forces” in Prussia in the eighteenth century were Winckelmann, Herder, and Kant. Paintings and portrait busts (which, presumably, we can trust) inevitably depict him as though his features are about to break out in a smile. He was the first great philosopher who was a university professor and who has had a great impact—on philosophy and on academic life.
    Kant (1724–1804) is, for many people, the most important philosopher since Plato and Aristotle. One reason for this—an argument that underlies the first half of the present book—is that he was living in a crucial era, when the old certainties attaching to the Christian faith were being washed away and before Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859, which gave us a new, and in this case a biological understanding of ourselves, bringing with it a measure of intellectual agreement that simply