Schiller encounter with the aesthetic ideas of Kant

Schiller encountering Kant’s aesthetic ideas

Hamideh Jafari
Oloum Tahghighat University, Iran

Abstract
Schiller quotes Kant's Transportation of Judgment as a starting point of his philosophical research on art and aesthetic. He criticized Kant’s work while studying them. In the meantime, what most persuaded him to reflect and motivated him to advance his theories was overcoming Kant’s "dualism" of "necessity and freedom" and "sense and reason". He believes this "dualism" forms a part of the difficulties and problems facing modern man. He reckons that the Enlightenment and Modernity have caused these problems, because according to modernity and enlightenment, the power and the human impulses have stood against each other. Thus, modern man has lost his inner forces of harmony and unity and has been alienated from nature and himself. Schiller was not convinced by Kant's description of aesthetic experience to overcome the abyss between nature and man, and believed that Kant’s opinion has not eliminated the problem, but contributed to this separation. Hence, by critical assessment of the Kant’s ideas, Schiller tried to show how freedom can be achieved out of necessity, how the lost integrity of man can be restored and how the opposition between part and whole, duty and desire, and nature and man can be eliminated. Schiller believed that Kant's ideas were dualistic. It was his habit of mind to look for a "third degree", a degree which can serve as a mediator between two opposing categories. A clear example of this third degree is the validity of the incentive for game which is used to reconcile the two mutual motivations of "material" and "form". According to Schiller's aesthetic ideas, the most important and fundamental sense is "game motivation", because his perception and conception of art is art as a serious game where man can fully realize and find himself. Although "game" which Schiller applies is his own particular achievement and different from what was intended by Kant, Schiller gets his concept of "game" by reviewing Kant’s aesthetic rules and his free game of cognitive faculties (Cooper, 1995, p. 382). The coordination of cognitive faculties was important for Kant. Beautiful yet, in his view, is a ……….. which maintains a "general" balance between imagination and understanding. Kant utilizes the term "game" to refer to this indeterminate Oriented balance: the coordination and free functioning of the imagination is related to the power of knowledge (Sheperd, 2006, p. 69). But what Schiller means is that the ultimate form of the game of speculation is about beauty, where the man truly plays, where he neither satisfies his material needs nor ascertains any purpose, but rather where the harmony and solidarity, two opposite aspects of human nature, are realized. Since Schiller is one of the first followers of Kant who welcomed his views, modified them, and tried to bring Kant's unfinished work in linking theoretical and practical reasons to fruition, and to overcome the "dualism" of his thoughts, this study specifically explains the relationship between Schiller's ideas and Kant’s aesthetic ideas and the way Schiller criticized Kant’s.