The Goal of Classical Drama
Goethe’s Italian Journeys (1786-88) mark the beginnings of a different way of looking at art and
drama in which which Schiller will also participate. Goethe and Schiller will no longer be
interested in the discussions of art and drama debated by Gottsched, Lessing and others in the
early and middle part of the eighteenth century which had revolved around adherence to certain
rules, the central role of emotions such as pity and fear, or the meaning of catharsis. Goethe and
Schiller will be influenced by ideas and ideals, not by rules. They will be interested in the idea
of Beauty itself, and the ideal of harmony, be it within ourselves as an inner struggle, or in the
real world when humans struggle to assert and realize their inner freedom. Most of all, they will
be interested in how art contributes to the idea of freedom, how art’s concern with the ideal of
Beauty anticipates real freedom. Their thoughts on the role of art in society take art just as
seriously as Lessing had done in an earlier part of the century, but they raised the discussion of
art to a level equal to that of philosophy. Their ideas are much more abstract than those of
their predecessors, and reveal the influence of German idealist philosophy. Goethe and Schiller
develop an idealistic theory of art which owes much to the thoughts on the autonomy of art
discussed at length by the philosopher Kant.
The authors and thinkers of German Classicism attempted to rescue the social harmony they saw
promised by the enlightenment, but threatened by the bloody events which became part of the
French Revolution. Classical drama does not deal with debatable rules of dramatic form,
but rather with more abstract ideas and more serious issues such as the individual dignity
of each person, moral autonomy, self-development and self-realization, self-determination
and freedom.
Schiller and the Power of Beauty
Humans are both rational and sensuous beings, and that’s a big part of the our problem. Reason
and nature in general are always in conflict, and we are the site where they come into conflict
with one another. We struggle both against that rational part of ourselves, as well as against our
own sensuous nature.
About Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795)
Here Schiller develops a concept of the “modern” poet. Schiller’s distinction between naive and
sentimental poetry are based upon different relationships a poet and poetry have to nature.
naive poets/poetry:
A poet who is “at one” with nature is a naive poet. A naive poet feels a connection to nature
naturally. This natural connection to nature is not perceived as a relation which has been lost
and which needs to be pursued or re-established. It follows that a naive poet therefore is
concerned with the sensuousness relation of humankind to nature in the present. In this sense a
naive poet imitates reality. Naive poetry can also be seen therefore as realistic. This kind of
naive imitation of nature, Schiller believes, was possible for the ancient Greeks. In the ancient
civilization of the Greeks, he theorized, the imitation of nature coincided with the imitation of
reality. The experience of nature was immediate, experienced directly; nature and reason were
thus unified (i.e. ideas one had about nature were at home, substantiated, in a mythological
universe in which one believed.)
For Schiller, it is impossible for the “modern poet” (his “today’s poet”) to have this kind of
relationship to nature. The forms of “modern” reason (philosophy, natural sciences), have taken
the “soul” out of nature. For the modern poet, nature is only an idea.
sentimental poets/poetry:
A poet who views nature from the standpoint of its being “lost,” and who seeks to discover her
again, is considered a sentimental poet. But don’t confuse the word sentimental here with a
melancholic longing to return to the past.
As a matter of poetic practice, “sentimental” poetry reflects upon an object and its relation to an
idea. (Note that this is very different from how one had talked about poetry in the past, e.g. the
relation of a particular poetic work to the rules which governed conformity and deviation from
the norm.) Schiller was very much interested in the effect of drama on the audience. It is the task
of the poet to reconcile nature, reason and spirit. But How?
Schiller’s theory of “the pathetic-sublime”1
pathos [Gr. pathos, suffering, disease, feeling, akin to pathein, paschein, to suffer, to feel < IE. base *kwenth-, to
suffer, endure, whence OIr. cessaim, I suffer] 1. [Rare] suffering 2. the quality in something experienced or observed
which arouses feelings of pity, sorrow, sympathy, or compassion 3. the feeling aroused
pathetic [LL. patheticus < Gr. pathetikos, akin to pathos, suffering, PATHOS] 1. expressing, arousing, or
intending to arouse pity, sorrow, sympathy, or compassion; pitiful 2. pitifully unsuccessful, ineffective, etc. [ a
pathetic performance] 3. of the emotions, now only in PATHETIC FALLACY
sublime (...) 1. noble; exalted; majestic 2. inspiring awe or admiration through grandeur, beauty, etc. 3. [Colloq.]
outstandingly or supremely such [ a man of sublime taste] ....
Schiller uses the term pathos as it emerges out of the tradition of rhetoric (Aristotle, Cicero,
Longinus, Quintillian). For Aristotle, a good orator had to be pathetic, i.e. he must speak with
passion. Lessing had translated pathos as suffering, and rejected its value for the theater because
it didn’t suit his notion of the “middle character.” But for Schiller, pathos was the expression of a
real suffering human being.
1
About the Pathetic was originally Part II of On the Sublime (1793); Part I was dropped and the title changed.
About the Sublime appeared in a volume which included About the Pathetic and About the Aesthetic Education of
the Man (1795)
The sublime was a concept rediscovered by Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Poetic Art ,
1674), who translated On the Sublime by Longinus (?) (first century A.D.) Boileau reintroduced the term “sublime” as a noble style with which one expresses strong and noble
feelings.2
For Schiller, the Pathetic and the Sublime are united, which is why he writes them in hyphenated
form as the Pathetic-Sublime. The pathetic without the sublime is not worthy of being
represented; the sublime needs the pathetic in order to appear at all.
Pathos is suffering. Each situation is pathetic in which we see a suffering human being. Yet
human beings are autonomous; we have a power which is independent of nature, a capacity to
resist and overcome suffering. Tragedy should show humans in situations in which both
suffering and freedom are visible - where dignity and greatness appear. This alone makes it
possible to experience a sublime feeling. When the dramatist discovers a constellation in which a
human being shows his/her will to confront that which the power of nature otherwise demands of
us, then dramatic material for the sublime has been found which portrays our “moral resistance
to suffering.”
Schiller vs Lessing
What about pity? Pity for Schiller is very different than how Lessing understood it. For Lessing,
drama was to cultivate our capacity for compassion. For Schiller, the audience should suffer
along with the suffering heros on stage as if we were in fact those suffering heroes. The task of
the artist and poet is not to expand our capacity to feel pity or compassion, but to awaken our
sense for the sublime: to learn to bear what can’t be changed and save our dignity in the process,
to assert our inner freedom (spiritual nature, independent moral self) when our outer freedom is
limited by reality. Beauty (the moral ideal of the “beautiful soul”) for Schiller is “freedom in
the appearance.” The experience of the sublime should portray the possibility of freedom (“It
is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom.” 1795).
►The appearance of freedom as a abstract ideal - made visible on the stage - is particularly
important when real, concrete freedom in society is not within reach.
2
The notion of the sublime has a rich history in eighteenth century philosophy: Edmund Burke: A Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756); Moses Mendelssohn: Observations on the
Sublime and the Naive in the Science of Beauty (1758); Immanuel Kant: Observations on the Feeling of Beauty and
the Sublime (1764), and Critique of Judgement (1790); J.G. Sulzer summarized all this history in a lexicon article:
General Theory of the Fine Arts of 1771-74 (Schiller made use of Sulzer’s article).