Frederich Schiller

Schiller's Philosophical Letters Frederich Schiller

Publisher Marketing: The reason passes, like the heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual. Degeneracy in morals roots in a one-sided and wavering philosophy, doubly dangerous, because it blinds the beclouded intellect with an appearance of correctness, truth, and conviction, which places it less under the restraining influence of man's instinctive moral sense. On the other hand, an enlightened understanding ennobles the feelings, -the heart must be formed by the head. The present age has witnessed an extraordinary increase of a thinking public, by the facilities afforded to the diffusion of reading; the former happy resignation to ignorance begins to make way for a state of half-enlightenment, and few persons are willing to remain in the condition in which their birth has placed then. Under these circumstances it may not be unprofitable to call attention to certain periods of the awakening and progress of the reason, to place in their proper light certain truths and errors, closely connected with morals, and calculated to be a source of happiness or misery, and, at all events, to point out the hidden shoals on which the reason of man has so often suffered shipwreck. Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom Contributor Bio:  Schiller, Frederich ohann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) is an influential dramatist, poet, historian and philosopher. Friedrich Schiller's early career interests were to join the clergy. To further these ends, he attended the Latin School of Ludwigsburg. However, his father's patron, Duke Karl Eugen of Wurttemberg, insisted that Friedrich Schiller attend the military academy at Castle Solitude. Unable to further his liturgical study, Friedrich Schiller pursued legal studies and then after the school was moved to Stuttgart he began to study medicine. Friedrich Schiller's early days at the academy were restrictive. However after the school moved, Schiller found a more liberal atmosphere. He used this increased freedom to read the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, Klinger, Lenz, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Friedrich Schiller, in pursuit of a more thorough understanding of aesthetics, turned to the works of Immanuel Kant. These thinkers and artists encouraged the revolutionary tenor found in Friedrich Schiller's creative works. In 1780, his studies finished and he began to work as a regimental physician. This was also the year that he finished Die Rauber, a play which he would self-publish in 1781. In 1782, Die Rauber was performed to a rapt crowd. The Sturm und Drang play in which a noble attempts to resist the moral strictures of the eighteenth century revealed Friedrich Schiller's revolutionary spirit. During a climatic scene, the character Charles (Karl) Moor expresses the ideal "Death or Liberty!" This character also voices the belief that the goal justifies any transgressions used to achieve it. To this end, Friedrich Schiller indicates in his writing that "man is the being who wills." This crucial feature of his artistic work has had clear implications to the development of aesthetics and philosophy over the eighteenth and nineteenth century. There can be little doubt that this assertion has manifested with a profound resonance throughout Continental thought. As one of the predominate influences of the great German poet. Some critics see Charles Moor as one of the literary forebears of Friedrich Nietzsche's Ubermensch. There seems to be an absolute correlation between the importance of will for Schiller and that in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.