On Beauty

�On Beauty� is one of the early documents with which Friedrich Schiller started his long inquiry about aesthetics in general. The letters are presented here in their full content hence leaving the reader the freedom to assess the scope of his early, rathe

The examination of the concept of Beauty, from which almost any part of aesthetics cannot be separated, leads me into a very broad field where, for me, unknown territories lie still. And, therefore, I must simply encompass the whole subject if I should perform anything gratifying. The difficulty to establish objectively a concept of Beauty and to legitimate it completely, a priori, from the nature of reason - so that experience confirms it throughout as true, without having, however, the concept of Beauty necessarily to claim pretence on experience to affirm its validity - is almost insurmountable. I have really looked for an inference of my concept of beautifulness; however, it does not arise without the proof of experience.

This difficulty, that people will give me only an explanation about the beautiful because they find that such explanation meets the individual judgments about taste and (as should have been the case, hence, in any knowledge derived from objective principles) not their judgment about the specific aspect of the beautiful, as seen in the considered experience and for that reason, they find their explanation correct, just because it agrees with my own explanation, always remains.

You will say that this maybe asking too much, however, as long as one does not bring the examination to that point, hence, taste will always remain empirical, just as Kant has held it for unavoidable. However, precisely from this inexorableness of the empiric, from this impossibility of an objective principle to be valid for taste, I can not yet convince myself of.

It is interesting to notice that my theory is a fourth possible way to explain the beautiful. People can either explain it objectively or subjectively and, in truth, either sensibly subjective (like Burke and others did) or subjectively rational (like Kant) or rationally objective (like Baumgarten, Mendelssohn and the whole partisans of the Perfection theory) or finally sensibly objective: a terminology which you could not, indeed, have been much thinking of, until now, unless you compare the other three ways with each other.

Each of these avant-garde theories contains an experimental part in itself and contains apparently a part of truth and the mistake seems bluntly to be that people hold for Beauty itself, the element of Beauty with which they agree upon. The partisan of Burke is perfectly right against the Wolffian when he affirms the non-negotiability of Beauty and its independence from content; however, he is not right against the Kantian when he puts Beauty in the blunt influence of sensibility.

The fact that most Beauties found in experience which exist in your mind, are not really free Beauties but rather logical fields which remain under the scope of a purpose like any artwork and most Beauties found in Nature, this fact which Beauty put in an apparent perfection, seems to have misled everyone, for, now, the logic of goodness is mistaken for Beauty.


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Author's Note

copy and paste the passage that seems not clear to you

Reviews

[Alex McFadyen]

I think such a subjective thing must be only a matter of taste. People can judge such qualities based on their own unique experience. However, I find that things that are more vivid, more lifelike, and in close relation with my own values and genetic predispostions will be regarded as beautiful. Essentially, we see ourselves as the ideal beauty, and when we see aspects of ourselves that we value highly in the world around us, we will regard it as beautiful. ...
That and we like sex.

However, I think beauty is a concept that can only exist within the subjective mind and therefore, its objective reality is non-existence. Is that the point that we are all driving at?