By David Gosselin
The following essay is part two of a series. Click here for part one. Having examined Schiller’s notion of Genius in the last article, it became clear that the wisdom of the “masters” described in his poem was not the kind of knowledge born out of the natural insight and creative intuition of the properly cultivated human being, but only the officially sanctioned opinions of the day. These opinions were represented by Kant and the Enlightenment “schools” — which still exert an inordinate amount of influence over the thinking of modern man. In his second of Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller summed up the predicament of modern culture as follows:
As already observed, in the Kantian system art and science were treated as opposing forces. One affirmed man’s “rational” nature while the other affirmed his “sensual” nature. Consequently, one could essentially only develop at the cost of the other. The historical reaction to this false dichotomy became known as Romanticism. As a philosophical and aesthetic movement, Romanticism prized emotional authenticity, personal conviction and naturalness over the logical, didactic and mechanistic outlook of Enlightenment schools. Just as France had vacillated between monarchy and anarchy, and finally came full circle with a new emperor, a similar phenomenon would be observed in Germany 200 years later. The sophisticated edifice of German “rationality” came crashing down in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. The sheer pessimism and despair caused by the injustices of the treaty served as the detonator that blew apart the Enlightenment ideal. The famous German poet and critic of Romanticism, Heinrich Heine famously anticipated the results 100 year earlier, writing:
On the History and Philosophy of Germany — Heinrich Heine Once the foundations of modern rationalism were sufficiently rocked, the instinctive drives came rushing back with a vengeance and engulfed the entirety of the German state. Being well aware of the many Frankenstein monsters that can emerge when the rift between men’s feeling and reason becomes too great, we are forced to go back to the abstract problem pursued by Schiller in his letters. Science and Art EnslavedAs the sciences became reduced to strictly defined forms of technical knowledge, the provinces of the arts shrank further; and feeling became even more estranged from thought. This deepening divide made possible both the modern commercialization of art and the irrationalism of modern art, with the latter trying to assert itself against the “realism” and practical ends of Enlightenment standards. So Schiller writes:
Science suffered from a lack of imagination, since it was divorced from the intuitive and creative drives which make the creation of new hypotheses and the expansion of the science’s borders possible. Art suffered from the utilitarian impulse of the age, or it simply distanced itself from rationality altogether. To the degree art sought to defend its borders from the stultifying spirit of the age, it was by being subversive or asserting the blind forces of passion over reason i.e. Romanticism, and later Modernism and Contemporary Art. New theories were proffered which only further divided man in multifarious ways. That being said, Schiller reminds us that beauty and truth will always “struggle triumphantly to the surface with their own indestructible vitality.” So, the key becomes understanding exactly how beauty and truth work together, and what they can achieve in their highest perfection. In his sixth letter, Schiller begins resolving this paradox by comparing the modern age with the outlook embodied by the age of Classical Greece:
A multiplicity of ideas could be still grasped with a sublime simplicity. So we have classic aphorisms like Heraclitus’ famous “nothing is constant but constant change” or Plato’s famous paradox of the “One and the Many.” Knowledge of particulars didn’t come at the cost of unity, and unity didn’t come at the cost of individuality. Rather, each one justified the necessary existence of the other. The Muses still kept watch over all fields of knowledge, from the mystical dance of the stars to the trembling strains of the lyre; from the heroic deeds of bygone ages to the timeless wisdom of the Seven Sages, all of knowledge was still divinely preserved in memory. Divine madness still entailed a seer-like clarity; and everyday life still concealed a divine mystery.
Human KnowledgeBecause you glean from it what you yourself have writ in it, A planiglobium was a 17th century two-hemisphere representation of the celestial globe, projected onto a flat surface (planisphere). Schiller poetically captures the Enlightenment tendency to model and map its knowledge of every phenomena, which it then reduced to a set of formulas and fixed rules —terming that “knowledge.” However, that “human knowledge” usually came at the cost of divine knowledge. Rather than man’s expansion of knowledge re-enforcing and deepening his sense of mystery and awe before all creation, the narrow empirical models and formulaic approach of Enlightenment thinkers only lead to the further mechanization of knowledge, the worship of formalism and an abolition of mystery. Deeper knowledge of the causes underlying observed phenomena were relegated to the obscure department of metaphysics; knowledge of the divine was confined to the world of priests, soothsayers and esoteric doctrines. Of course, the denial of mystery in official knowledge only resulted in the resurgence of esoteric teachings in Europe’s philosophical underground, where secret societies like Free Masonry, Rosicrucianism and related occult schools proliferated at their fastest pace in centuries during the so-called “Enlightenment.” While mystery was chased out of the classroom by the “official” schools, it was promoted in more perverse and esoteric forms in the underground, leading to an ever widening rift between earthly and divine knowledge. So, how to resolve the deepening fragmentation of society and man’s faculties amid the growing divisions of knowledge in the modern world? Schiller recognized that as high an achievement as the classical world boasted, it had also reached a limit of what was possible under that model. One first had to understand its limitations before drawing any lessons from its time-tested wisdom.
Schiller observed that while it becomes necessary to focus all of one’s powers into a single point if one is to propel a field of inquiry beyond the limits of intuition alone, a well-tempering of the faculties becomes necessary if the fruits of such progress are to ripen to perfection and serve a thriving society. Schiller writes:
So how to benefit from the “sweet wisdom of ages,” without at the same time forsaking the fruits of modern progress? Schiller hearkens back to an ancient myth and an ancient proverb:
Schiller reminds us that a spirit of Genius, which is uniquely preserved by the aesthetic character, must restore man’s creative vision and courage, since:
The victims of cultural degradation are too blinded by their own uncultivated instincts to imagine any better lot. Therefore, “In the lower and more numerous classes, crude, lawless instincts are found which are unleashed by the loosening bonds of civil order, rushing with ungovernable fury to their animal gratification.” However, the problems of the age are exacerbated by those who are in a position to enact change vis-à-vis the culture and man’s development, since they are at the source of cultural corruption. Schiller writes:
The on-the-ground facts in Schiller’s survey confirm that only a renewed spirit of Genius can restore man’s capacity to feel and think in harmony, and unlock man’s fullest potential in the greatest number of people:
The great irony here is that the development of one’s reason depends on strengthening his capacity for feeling. The heart of the savage or barbarian is incapable of responding to the noblest ideas. In a word: if the savage or barbarian are to ever become open to new laws and ideas, a change first has to take place in the heart. So the spirit of “Genius” hearkens back to a Golden Age, where the Greek’s powers of reason and his embrace of the sensual world were not yet so fragment and differentiated as to lose the thread of the divine and human that enveloped all categories of knowledge, whether artistic, scientific, political or otherwise. Schiller writes:
The task of Genius becomes that of reclaiming the divine in both feeling and discernment. And that can only be done by developing in man a fully matured play instinct. Through the “play instinct,” concepts can be enjoyed and explored without having to be immediately marshalled to some practical end; the beauty of Truth can be experienced without the need for laborious mechanical procedures and lifeless formulae to justify its existence. Instead, the practical end and true value of a concept becomes clear as we learn how to play with it; the Truth becomes more enjoyable and practical as we discover how its beauty offers man new degrees of freedom which both the savage and barbarian lack. In a word: through the aesthetic play drive man achieves a perfection which neither reason nor the senses alone can achieve. That perfection, which seems so elusive in theory, is readily found in the world Fine Art, observes Schiller. There we find countless instances of both imagination and discernment working in perfect harmony, rather than clashing at every turn. Such art can contain the highest expression of morality without dictating any course of action for audiences; man’s contemplative life can be awakened through the perfectly harmonious wedding of images, music, and dance. Rather than stirring his emotions at the expense of reason, or speaking to his rational nature at the cost of the free interplay of his senses, the aesthetic experience emerges as something that doesn’t elevate one condition by depriving the other, but rather strengthens one by re-enforcing the other, ultimately leading to the magical cancelation of all opposing forces. The paradoxical nature of how the aesthetic life liberates man is summed up by Schiller in his twenty-first letter, where he writes:
Schiller concludes:
Through ideal art, as rigorously defined by Schiller, Beauty becomes a reminder of the freedom which the actual world denies man. The injustice so characteristic of the world he inhabits, the ugliness which infests the manners and conduct of his peers, the corruption which weighs on the institutions of his country, and the madness which characterizes the philosophy of his age are all annulled aesthetically. In this state, man becomes free to dream, imagine, and feel not what the world dictates, or what his own narrow conceits demand, but to experience a pure moment of unfiltered and divine awareness of his own freedom. In “On Grace and Dignity,” Schiller draws the comparison between a beautiful life and a beautiful painting:
In conclusion, the Fine Arts becomes both the keeper and preserver of the ideal. They make possible what the savage and barbarian deny, the alternative which the “realist” is unable to imagine, and the timeless wisdom which the starry-eyed idealist is to naïve and importunate to acquire. When man becomes capable of experiencing the ideal proper, he will (as the spirit of Genius reminds us), have “blindly achieved what the rest of men missed in the light, just as children at play succeed where the wisest have failed.” In this way, those “quieter souls” may finally restore “the sweet wisdom of ages.” David Gosselin is a poet, researcher, and translator in Montreal, Canada. He is the founding editor of The New Lyre. His personal Substack is Age of Muses, where he publishes historical deep-dives, original poetry and a variety of writings for a new renaissance. His new book A Renaissance or New Middle Ages: Magic, Mystery, and the Trance Formation of the West can be purchased here. The Rising Tide Foundation (RTF), a non-profit based out of Montreal, Canada, dedicated to the rigorous re-examination of Universal History and the principles governing the cyclical appearance of Renaissances and Dark Ages in human civilization. Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.
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