Aesthetics, Politics, Revolution: Concepts of Representation in Schiller, Fichte and Buchner

Aesthetics and Politics;French Revolution;Friedrich Schiller;Johann Gottlieb Fichte;Georg Büchner;Representation;Germanic Languages and Literature;Humanities;Germanic Languages & Literatures

Heidepriem, SamuelWeineck, Silke-Maria ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Aesthetics and Politics;    French Revolution;    Friedrich Schiller;    Johann Gottlieb Fichte;    Georg Büchner;    Representation;    Germanic Languages and Literature;    Humanities;    Germanic Languages & Literatures;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/138658/sjheid_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation explores the connection between aesthetic and political representation in three prominent German writers’ responses to the French Revolution. Though they present conflicting judgments of the Revolution, I argue that Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Büchner all use it as an occasion to reflect on the interpenetration of aesthetic and political processes. Each configures aesthetic and political principles differently, according to an idiosyncratic concept of representation that combines aesthetic, political, historiographic and theatrical modes. I consider each writer an aesthetic-political ;;type” based on how he organizes these axes and the forms of representative distance (between representative and represented) they involve. This study builds on recent discussions in political philosophy and historiography by profiling Schiller, Fichte and Büchner as influential cases of aesthetic-political fusion around 1800.Chapters one and two read Schiller’s aesthetic writings and history plays as theoretical and practical wings of a program to correct the failures of the French Revolution, understood as the collapse of representative distance. Schiller constructs a politics around the aesthetic concept of beauty in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) after rejecting its opposed concept of sublimity, which he sees behind revolutionary violence. His ;;politics of the beautiful” calls for gradual political change via social education through artworks that encourage viewers to critically reflect on historical processes and their own aesthetic experience. Anthropological in foundation, it situates modern society in the larger developmental arc of humanity. Aesthetic education corrects a malformation in internal drives that resulted in the violence of the Revolution. I argue Schiller’s ;;classical” history plays—Wallenstein (1798-99); Maria Stuart (1800); Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801)—attempt to implement this program. This systematic interpretation of Schiller’s late oeuvre is new in critical literature.Chapter three argues that Fichte’s defense of the Revolution in his treatise Contribution to Correcting the Public’s Judgment of the French Revolution (1793) is based on an aesthetic—and specifically sublime—understanding of politics. The connection between aesthetic theory and Fichte’s political thought is absent in current scholarship. I argue Fichte’s ;;sublime politics” conceives of violent upheaval as an opportunity for moral transcendence. Fichte denies that humans are historically determined and advocates the French Revolution as an unprecedented break with the past. This break must be absolute: to realize their moral potential, Fichte insists people reject all embeddedness in the political past, all pleasures they currently enjoy, and any forms of representational distance that prevent them from experiencing the immediacy of revolutionary virtue. Chapter four details Büchner’s critique of idealism as it appears in both Schiller and Fichte. In his pamphlet The Hessian Courier (1834) and drama Danton’s Death (1835), Büchner rejects the notion that the French Revolution must be signified or interpreted, instead exploring the Revolution’s rhetorical character and addressing its practical and discursive consequences for subsequent European politics. His innovative practice of literary citation in Danton’s Death represents history without overly conceptualizing it. Similarly, Büchner does not idealize ;;the people” in the manner of Schiller, Fichte and antecedent political thought, but focuses on the concrete realities of political subjects’ lives in the 1790s and 1830s. This original conception of the polity as a ;;concrete multiplicity” contributes to ongoing debates regarding the status of Büchner’s materialism. Likewise, the dissertation clarifies Schiller and Fichte’s positions as ;;idealists” in contemporary intellectual history of the Goethezeit.