In his philosophical essay of literary and cultural criticism, Ueber Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung, the great German dramatist analyzes the deep differences between the Greek and the modern spirit. The literary historian well knows that he is at the same time analysing the differences between himself and the contemporary giant in German literature, Goethe. But that underlying substance of a concrete and most personal drama only lends additional zest and graphic immediacy to his discussion of the peculiar features of Greek culture.
By the way, was Goethe a perfect picture of the naive? Not in our opinion or according to our terminology. He was not in Schiller's opinion either. In his opinion, no modern person can ever be perfectly naive. That is a prerogative of the old masters. We know the boundless admiration Schiller had for the poets of ancient Greece. In what does he see their overwhelming superiority? First and foremost in their harmonious totality, we would venture to say. And where is that totality found, according to Schiller? It is in the naive poet. To our keen German critic that laureate of old has one characteristic above all else: he is a genuine child of that original naiveté which is the source of beauty.
And let us notice this: in Schiller's evaluation, that has something to do precisely with the entire "Zeitcharakter". It is the naturalness and simplicity of antiquity. These features have since been irrevocably lost in the artificial and complicated societies of our modern culture. See, for instance, what he also says in the sixth letter of his discussion "über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen":
Back then, in that beautiful awakening of the spiritual powers, the senses and the mind had not yet been strictly separated. For no discord had yet provoked them to divide each other hostilely and define their boundaries. Poetry had not yet courted wit, and speculation had not yet defiled itself with subtlety.[1]
What is that "Zwiespalt" to which Schiller is referring here and in so many other passages of his philosophical and aesthetic writings?
When he goes back to old Greece in search of a pattern of perfect harmony and simplicity, it is precisely not the idealist he sees in front of him, but the realist. Just listen to him describing the differences between the realist of antiquity and the idealist of modern times. It is almost as you might imagine Kretschmer describing the differences between the "cyclothyme" and the "schizothyme" characters of human personality.
The naive realist is above all a man of practical ability. In other domains he seems to have small chances considered as a pure type--of passing beyond a certain striking mediocrity. In what domains?
The realist knows and thinks little of that which has its value and purpose in itself (always excluding the whole); in matters of taste he will speak in favour of pleasure, in matters of morality he will speak in favour of happiness.[2]
The persons whom that realist loves, he will try to make happy (beglücken). The idealist will be more anxious to make them noble (veredeln). In political life the realist will therefore be most concerned about the prosperity his subjects may enjoy. The idealist is above all concerned about their liberty. To him that is more precious than any material well-being.
Of course Schiller is far from regarding everything in the simple and practical minded spirit of realism as pure advantage. On the contrary:
The realist alone would never have expanded the sphere of humanity beyond the limits of the sensory world, never have acquainted the human spirit with its independent greatness of freedom. Everything absolute in humanity is, to him, merely a beautiful chimera, and belief in it is little better than enthusiasm.[3]
But if now even the more elevated spirits of classical art have something, at least, of that somewhat narrowing realism inherent in the old Greek naiveté--why, then, does Schiller, the great representative of a new age and a new "sentimental poetry", still look back to that classicism with an actual "homesickness"? Why does he look up to the Greek poets as superior masters? For there is no doubt: his admiration for them is wholehearted enough. "Nur die Alten", he writes to Körner, "geben mir jetzt wahre Genüsse." And, as a matter of fact, he had even made up his mind, on one occasion, to simply abstain from reading any modern authors at all for a period of two years!
Well, the reason is clear enough, after all: Schiller knew the seamy side of idealism, as well. There he had experienced the painful deficiencies right in the living core of his own experience. Where was, after all, the earthly happiness of that ever excited idealist, constantly stretching his hands towards the infinite and the eternal? Schiller knew the disruptive super-tension of such a convulsive idealism. Human happiness is absolutely homeless there. Only the naive realist has true equilibrium in his mind and full satisfaction in his heart.
The idealist's fate is far from as good. Not only does he often fall apart with fortune because he failed to make the moment his friend; he also falls apart with himself; neither his knowledge nor his actions can satisfy him. What he demands of himself is infinite, but everything he achieves is limited. (Ibid.)
Schiller knows very well the danger inherent in this radical severity. The idealist is a sworn enemy of anything that is cheap or mean. But his requirements may be strained to the point of bursting.
He thinks so highly of humanity that he is in danger of despising people. (Ibid.)
The realist, it is true, may have a far less exalted conception of man and of humanity, and nevertheless he may prove himself to be the truer philanthropist in everyday life. In fact, he is prepared to forgive any meanness almost, in others, as well as in himself. The only thing he is not able to forgive is the eccentric.
As a most suitable introduction to our study of dualism, we are mightily interested in one particular point on which the naive realist (who, to Schiller, is the average Old Greek as a human type) distinguishes himself from the idealist (who, to us in this work, is above all the man who laid the foundations of European dualism for millennia). This is a fundamental difference in the two types regarding their respective attitudes towards reality:
1) The naive permits reality to flow in upon him in its immediate purity. That is the intuitive form of perception, characterizing Greek poetry. And what is the peculiar vision with which it enriches the ancient world, according to Schiller? It is not a vision of the general and the generic. It is always a vision of the special and the individual. Of course the senses are bound to play a predominant part in this very graphic and tangible form of perception.
2) How different from the perception prevailing in the world of "chimeras" so dear to modern idealist; we might add the world of ancient idealist as well, for of course, what we are particularly curious about here, is the idealist par excellence, Plato, our "exceptional genius", the man who gave European idealism its basic structure for thousands of years. And Plato, to us, is not just "the Greek", far from it. Plato is by no means the "naive", as far as we can see, whom Schiller keeps mentioning. He is not at all the "ancient" whose praises he chants. No--no, Plato is the great Occidental of a forthcoming world, of future generations. He is the Idealist of a rising, modern Europe. About him Schiller talks in quite different terms.
The idealist's striving goes far too far beyond sensual life and the present. He wants to sow and plant only for the whole, for eternity, and in doing so, he forgets that the whole is only the complete circle of the individual, that eternity is merely a sum of moments. (Ibid.)
Now you and I belong to a generation still more modern than Plato's. In fact, we belong to a world even ten times more sophisticatedly adult than that of Schiller (the modern sentimental). So our alterocentrism (our concern about the other one, the particular case, the case of man as an individual, a neighbour) or any such like naively warm preoccupation with everyday things, certainly this must be an anachronism; if such childlike things have had their existence in our proud Occidental breasts at all, they must certainly be a past stage in our development towards the "ideal"! We are sadly lacking, probably, in that warm interest the genuine child would tend to take in the personal destinies. But still there may be a tiny bit of curiosity left in us to know the human interest part of this story as well: at was it, then, in the life of Friedric Schiller from Weimar, that caused him to busy himself so seriously with these topics of human nature?
It may be most correct to say that the reasons are partly general and partly personal.
Of course Schiller is a product of his own age. We know to what extent Rousseau's pathetic message had influenced that age in human history. A violent opposition between nature and culture seemed to be the inevitable heritage of that influence. In fact, culture had come to be considered by many as the cause of all misery in this world.
Not that Schiller is any superficial imitator of contemporary behaviour patterns. He is rather a deep and dynamic spirit. He has found out, in a fairly independent way, that there is an unattainable greatness in the ancient "naives". That greatness consists of the fact that: they are natural. But the position of the modern "sentimental" is by no means hopeless in this respect. True, he is not natural, but he may aspire after nature. And in this heroic aspiration there may be--shall we say--a complementary synthesis of opposites which is liable to restore the equilibrium, perhaps even establish a unity superior to that of the fundamentally naive.
A return to nature in the sense of a return to a state of sensual enjoyment and the superficial peacefulness of this world, may have satisfied many of Schiller's contemporaries. It did not satisfy Schiller. Never was there any question of giving up the proud soaring ideals of his passionate spirit, simply to drown them in the lukewarm ocean of Philistine indulgence. The peace and harmony he was yearning for was the one resulting from the fusing together of the natural and the cultural. In order to realize that higher totality, right in the heart of a modern sentimental, he is disposed to make his pilgrimage to antiquity and let the wholesome spirit of ancient naïveté work upon his mind.
But Schiller never ceased to be a fighter. And that fight of his was as intensely and bitterly subjective as any titanic fight could ever be. In his irreconcilable struggle for absolute perfection, the more distant image of Greek poetry may certainly have been the ideal object of his emulation. But right in the immediate world of his personal environment there was quite another object, his rival Goethe. For our study this is a rivalry of absorbing interest.
In the history of Norwegian literature we find an analogous case in Ibsen's relation to Björnson. It was a rather one-sided rivalry, we know. Björnson's part in the drama mainly consisted in his just being there--and being successful, of course--as it seems to be the inevitable lot of a natural genius to be successful. The success of the more introvert genius, the "sentimental", does not follow so naturally at all. Only after a painful struggle does he see the first victorious results of his convulsive efforts. But first something most characteristic should be noticed: Schiller's feelings towards Goethe during his initial struggle were as ambiguous and disruptive as only a "sentimental" mind can produce. Hate and love, envy and admiration, were tossing and alternating in his mind, as a tiny boat is tossed on a tempestuous ocean. Self-scrutiny was his natural reaction. He became anxious to make sure of his own qualifications and his own calling.
The next consequence was his endeavour to analyse the qualifications of his "opponent" as well. And that analysis became the more fruitful and objective as he took the precautions of identifying the "opponent" with a whole and very remote generation. Schiller's decision to fight his own inward battle to the victorious end, appears clearly enough from his personal statement to his friend Karoline von Lengefeld in a letter of February 25, 1789.
I have too much laziness and too much pride to wait for someone to develop for me. There is a language that all people understand: use your strength. If everyone works with all their might, they cannot remain hidden from others. This is my plan.[4]
And the full ambitious goal of that plan is distinctly revealed in another letter: Schiller is bent on reaching "den höchsten Genuss eines denkenden Geistes: Grösse, Hervorragung, Einfluss in der Welt und Unsterblichkeit des Namens". We shall later come back to this remarkable characteristic of spiritualistic vanity and pathetic human emptiness: an "immortality" of the name. But at this point we shall keep to less tragic perspectives.
A continuous struggle for perfection fills long years of Schiller's subsequent life. And perhaps the most gratifying of all, to his proud and ambitious spirit, was to discover one thing in the end: in order to reach as great an amount of that perfection as any man hopes to reach, it was not necessary for him to become either a Greek or a Goethe! Through tenacious personal efforts he might climb to peaks of perfection which they, in their natural greatness and generous unconcern, had never known: to his own peculiar advantage, as a sentimental, he might, through conscious struggle, even add some precious gems of that incomparable naïveté which was theirs.
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