Friedrich Schiller 1759 – 1805

Friedrich Schiller was a German philosopher, poet, and playwright, the close collaborator of Goethe at Weimar and one of the most important Kantian thinkers of his generation. His Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man argues that aesthetic experience is the only form of human activity in which the demands of reason and the demands of sense are reconciled, and that the cultivation of beauty is therefore the precondition of political freedom. He composed major dramas, including Don Carlos, Wallenstein, and William Tell, and his Ode to Joy, set by Beethoven, became one of the great anthems of European modernity.

Friedrich Schiller was born in 1759 in Marbach in the duchy of Wurttemberg, the son of a military surgeon. At fourteen he was conscripted into the Karlsschule, the duke's elite military academy, where he was forced to abandon theology for medicine. The clandestine composition and runaway success of his first play The Robbers (1781) led him to flee Stuttgart in 1782; after years of poverty and patronage he was appointed unsalaried professor of history at Jena in 1789.

His historical, dramatic, and theoretical writings of the Jena and Weimar years are the heart of the German Klassik. The plays — Don Carlos, the Wallenstein trilogy, Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, The Bride of Messina, William Tell — are matched by the philosophical essays On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, On Grace and Dignity, and On the Sublime, and by the journals Thalia and Die Horen. From 1794 his friendship with Goethe anchored Weimar Classicism; the two corresponded almost daily.

Schiller's aesthetics integrate Kant's third Critique with his own commitments to freedom and political reform: the play drive (Spieltrieb) reconciles sense and reason, and the aesthetic education of humanity is the indispensable path to true political community. The 'Ode to Joy' became the text of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth and, much later, the European anthem. He died of tuberculosis at Weimar in May 1805.