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.