Abstract

The Letters Concerning Beauty, or Kalliasbriefe, as they are better known within Schiller’s scholarship, are a series of letters that Schiller exchanged with his good friend Gottfried Körner between January 25 and February 28, 1793. They were never published as an independent work by Schiller—unlike his letters to the Prince of Augustemburg, which Schiller edited for publication under the title Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind (from now on Aesthetic Letters). This is why for a long time they were not considered part of Schiller’s philosophical corpus (the NA groups them in a volume of his correspondence (NA 26) rather than in the volumes devoted to his philosophical writings (NA 20 and 21)). They contain, however, Schiller’s first confrontation with Kant’s aesthetics (as presented in the first part of the Critique of the Power of Judgement), and are therefore an important source for understanding not only Schiller’s own stance on aesthetics—mostly on beauty—but also Schiller’s aesthetical-political project that would be developed more fully a few years later in the Aesthetic Letters.