Abstract

In this paper, I analyse Schiller's critical and theoretical writings from his youth to the "Ästhetische Briefe", focusing on his struggle with the problem of social integration. In the "Philosophische Briefe" , the young Schiller argues that humans naturally want to others to be happy, because they identify with others intuitively. But Schiller abandons this concept of "love" in the same work. The "Briefe über Don Karlos" deal with the incompatibility between friendship and "republican virtue" based on an abstract idea of "mankind as a whole". To solve the conflict between natural feeling and rational idea, Schiller conceives of a modern "folk poet" to unify the intellectuals and the masses in "Über Bürgers Gedichte". In comparison with these foregoing attempts, the concept of the "Aesthetic State" in the "Ästhetische Briefe" should be understood as the climax of Schiller's confrontation with the problem of social integration. There he analyses the desire of individuals to express themselves as aesthetic objects in social intercourse and be approved by disinterested aesthetic judgment. This desire lets them take the universal viewpoint, free from private interests, that Schiller calls "taste"