| In my dissertation, "Der Ring der Notwendigkeit: Friedrich Schiller nach der Natur," I read Schiller's work against the Idealist and Enlightenment grain by showing that the importance of such notions as freedom and autonomy within his theoretical and literary texts is eclipsed by a profound fascination with the idea of a necessary order and the need for (quasi-)external guidance and constraint. My study begins by tracing the emergence of the concept of Notwendigkeit in Schiller's early anthropological writings, and by bringing into relief its moral and epistemological significance, as well as its theological underpinnings. By framing Schiller's early work as articulating a gradual metaphysical disillusionment, I bring to the fore that this process eventually leads to his embrace of two novel sources of necessity: the Kantian concept of teleology in his historiography and, in his aesthetics of tragedy, the moral law. By highlighting the fact that the transcendental project is as much a theory of necessary forms as it is a theory of self-legislation, I argue that Schiller's Wirkungsasthetik is still under the sway of a naturalistic logic: It seeks to bring about its effect with necessary force. In a second step, I explore what impact the primacy of form and the attendant claim to necessity have on the dimension of the empirical, the individual, and the particular in Schiller's thought, both with regard to his subject matter as well as his own creative process. In a third step, I draw out this discussion to include Schiller's three major aesthetic essays and test the results through a reading of the Wallenstein-trilogy. By doing so, I hope to show that Schiller's fascination with a nature-like order can never fully relinquish a tendency that, as a case of unbefriedigte Aufklarung, can serve as a prime example of what one could call 'secularization and its discontents': the idea that the only way to escape chance and uncertainty is to draw on the sheltering, determining, and unifying power of necessary impulses, be it in the form of physiological laws, categorical imperatives, or situational constraints (Sachzwange). |
