Aesthetical and philosophical essays : $b introducing the dissertation on the "connection between the animal and spiritual man"Schiller, Friedrich
Philosophy
Aesthetical and philosophical essays : $b introducing the dissertation on the "connection between the animal and spiritual man"
Schiller, Friedrich
Aesthetics; Philosophy
consideration, that it is ordinarily more favorable to the conformity of
acts with the law that inclination is on the side of duty. As a
consequence, this much appears evident: that the assent of sense, if it
does not render suspicious the conformity of the will with duty, at
least does not guarantee it. Thus the sensuous expression of this
assent, expression that grace offers to us, could never bear a
sufficient available witness to the morality of the act in which it is
met; and it is not from that which an action or a sentiment manifests to
the eyes by graceful expression that we must judge of the moral merit of
that sentiment or of that action.
Up to the present time I believe I have been in perfect accord with the
rigorists in morals. I shall not become, I hope, a relaxed moralist in
endeavoring to maintain in the world of phenomena and in the real
fulfilment of the law of duty those rights of sensuous nature which,
upon the ground of pure reason and in the jurisdiction of the moral law,
are completely set aside and excluded.
I will explain. Convinced as I am, and precisely because I am convinced,
that the inclination in associating itself to an act of the will offers
no witness to the pure conformity of this act with the duty, I believe
that we are able to infer from this that the moral perfection of man
cannot shine forth except from this very association of his inclination
with his moral conduct. In fact, the destiny of man is not to accomplish
isolated moral acts, but to be a moral being. That which is prescribed
to him does not consist of virtues, but of virtue, and virtue is not
anything else “than an inclination for duty.” Whatever, then, in the
objective sense, may be the opposition which separates the acts
suggested by the inclination from those which duty determines, we cannot
say it is the same in the subjective sense; and not only is it permitted
to man to accord duty with pleasure, but he ought to establish between
them this accord, he ought to obey his reason with a sentiment of joy.
It is not to throw it off as a burden, nor to cast it off as a too
coarse skin. No, it is to unite it, by a union the most intimate, with
his Ego, with the most noble part of his being, that a sensuous nature
has been associated in him to his purely spiritual nature. By the fact
that nature has made of him a being both at once reasonable and
sensuous, that is to say, a man, it has prescribed to him the obligation
not to separate that which she has united; not to sacrifice in him the
sensuous being, were it in the most pure manifestations of the divine
part; and never to found the triumph of one over the oppression and the
ruin of the other. It is only when he gathers, so to speak, his entire
_humanity_ together, and his way of thinking in morals becomes the
result of the united action of the two principles, when morality has
become to him a second nature, it is then only that it is secure; for,
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