Estetica e metafisica in Schiller. Dalla spontaneità alla mediazione

This doctoral thesis examines the development of the relationship between nature and reason in Friedrich Schiller’s philosophical work, with particular attention to the metaphysical implications of his aesthetics, through which his mediating position between Kantian philosophy and German Idealism takes shape. Within Schiller’s philosophical writings, two main stages can be identified in the evolution of the relationship between nature and reason. In his essays on beauty and grace of the 1790s, building on his early writings, this relationship takes the form of a linear continuity, in which the natural dimension appears spontaneously predisposed to conform to rational content. In the Kallias Letters, this continuity emerges primarily outside the subject, in an organic nature that Schiller associates with human reason insofar as it is beautiful, free, and spontaneous. In On Grace and Dignity, this relation is transposed onto the subjective plane: just as external nature appears capable of serving as a receptacle for the rational principle, so too can sensible inclinations become motives for moral action. In his later essays, however, a new interpretation of the harmony between the natural and the rational emerges, which is no longer conceived in terms of spontaneity but rather in a proto-idealist sense as a dialectical mediation of opposites. From this perspective, the beautiful soul is understood as the outcome of a process of formation through which aesthetic unity becomes a moral achievement of the subject. The renewed grounding of the continuity between human beings and nature in their shared process of overcoming the negative is reflected both in Schiller’s conception of natural teleology and in his philosophy of history, culminating in the dialectic of the naïve and the sentimental.