our roles, our longing for“serenity”and“inner necessity.”It is from this
longing that we project this serene condition on to them. For us, Schiller claims,Theyarewhat wewere; they are what weshould becomeonce more. We were
nature like them, and our culture should lead us along the path of reason and
freedom back to nature. Thus they depict...our lost childhood, something
that remains ever dearest to us, and for this reason they fill us with a certain
melancholy.^8
But for us–freighted with self-consciousness and aware of our lives as
subjects within social roles, whose functioning and value not everyone can
readily endorse and wherein work takes place apart from immersion in
nature and ritual–there is no ready way to achieve serenity and at-homeness.
We represent this serenity as an ideal to be achieved rather than as partici-
pating in it as a lived fact.
Once the human being has entered into the condition characteristic of culture
and art has laid its hands on him, thatsensuousharmony within him is
overcome, and he can only express himself as amoralunity, that is to say, as
someone striving for unity. The agreement between his feeling and thinking,
something thatactuallytook place in the original condition, now exists only
ideally. It is no longer in him, but rather outside him, as an idea that must be
realized in his work, no longer as a fact of his life.^9
Poetry–and by implication art in general–aims, Schiller claims, at“giving
humanity its most complete possible expression.”^10 In modern times, this
requires not the depiction of lived meaningfulness, which is lost,“but
[rather] the elevation of actuality to the ideal or, what comes to the same,
the portrayal of the ideal”^11 as something not yet present and actual.
But how is the ideal to be portrayed? Through a free, personal fantasy of
meaningful life or of a utopia? That runs the risk of beingad hocand irrelevant
to our condition and to any realistic prospects we might have. Or as a realistic
description of the actual? That runs the risk of failing to express our possibil-
ities completely, in portraying us as always caught up in an antagonized
present social actuality with which we cannot become wholly reconciled.
Modern poetry and art, Schiller suggests, have found a partial solution to
this dilemma–the only possible solution–in that the modern poet“reflects(^8) Ibid., pp. 180–81. (^9) Ibid., p. 201. (^10) Ibid. (^11) Ibid.
258 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art