Abstract

Cipa examines the ways in which Schiller’s literary prose contains resonances of the ideas he would develop in his later philosophical works, arguing that philosophical concepts from Schiller’s Kantian phase in the 1790s are in principle already discoverable in the pre-critical prose works. Cipa highlights the question of free will and Schiller’s understanding of aesthetic education, especially as it relates to Schiller’s theory of three drives: the form, the sense, and the play drive, before turning to Schiller’s views on duty, inclination, and grace to outline how, for Schiller, art cannot be isolated from its necessary role in forming and developing the citizen and civilised society. Cipa concludes with a discussion of the ideal of art as it relates to what Schiller calls the beautiful soul.