[Friedrich Schiller] Καλλίας ή περί του Κάλλους, Επιστολές στον Κρίστιαν Γκότφριντ Κέρνερ
Συγγραφέας: Friedrich Schiller
Έκδοση: Πόλις, 2005
Επιμέλεια - Σχόλια - Επίμετρο: Γ. Ξηροπαΐδης
Μετάφραση: Μόρφη Κοντοπούλου κ.ά.
Τίτλος Πρωτοτύπου: Kallias oder uber die Schonheit, briefe an Gottfried Korner
Πρώτη Έκδοση: 1847
In a letter to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner on December 21, 1792, Friedrich Schiller first indicated his intention to advance his own theory of beauty in a work to be entitled Kallias or, On the Beautiful. Between January 25 and February 28, 1793, Schiller and Körner engaged in a dialogue on the subject in the form of an exchange of letters.
Schiller had read Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in March 1791 and during the winter of 1792-93 gave a series of lectures on aesthetics at Jena University. The Kallias letters thus culminated a period of intensive study by Schiller of various theories of beauty and prepared the way for his writing On Grace and Dignity, which he began in May of 1793, and the letters On the Aesthetical Education of Man, which were written in the late autumn/winter of the same year.
In the Kallias letters, Schiller writes that there are four theories of beauty: (1) the sensuous-subjective theory of Edmund Burke among others, which incorrectly derives beauty merely from physical causes, and confuses that which is sensuously pleasant with the beautiful; (2) the rational-objective theory of Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and others, which incorrectly defines logical perfection, i.e., proportionality, regularity, etc., as the cause of beauty; (3) the subjective-rational theory of Kant, which correctly distinguishes between the logical and the beautiful, but which, as Schiller says, "seems to me to miss fully the concept of beauty"; and finally (4) the sensuous-objective theory, which Schiller himself advances in the Kallias letters.
In Schiller's theory, proportionality, regularity, etc., do not cause beauty, but rather are merely the material of the beautiful. What constitutes beauty is not the sensuous perfection of an object, an action, or a character, but rather the freedom with which its sensuous perfection is expressed. For this reason, Schiller writes: "I am at least convinced, that beauty is only the form of a form and that that, which one calls its matter, must by all means be a formed matter. Perfection is the form of a matter; beauty, on the other hand, is the form of this perfection; which stands thus to beauty as matter to form."
Therefore, for Schiller freedom is the immediate ground of beauty, and technique merely mediately the condition of beauty. Only if the perfect is presented with freedom, is it transformed into the beautiful.
