schiller's free will in relationship to the divine and the sublime

through religion, our instinct to survive is put at ease. Immortality cannot contribute anything at all to the representation of death as a sublime object. the sublime disappears as immortality prevails. (the sublime is never based upon the satisfaction of our instincts).



If the image of divinity is to be practically (dynamically) sublime, then we have to tie the feeling of our security not to our existence but rather to our principles (for Schiller, this refers to the external, moral realm).

"...divinity could never as a force act upon the will.

editor: "in religion in general, throwing oneself down and adoring with contrite gestures full of fear seem to be the only appropriate behavior in the presence of the divinity, behavior most peoples have also accordingly taken up. but, he continues, this fram of mind is not at all necessarily bound up with the idea of the sublimity of a religion. The human being conscious of his own guilt and thus having cause to fear is not at all in a frame of mind to wonder at the divine greatness. Only when his conscience is clean, do those effects of the divine power serve to give him a sublime idea of the divinity, inasmuch as he is then elevated above the fear of the effects of this power through the feeling of his own sublime disposition. He stands in awe (Ehrfurcht), not in fear (Furcht), of the divinity. On the other hand, superstition feels only fear and anxiety toward divinity, without esteeming it. Out of such feeling there can never arise a religion of uprightness, but only ingratiation and the solicitation of favor. Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Analytic of the Sublime.

Schiller goes on to discern free will as free will only when we recognize it as such (the preservation-instinct, or our intelligible self - that which is in us which is not of nature and distinct from our sensuous side so that we might become aware of its self-sufficiency, its independence).

freedom of will is only a moral freedom, never a physical freedom.

magnificent - to overcome what is fearful
succumbing to the fearful w/o fear = sublime