Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volume 21, Issue 1, Fall 2016

The Resistance of Beauty
On Schiller’s Kallias Briefe in Response to Kant’s Aesthetics

In this article I address Schiller’s first response in his Kallias Briefe or Concerning the Beautiful, Letters to Gottfried Körner to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful in the first part of the Critique of Judgment. My main intention in the paper is to investigate Schiller’s emphasis on the notion of resistance (Widerstand) in his reading of Kant’s concept of beauty, and to ask how does this relate to Schiller’s own approach to aesthetics as an ethico-political realm. I am particularly interested in the turn, in Schiller’s case, from Kant’s critique of aesthetics to the idea of aesthetics as critique.