Schiller on the Artistic Value of Tragedy. A Case of Moderate Autonomism?

Works of art often provide insights into moral issues, and we regard these insights as contributing to their moral value. What precisely constitutes that value and whether it interacts with or is distinct from the works’ aesthetic value are disputed questions. Radical autonomism claims that the possible moral value of an artwork is entirely irrelevant to its artistic value and that art is valuable if and only if it has aesthetic value. While it may be natural to want to defend the freedom of aesthetic evaluation from cognitive, moral and political intrusion, the radical version of autonomism seems rather implausible.On the other hand, interactionists maintain that “the presence of one kind of value”, be it moral or aesthetic, “affects the degree of the other”. Interaction between these different kinds of value can be conceived of in two ways: one may think that the “ethical merits and defects in a work affect the degree of aesthetic value possessed by the work”, or one may assume that the aesthetic value of a work bears on its ethical value. Schiller’s position is not easy to assess. On the one hand, he makes room for a relation between aesthetics and ethics, while on the other he clearly claims that art should be autonomous, that it should be an end in itself and that moral evaluation and aesthetic evaluation are radically different. The aim of the paper is to try to clarify how, according to Schiller, the moral value and the aesthetic value of drama may relate to each other – if they do relate. I hope to provide a clearer picture of his position by considering his reflections on tragedy against the background of the debate between autonomists and interactionists. The paper is structured as follows. I begin with broad observations on Schiller’s conception of the aim of art in general and of tragic art in particular (Sec. 1 and 2). I then hint at Schiller’s argument for the autonomy of art and at the role of imagination in the experience of tragic art; this will help us to further specify how the distinctive aesthetic response to tragic art might engage with moral content (Sec. 3). From this basis, I move to a more extensive examination of how, in Schiller’s conception, moral value may be related to aesthetic value (Sec. 4 and 5). In the conclusion of the paper (Sec. 6), I tentatively suggest that Schiller is a moderate autonomist.