Schiller and Austen, Aesthetic Education and Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published in 1811. It is concerned with two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. The former is characterised primarily by sense (rationality, reservation, duty to others) and the latter primarily by sensibility (emotion, expressivity, romantic inclinations). In splitting two components of human nature across different characters, Austen’s novel examines the vitality of a holistic view of the human person – its nature, ethical disposition, and teleology. It is not a matter of prioritising rationality over emotional expressivity (or vice versa), but of integrating these two aspects of human nature into a unified whole. The novel explores these existential-ontological ideas through an aesthetically realised interest in ethical matters of social mores, manners, and behaviour.

German philosopher, poet, playwright, and prose writer Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man was published in 1795 – a wide ranging work of philosophical literature that, amongst other things, articulates Schiller’s system or theory of drives. For Schiller, the human self is impelled toward an imperative of harmony, in that each person “externalize all that is within him and give form to all that is outside him.” The fulfillment of this imperative is motivated by two drives – the form drive and the sense drive, which are brought into unity by a third drive, the play drive.

This paper teases apart the stunning overlap in concerns related to the nature of the human self that is present in both Austen’s novel and Schiller’s theory. I consider, through Schiller’s notion of aesthetic education, the way in which, and the importance of, both authors’ exploring the ethical responsibilities of individuals and the metaphysical nature of human existence in strictly aesthetic terms.

About the speaker

Matthew Cipa is lecturer in the School of Communication at the Queensland University of Technology and affiliate academic in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. His monograph, Is Harpo Free? And Other Essays of the Metaphysical Screen is forthcoming with SUNY Press.