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Abstract
The central concern of this paper is to explore the efforts of Schiller's post-Kantian idealism and Marcuse's critical theory to develop a new conception of free human experience. That conception is built on the notion of play. Play is said to combine the human capacities for physical pleasure and reason, capacities which the modern world has dualized. Analysis of their respective accounts of play reveals its ambivalent form in the work of both philosophers. Play supports the ideal of ‘freedom from necessity’, understood as a release from all external constraint. But it also appears to serve as a model for ‘freedom as a higher necessity’. In the case of Schiller, the ambivalence encompasses idle play and an obligation to make ourselves worthy of freedom. For Marcuse, play represents a kind of libidinal idleness while also underpinning a non-alienated conception of labour.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Owen Hulatt, Fabian Freyenhagen, an anonymous reader and all participants at a University of Notre Dame colloquium in March 2014 for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
2See O'Connor, ‘Idleness, Usefulness and Self-Constitution’ for a discussion focused on the Kantian tradition of philosophical conflicts between social usefulness, self-constitution and idleness.
3See Miller, Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom, 51–54, for an account of Schiller's worries, throughout his philosophical writings, about the ‘despotic’ nature of moral law.
4On this point I take a different view from that of Deligiori who maintains that ‘for Kant, and indeed for Schiller, morality is not just about managing to conduct oneself in certain ways that are considered to be morally agreeable. Rather the reasons that shape the behaviour matter’ (Deligiorgi, ‘The Proper Telos of Life’, 498). Schiller, it seems to me, places the emphasis on agreeableness, even if he does not explicitly exclude the business of providing reasons.
5See Lavin, ‘Practical Reason and the Possibility of Error’, 446–449, for a discussion of the significance to Kant of the notion of a ‘liberty of indifference’.
6Schaper notes it with regard to the very idea of aesthetic education: ‘it is not altogether clear when Schiller speaks of “aesthetic education” whether it is education to the aesthetic, understood as the ideal state for man to attain, or through which ordinary living can be enhanced’ (Schaper, ‘Towards the Aesthetic’, 156).
7In this context ‘Gleichgültigkeit’ does not refer to the technical notion of indifference in the choice of the moral law, but rather to indifference to the pleasurable course of experience.
8‘Sowohl der materielle Zwang der Naturgesetze, als der geistige Zwang der Sittengesetze verlor sich in ihrem höhern Begriff von Notwendigkeit … ’
9Savile acknowledges (208n) that this account of Schiller may seem to be ‘fanciful’, but corroborates it with reference to claims found elsewhere in Schiller's writings.
10Freud famously writes: ‘Under the influence of the ego's instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle’ (Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 10).
11The phrase ‘neurotic necessity’ is quoted by Marcuse from C. B. Chisholm's The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress.
12We should note that Freud explains the repressions that become evident in neurosis as the outcome of a two-tiered process: ‘primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious. With this, a fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it … The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually an after-pressure’ (Freud, ‘Repression’, 148). The second stage in which ‘mental derivatives’ emerge is not incorporated into Marcuse's theory.
13On this point, Marcuse might be seen to undermine Schaper's claim that anyone ‘who looks for a deliberate continuation of the thought of the Critique of Judgment [in Schiller's text] … looks in vain’ (Schaper, ‘Towards the Aesthetic’, 157). Schaper seems to be on safer ground in heeding Schiller's own statement on the absence of any systematic connection between his theory and Kant's.
14The last line is a quote from Barbara Lantos.
15Marcuse later notes that this conception has its origins in Marx, and that Marx eventually dropped the idea. It is a pity that Marcuse does not explore Marx's change of mind. Marx's conception of ‘the relation between freedom and necessity’ in the Grundrisse, Marcuse writes,
envisages conditions of full automation, where the immediate producer is indeed ‘dissociated’ from the material process of production and becomes a free ‘Subject’ in the sense that be can play with, experiment with the technical material, with the possibilities of the machine and of the things produced and transformed by the machines.