Abstract

The writing Detached Reflections on Different Questions of Aesthetics [Zerstreute Betrachtungen über verschiedene ästhetische Gegenstände] (1793) forms part of the fourth and final volume of the journal Neue Thalia published by Friedrich Schiller and printed just before Friedrich Hölderlin’s famous Hyperion fragment. The detached quality of these writings is an admission and acceptance of an inability to achieve mastery over the material. Schiller does not appear to find this unpleasant, but instead regards it as appropriate for the matter in hand. After all, sublimity is particularly concerned with the failure of the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of the sublime, starting with Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and given further impetus by Immanuel Kant.