Abstract

The 1790’s were a time of upheaval, and every thinker in Europe was moved by the events of France, by the measure of fear or of promise they offered. In Germany the reaction to the political tumult was intense; the seeds of French radicalism found a ground nurtured by idealistic moral ideology, on the one hand, and actual political backwardness on the other. The cultural result of the completed Kantian philosophy was - as Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education testify - a preoccupation with the notion of freedom and its paradoxical invisibility. If one could not touch upon freedom to violate it, neither could one grasp it in order to nurture, establish or institutionalize it. This proved a quandary not for theoretical or philosophic reason alone. History had taken up the Kantian problematic, and as the progress of the Revolution through ‘the Terror’ indicated, made its solution most urgent.