The beautiful soul and the autocratic agent: Schiller's and Kant's 'children of the house'

Abstract

In his extended essay "On Grace and Dignity," Friedrich Schiller sets out an important challenge to Kant when he argues that sensibility must play a constitutive role in the ethical life. This paper argues that there is much we can learn from Schiller's "corrective" to Kant's moral theory and Kant's reply to this critique, for what is at stake in their debate are rival conceptions of the proper state of moral health for us as finite rational beings and competing political notions concerning the ideal form of self-governance that we ought to strive to attain.