Cutie Stories

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller, a famed dramatist, poet, and essayist, was born in Marbach, a small town in southwest Germany, to Elisabeth Kodweiss and Johann Kaspar Schiller, a lieutenant in the army of the Duke of Württemberg. Though tutored in Latin at an early age by his local pastor to prepare him for theological studies, Schiller was mandated by the duke to attend the duke’s new military academy, Karlsschule.

Schiller later related how his rebellion against the suffocating rigidity and isolation of Karlsschule paradoxically fostered his love of poetry. He remained at the school for eight years, focusing first on law, then on medicine. After his second medical dissertation, “On the Connection of the Animal Nature of Man with his Spiritual Nature,”was accepted, he became a regimental physician in Stuttgart.

There, he completed his first drama, The Robbers, the staging of which a year later (1782) in Mannheim brought him immediate acclaim and confirmation of his literary gifts.When the duke forbade him to write anything but medical treatises, Schiller fled Württemberg. For most of the rest of his life he would suffer considerable financial hardship and extremely poor health.

Friedrich von Schlegel

Friedrich von Schlegel, a critic and philosopher, whose writings spearheaded early German Romanticism, started out as a devotee of William Shakespeare poetry. Born to an illustrious literary family in Hanover and classically trained, Schlegel was an unhappy and unfocused student of law at Göttingen and Leipzig from 1790 to 1793, all the while piling up enormous gambling debts.

Fleeing creditors and abandoning his legal studies, he moved in 1794 to Dresden where, inspired by Caroline Böhmer, his future sister-in-law, he launched his literary career with essays extolling ancient mythology poetry’s superiority to modern poetry. In “On the Study of Greek Poetry”, he echoes Johann Joachim Winckelmann by attributing the greater unity, objectivity, and naturalness of ancient works to the Greeks’ single-minded pursuit of idealized beauty.

Philosophy, Criticism, and the Romantic Turn

Schlegel eventually wrote the History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans, but by the time the only volume was published in 1798, his view of modern poetry had changed. Already in his 1795 essay his admiration for William Shakespeare seems to belie his insistence on Sophocles’ superiority.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was nineteenthcentury Protestantism’s great systematic theologian. It was he who marked the points of the compass for much of subsequent theology and philosophy of religion.

Like St. Augustine, Schleiermacher desired to know God and the soul, and his place in the history of philosophy is due largely to the fact that he was able to state in modern language and concepts the great Augustinian conviction that religious faith is native to all human experience. Therefore, the particular system of communication of God and the knowledge of the soul are two orders of knowledge that must be distinguished but cannot be separated.

Life

Schleiermacher was first and foremost a preacher and theologian, a church statesman, and an educator. He carried out his work as a philosopher in the context of the great idealist systems of Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and G.W. F. Hegel, but instead of attempting to imitate these men he applied himself to the critical analysis of religion, both in its personal and societal manifestations, without reducing such experience to some form of philosophic intuition.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, essayist, and novelist, was born at Geneva. His mother having died a few days after his birth, he was brought up by an aunt and an erratic father who taught him to read through the medium of sentimental novels and Plutarch’s Lives. He had little formal education.

After staying for about two years with a country minister at Bossey, he returned to Geneva and lived with an uncle. He was then apprenticed in turn to a notary and an engraver, the latter of whom treated him so brutally that in 1728 he left Geneva to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was protected and befriended by Mme. de Warens, a convert to Roman Catholicism, who had left her native canton of Vaud to live at Annecy in Savoy, with financial support from the king of Sardinia and the ecclesiastical authorities. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s subsequent attachment to her was a decisive factor in his conversion to Roman Catholicism as well as in his emotional development.

Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce, the American idealist philosopher, was born in Grass Valley, California. He received his AB degree from the University of California in 1875 and his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1878. In the intervening years he studied in Germany at Leipzig and Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of Hermann Lotze. Royce returned to the University of California in 1878 as an instructor of English.

Four years later, with the help of William James and George Herbert Palmer of the Harvard department of philosophy, he was invited to University of California, where he taught for two years as a replacement for men on leave; in 1885 he received a regular appointment as assistant professor.

Until his death Royce was one of the mainstays of the philosophy department in its socalled golden period. During that time he carried on his friendly debate with William James about the merits and demerits of absolute idealism, supervised the doctoral work of George Santayana, and delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of California in Scotland. Royce was a prolific writer and was much in demand as a public speaker.

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, the French statesman and professor of philosophy, was born at Sompuis, a village in what is now the department of the Marne. Théodore Jouffroy represented this department in the Chamber of Deputies from 1815 to 1839, usually in the opposition.

He is best known as the leader of the Doctrinaires, a group whose members derived their political views from what they believed to be immutable and self-evident principles. These principles led to a compromise between absolute and constitutional monarchy, and though the principles were supported by Louis XVIII, they were rejected by his brother and successor, Charles X.

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard had little, if any, philosophical training. Nevertheless, from 1811 to 1814 he was professor of philosophy and dean at the Sorbonne. Théodore Jouffroy lectured first on Thomas Reid and later on his own views. Just as his political views were a compromise, so in philosophy he sought a compromise between the left wing of sensationalism and the right wing of authoritarian traditionalism.

Vasilii Vasil’evich Rozanov

Vasilii Vasil’evich Rozanov, the Russian critic and philosopher, was born in Vetluga, Russia, and attended secondary schools in Simbirsk and Novgorod before entering Moscow University as a student in the faculty of history and philology.

After his graduation from the university in 1881, he taught history and geography in a succession of secondary schools in provincial towns and began the writing on religious and philosophical themes that was to gain him a reputation as a brilliant if erratic critic of contemporary culture, both secular and religious. In 1893 a minor government post in St. Petersburg brought him to the center of Russian literary life, and in 1899 he retired to devote full time to writing.

He published numerous books and contributed many articles to the Russian reviews of the day, particularly the reactionary Novoe vremia (New times). During the Russian Revolution he took refuge with the religious philosopher Father Pavel Florenskii in Sergiev Posad, near Moscow, where Vasilii Vasil’evich Rozanov died.