Community and the individual body: Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Hoelderlin

This dissertation traces the development of a distinctive fictional paradigm of community in the wake of Kant's Third Critique. Four works written or published in Germany in the last decade of the eighteenth century are considered: Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft, Friedrich Schiller's Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Friedrich Holderlin's Empedokles.; Common to all of these works is a commitment to balancing the claims of the individual against those of the collective. Kant's aesthetic judgment offers a fundamental structure which organizes this concern. Aesthetic judgment, or communal sense, establishes in effect an equiprimordial relation between part and whole. Particular sensations and experiences are fundamental and independent but always already bound within some intersubjective structure. Neither part nor whole serves as an absolute point of origin.; Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin try to render this ideal of an interdependent relation and uncollapsible tension between part and whole into, respectively, historical, novelistic and dramatic accounts. Yet all three, in different measure and with different strateges, simultaneously strive to rebalance this relation to give greater weight to the human body than Kant grants. Sympathy with other human bodies, an issue dodged somewhat awkwardly in the Third Critique, thus becomes key to their understandings of communal solidarity.; In his Aesthetic Letters, Schiller attempts to hold onto the synthetic and unifying force of beauty while stretching and narrativizing Kant's account to lend greater emphasis to sensation. As a result, a split constantly opens up in Schiller's treatise between the empirical and formal dimensions of beauty. These unintended aporias in Schiller's work are an important point of departure for Goethe and Holderlin. Both authors strive to uphold the tension between community and particular empirical moments by stressing disjunction and negativity. In both Lehrjahre and Empedokles, the gap between an embodied protagonist and a collective ideal opens up an interpretive space. These works thus reconfigure the tension between individual and community as an indeterminate hermeneutic relationship.; A single decade brings, then, great expansion and revision of this powerful paradigm of community.