Astrazione e violenza. La non-critica di Schiller alla morale kantiana

This essay aims to redress current views about Schiller’s criticism of Kantian ethics. In order to do so, it analyses Schiller’s arguments through the lenses of two ideas which are usually exposed to misinterpretations, namely “abstraction” and “violence”. Rather than signalling a basic opposition, these two ideas turn out to be the best key to understanding Schiller’s core agreement with Kant as far as the role of natural feelings in moral life is concerned. A moral agent must abstract from human drives and cannot but exert violence back on them. Nor can even taste change any of this, for taste itself ultimately rests on the violence of civility.