ABSTRACT

In flat contradiction of one of the intellectual shibboleths of the modern age — namely, the proposition that discursive language is the primary and always central context of meaning — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe seeks to get beyond discourse as a symbolic form in order to encounter living reality. Symbolism proper for Goethe and Friedrich Schiller is, then, aesthetic in nature. John Michael Krois has argued that for Ernst Cassirer, as he began to leave behind 'the ambivalence of his earlier writing', the symbolic pregnance of expressive symbolism remained the foundational idea of his whole theory. The defining characteristic of aesthetic experience, on the Weimar Classical theory, is the experience of the apparent autonomy of the object in view. The timely relevance of the cultural theory of Weimar Classicism, properly understood, may be demonstrated by reference to the influential discussion of an 'opposition between Schiller's and Jacques Derrida's concepts of play'.