„Das Lob der Frauen“. Hegel und das ästhetische Ideal Schillers

In the Introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel observes that Schiller praises women because he believes that they embody the aesthetic ideal of a unification of nature and spirit, by fully expressing the “grace” and the “dignity” which characterizes a “beautiful soul”. This essay, starting from this Hegelian statement, analyses, firstly, in which way it is possible to establish an analogy between the female virtue and the beautiful soul in Schiller’s writings. Secondly, it lingers on the comparison between the Schillerian doctrine of the beautiful soul and the Hegelian one, to defend the thesis that the latter does not represent a criticism of Schiller but of the model of moral beauty typical of philosophies that, like those of Jacobi, absolutize subjectivity.