The Beautiful Soul in Schiller and Hegel

This dissertation uses Friedrich Schiller’s description of the “beautiful soul” to develop and defend an account of moral beauty, according to which a person who is morally good is for that reason beautiful. The "beautiful soul" as a moral exemplar was popular at the turn of the 19th century, but has since fallen out of philosophical favor, in part due to a critique leveled by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit. While some have assumed that Schiller's account of the beautiful soul succumbs to Hegel's critique, I argue that, in fact, Schiller's account of moral beauty has more in common with Hegel's own conception of ethical life than with the version of the beautiful soul popularized by the German Romantics. Because Schiller's philosophical work is chronically underrepresented in English-language scholarship, I first reconstruct a full account of Schiller's beautiful soul: an ethically good person's inclinations are in accordance with reason, which makes her actions appear free; since beauty is the appearance of freedom, the actions of an ethically good person will appear beautiful. I then defend this account against the Hegelian critique by expanding on Schiller's conception of freedom and the role of moral beauty in the functioning of an ethical community. The account of the beautiful soul I develop on Schiller's behalf is equipped to respond to current worries about the viability of moral beauty in general. Moreover, recent work in aesthetics has tended to focus on the moral status of art works. By approaching this issue from the other direction, and addressing the aesthetic status of moral value, my historical project also enriches current conceptions of moral agency and value.