REASON AND DESIRE: THE PROBLEM OF EMANCIPATION IN SCHILLER, HERDER AND NOVALIS

Purpose of this paper is to present how Schiller, Herder and Novalis address the question of emancipation. I will start setting out the specifically modern problems, which those thinkers confronted, characterized by the mechanistic metaphysics, the positive religion and the socio-political fragmentation; secondly, I will analyze the Kantian perspective on practical reason in its emancipating dimension, that is, as a critical negation of the conditioned nature of empirical world; finally, I will outline the main ideas of a philosophy of emancipation in the theoretical work of Schiller, Herder and Novalis.