The unity of the moral man: elements for a Weil-schiller relationship

Abstract

If it is true that each serious philosophical effort is built on the history of philosophy, if the reference to philosophical authors of the past and present is a conditio sine qua non for every rigorous conceptual analysis and if, for these reasons, nothing can be called utterly novel in philosophy, then it is not irrelevant to try to make explicit the references that determined the emergence of one’s philosophical thought. This paper aims to present philological and philosophical reasons in support of this hypothesis that one of the main (hidden) source of Eric Weil’s conception of moral life in his Philosophie morale is constituted by the ethical reflection of Friedrich Schiller (in specific the essay Über Anmut und Würde). From a first and immediate proximity of content, the analytical path leads to a more significant distance between the two authors’ methodologies; finally, the complexity of the Weil-Schiller quæstio is clarified in the light of the common reference to the Kantian conception of radical evil.