Schiller and Hesse

This passage from On the Aesthetic Education of Man reminds me of Herman Hesse's powerful interpretation of Siddhartha's passage to enlightenment through the world of Man.

One of the chief reasons why our physical sciences make such slow progress is obviously the widespread and almost insurmountable tendency towards teleological judgements, in which, as soon as they are used constitutively, the determining faculty is substituted for the receptive. Nature may touch our organs as vigorously and variously as you please -- all her diversity is lost upon us, because we are looking for nothing in her but what we have put there, because we do not allow her to come forward to meet us, from without, but rather strive with impatiently anticipating reason to go out from within ourselves to meet her. And if in the course of centuries one man comes along who approaches her with calm, pure and open senses, and therefore encounters a number of phenomena which we by our anticipation have overlooked, we are mightily astonished that so many eyes in such bright daylight should not have noticed anything. This premature striving for harmony before we have gathered together the separate sounds of which it is to consist, this violent usurpation of the intellectual faculty in a field where its authority is only conditional, is the cause of the sterility of so many thinkers for the greatest benefit of science, and it is hard to say whether sense-faculty which admits of no form, or reason which abides no content, has done the greater harm to the extension of our knowledge.

Not to say Schiller is leading us to the conclusion that these problems can be resolved through the adherence to and practice of transcendental philosophy. On the contrary, he states earlier that the nature of such views contradicts the harmony and unity of opposing forces that is the hallmark of aesthetic philosophy, that is, the subjugation of the natural impulse by the purely intellectual impulse. This antagonism breeds division and discord.