 The title of Schiller’s essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” [“Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung”] (1795–6), articulates another distinction Schiller uses to explore and define the modern human condition. To ground the essay’s fundamental dichotomy, Schiller again takes a fact of human experience and then asks what else must be true of humans in order for this fact to be possible. This time his subject is the pleasure humans take in nature. What explains our “many fondnesses for flowers and animals, for simple gardens, for walks, for the land”? (NA XX, 413/E 179). Schiller agrees with Kant that our pleasure cannot be only a response to their beauty since our delight in a birdsong is destroyed if we discover that it was produced by human imitation. This reaction suggests, Schiller thinks, that our enjoyment of nature is not aesthetic but moral. It is not the flower or animal itself that gives us pleasure but