Fiction and Illusion

The lost unity of idea and reality and the resulting tension between found reality and fictitious ideal, which Schiller analyzed as a common determination of the “modes of sensation” satire, elegy, and idyll, and which, as I have tried to show, also underlies the utopian novel and its complementary forms, is, as a negation of a unity of idea and reality ‘originally’ given and only newly given to reason, itself subject to the same conditions as the ‘bad’ reality interpreted by the modes of sensation mentioned above. That is, as a negative determination, it is only one side of the regulatively demanded synthesis. While the idyll and its ultimately regressive harmonization – because it evokes ‘simple forms’ of the past – can be interpreted as a poetic form of reconciled reality, utopia, by virtue of its self-definition as an agent of reality, must undertake harmonization at the historically possible level of actualization: It must present an intellectually insightful, realizable model of reconciled reality.