Friedrich Schiller – Don Carlos

• Theme: Political liberty, individual conscience, and the tragic limits of desire and reform.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

At the heart of Don Carlos is a threefold conflict: between private desire and public duty, between ethical subjectivity and state discipline, and between liberty and the structures of governance. The characters—Carlos, the Marquis of Posa, and King Philip II—each serve as an ethical mirror, dramatizing different modes of subjectivation in a regime shaped by reason of state, religious orthodoxy, and sovereign absolutism.

From a Foucauldian standpoint, Don Carlos becomes a battlefield of technologies of the self under the panoptic shadow of monarchical power. In particular, the Marquis of Posa emerges as a dramatic vessel for Enlightenment parrhesia—the fearless speech that dares to challenge the sovereign. When Posa confronts King Philip, pleading not for Carlos’ release but for freedom of thought and conscience for all of Flanders, he embodies Foucault’s conception of the parrhesiast, who risks their life in order to speak the ethical truth.

Yet this parrhesia is not sustainable. The very truth Posa delivers leads to his death, and Carlos’ eventual collapse. Here Schiller anticipates what Foucault would describe as the tragic paradox of Enlightenment ethics: that the subject who seeks liberation through truth-telling is also formed within the very power structures they seek to dismantle. Posa’s virtue becomes complicit in the machinery of state power even as he resists it.

Don Carlos, torn between romantic desire and filial obedience, enacts Foucault’s idea of the aesthetic care of the self—but it is fractured. His passion for Elisabeth (his stepmother) is never mere erotic longing; it is the desire for an impossible ethical purity, for a realm in which love and justice could coexist. Foucault saw ancient ethics not as a moral code, but a self-fashioning of life as art. Carlos’ tragedy is that he cannot reconcile his inner freedom with his political obligations.

Meanwhile, King Philip represents a sovereign authority that has moved from absolute power into surveillance: a sovereign who seeks confession, who spies, who wants not just obedience but souls. This anticipates Foucault’s later critique of governmentality—the evolution from monarchic to disciplinary power. The Inquisition, ever-present, symbolizes the fusion of power, knowledge, and salvation, producing docile bodies and obedient minds under the guise of divine order.

Thus, Don Carlos dramatizes the Enlightenment as both promise and peril: liberty becomes ethical risk, and truth becomes a fatal wound.