On the Aesthetic Education of Man

by Friedrich Schiller, Keith Tribe (Translator), Alexander Schmidt (Introduction)

'Man defines himself by his deeds - and what kind of image of man do we see in the mirror of our present times?'

The poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller was also a profound philosopher, who described his work On the Aesthetic Education of Man as 'the best thing that I have done in my life'. This impassioned treatise analyses politics, revolution and human nature to define the relationship between beauty, art and morality. Expressed as a series of letters to a patron, it argues that only an aesthetic education - rather than government reform, religion or moral teachings - can achieve a truly free society, and must be placed at the heart of human experience. One of the most important works of German philosophy, its arguments remain as arresting and inspiring as when they were first written.

Translated by Keith Tribe with an introduction and notes by Alexander Schmidt

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, German Literature, Classics, Education, 18th Century

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1794

About the author

People best know long didactic poems and historical plays, such as Don Carlos (1787) and William Tell (1804), of leading romanticist German poet, dramatist, and historian Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.

This philosopher and dramatist struck up a productive if complicated friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe during the last eighteen years of his life and encouraged Goethe to finish works that he left merely as sketches; they greatly discussed issues concerning aesthetics and thus gave way to a period, now referred to as classicism of Weimar. They also worked together on Die Xenien ( The Xenies ), a collection of short but harsh satires that verbally attacked perceived enemies of their aesthetic agenda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedri...

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy addressing beauty, taste, art and the sublime. After studying what philosophers have to say on this topic, it is refreshing to read the philosophical reflections on aesthetics by Friedrich Schiller (1769-1805), a man who was not only a first-rate thinker but a great poet and playwright. And Schiller tells us he is drawing his ideas from his life rather than from books and is pleading the cause of beauty before his very own heart that perceives beauty and exercises beauty's power.

Writing at the end of the 18th century, Schiller reflects on the bitter disappointment of the aftermath of the French Revolution where an entire society degenerated into violence. What can be done? As a true romantic, he sees beauty and art coming to the rescue.

Schiller writes how idealized human nature and character development is a harmonizing and balancing of polarities - on one side we have the rational, that is, contemplative thought, intelligence and moral constraint and on the other side we have the sensual, feeling, physical reality. Lacking this balance, harmony and character, Schiller perceives widespread disaster for both lower and higher social classes, that is, people of the lower classes living crude, coarse, lawless, brutal lives and people of the higher, civilized classes are even more repugnant, living lethargic, slothful, passive lives. Not a pretty picture, to say the least.

We might think scientists or hard working business people might stand a better chance at achieving balance, harmony and character. Sorry; the news is not good here either. Schiller writes, "But the predominance of the analytical faculty must necessarily deprive the fancy of its strength and its fire, and a restricted sphere of objects must diminish its wealth. Hence the abstract thinker very often has a cold heart, since he analyzes the impressions which really affect the soul only as a whole; the man of business has very often a narrow heart, because imagination, confined within the monotonous circle of his profession, cannot expand to unfamiliar modes of representation."

So, what must be done to restore a population's needed balance, harmony and character? Again, for Schiller, beauty and art to the rescue. One key idea in making beauty and art a central component of people's lives is what he terms `the play drive'. Schiller writes: "Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly man when he is playing" By play, Schiller doesn't mean frivolous games, like a mindless game of cards; rather, play for Schiller is about a spontaneous and creative interaction with the world.

To flesh out Schiller's meaning of play, let's look at a couple of examples. In the morning you consult your auto manual to fix a problem with the engine and then in the afternoon you examine a legal document to prepare to do battle in court. Since in both cases you are reading for a specific practical purpose or goal, according to Schiller, you are not at play. In the evening you read Shakespeare. You enjoy the beauty of the language and gain penetrating insights into human nature. Since your reading is not bound to any practical aim, you are free to let your imagination take flight and explore all the creative dimensions of the literary work. According to Schiller, you are "at play" and by such playing in the fields of art and beauty, you are free.

And where does such play and spontaneous creativity ultimately lead? Schiller's philosophy is not art-for-art's sake, but art for the sake of morality and freedom and truth. If Schiller could wave a magic wand, everybody in society would receive an education in beauty by way of art, literature and music. And such education would ultimately nurture a population of men and women with highly developed aesthetic and moral sensibilities who could experience the full breathe and depth of what it means to be alive. Or, to put it another way, with a restored balance, harmony and character, people would no longer be slaves to the little world of their gut or the restricted world of their head, but would open their hearts and directly experience the fullness of life. And experiencing the fullness of life, for Schiller, is true freedom.

How realistic is Schiller's educational program as a way of transforming society? Perhaps being realistic is not exactly the issue. After all, Frederick Schiller was an idealist. He desired to see a society of men and women appreciating art and beauty and having their aesthetic appreciation color everyday behavior, so much so that their dealings and activity in the world would serve as a model of noble, moral conduct for all ages. Not a bad vision.

[Aurelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not the poetic celebration of Art one expects from the title, but rather a dense and quit theoretical essay in politics and ethics with heavy references of Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Rousseau’s human nature and social contract ideas. It is important to have been introduced to these authors in order to understand the questions Schiller is trying to answer. This is also a text which is a reflection of the historical epoch in which it was written, with all the intellectual turbulence and the political upheaval the western world was going through. At the height of the age of Enlightenment, old systems of government, old paradigms and old metaphysics were all toppled down and new ideas of Right, Freedom and Progress emerged, yet the reality of the leading European nations taking this new path was one of total chaos, violence and anarchy. Schiller, with a firm belief in Enlightenment ideals, tries to explain this failure, to defend what was achieved due to rational thinking and point at which step the problem occurred and find a way to cure it, and it is in Art, where he finds the solution.


In order to have a diagnosis of the situation in Europe of the XVIII century, Schiller uses the new paradigms which were newly introduced by his time. Mainly ideas about the transition of Man from the state of Nature and the state of Reason. Man in the state of Nature is a slave to necessity and causality of the senses, basic needs hunt him and savage impulses are repressed only by an all-powerful state, while the state of Reason is one of choice, of free subordination to the laws of reason in the Kantian sense. Both states do not fully represent Man. If the state of Nature is one where Man is tormented by an endless stream of sensory stimuli, with no meaning or structure, the state of Reason is one where he restlessly seek unity, cause, reduces all the diversity of Nature to a system, impoverishing it. These two impulses tear apart Man and prevent him from getting the bigger picture, the totality of what he is.


In parallel with the dualism of Nature and Reason, Schiller introduces other dualism which are logical consequences of the first one. On the political dimension, the state is an abstract construction which aims at unity and uniformity, in contrast to the individual who represents diversity and needs freedom. On the metaphysical level, we find what Schiller calls the Person, by which he means the unchangeable substratum of man which remains the same independently of time and situation, in opposition to what he call the Condition, which are the variety of responses man exhibits in every moment. The intellectual part of man is always looking to get out of Time, to exist in the realm of the Infinite, while the natural part is always finite and dependent on Time in an endless cycle of change. Finally, on the social level, we have the lower classes, who live in perpetual servitude to sensory needs and impulses unable to experience and respond to the laws of the intellect, in opposition to the upper classes, who although free from natural necessity and sufficiently versed in the working of the intellect are stuck in a state of moral lethargy and besieged by their own systems and ideals which hardly reach reality.


The dualism in the working of human faculties is not considered a fault by Schiller. It is a necessary division through which every faculty can reach its ultimate perfection. It is true that the dualism can blind an individual, but it is extremely beneficial to the species. Some individuals are carried away by the intellectual impulse into making ideals, while others are swept away by their senses and dependence on matter. To overcome these dualism and achieve a harmonious Totality which is the true manifestation of Man, Schiller introduces what he calls the playful impulse. Its role is to reconcile between the material impulse and the intellectual one, giving form to matter, and thus keeping an equal distance from the intellect and its laws, and Nature and its necessity, making it the true realm of human freedom.


The playful impulse is what pushes man to experience and seek beauty. Its appearance in the History of humanity marks a shifting from the state of dependence on Nature, on utility, on profit. The desire to ornament is the first step of Man outside of the realm of necessity towards that of reason and morals, it is his first experience of freedom, which combines both the elements from his material impulse and intellectual one. For Schiller, the artist lives in his age, he is the child of his historical epoch and social parameters, but it does not stop him from travelling across time to bring his material from another era, in order to respond to the needs of his fellow citizens. He exists in and outside of his time, he gives form, an intellectual shape to a matter, a tangible reality.


Beauty and Art can thus combine between the two fundamental faculties of man and create a balance between their opposite forces. To those who are overwhelmed by their senses Schiller offers what he calls an energizing beauty, which will help them give form to the formless mass of images with which their perception constantly bombards them with, and thus restore order to their souls. For those who went higher into their ivory tower of intellectual pursuit, he offers liquefying beauty, which will pull them back to matter and experience, and save them from the chimerical creations of their own minds. The cultivation of taste and the exposure to culture are the middle way between two excesses that Schiller identifies as the source of the calamities of his age.

[Chris Via]

Having only read this once, I’ll have to reread it before saying anything conclusive in terms of whether I think it succeeds in its thesis or not. I have the main sweep of his ideas, but I don’t have a confident grasp on the articulation.
What we do know is that this is a fragment of what was supposed to be a much larger project, so the “ending” is inevitably ambiguous. It is also a work of dialectical philosophy specifically on the branch concerned with aesthetics—taste and beauty.
Schiller defines two main impulses in man: physical and formal. Physical: life, existence, temporal, etc. Formal: form, absolute, etc. There is sensual man and rational man. There is man driven by the appetite for sensuous pleasure and man driven by intellectual pleasure. But either direction leads from a phantom promise of liberty to violence. Excess.
Schiller’s concern, exacerbated by the violence of the French Revolution and the suffocation of imagination at the hands of scientific progress, is to find a way to set individual man free in such a way as to achieve civil liberty in society.
A lofty task for sure.
Three philosophical predecessors come into play: Aristotle and his Golden Mean; Descartes and his mind-body dualism; and Kant and his transcendental idealism.
Thus the concept of a third impulse in man, one that can be cultivated through an aesthetic education (i.e. the fine arts)—the “playful” impulse.
The playful impulse is the moderation between physical and formal, between sensuous and intellectual, between imaginative and rational. At times this reminded me of points in Freud’s essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” Through conditioning of the aesthetic education, man can achieve the infinite within the finite, he can absorb the world instead of becoming lost in the vastness of the world.
Schiller does not give any practical direction in the letters that we have, and this may be a sticking point for some, even if materialists humor his dualism and empiricists humor his idealism.
Definitely want to read this one again soon to fill in the gaps. There were many times when I felt the emergence of a complex and novel idea but I failed to grasp it in such a way that I could explain it in my own terms.

[Hagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just inscribe this into my heart. A catechism.

[Xander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting collection of letters by Friedrich Schiller on the function of art in educating humanity. He wrote these letters to a Danish Prince, Von Augustenburg, in which he tried to set out his theories on Beauty and art.

According to Schiller, humanity needs art and beauty to raise itself from the state of natural, physical necessity to a higher place in which moral and logical laws guide its individual behaviour as well as its collective life. For most human beings this leap is impossible, hence the use of art to put us into an esthetic state in which we learn to reflect on the world and to see a world outside ourselves.

In other words: beauty is able to bridge the gap between physical perception and moral-logical reasoning, and offer a fertile middle ground from which human beings can jump to the eternal laws of morality and logic. These laws, supposedly, will result in a state of freedom both for the individual and society as a whole, but cannot be forced 'top-down' from their own position. One has to reach this ground 'bottom-up' from the foundation of individual freedom. Art is instrumental in educating the people to wrestle their freedom from their physical necessities and to use it as a force for good.

In outlining his theories and his ideas for a future ideal state, Schiller draws heavily from the epistemological, moral and esthetic theories of Immanuel Kant. So without any prior knowledge of Kant's main theories, reading this collection of letters is sheer impossible. Also, by using Kant, Schiller forces modern day readers to adapt to the archaic philosophical jargon of Kantianism, which can make this book a hurdle as well.

But if one is able to overcome both these challenges, one is in for a very enjoyable ride with lots of pleasurable sights to see and interesting spots to explore. Schiller's letters are dense and rife with interesting ideas and his view on the use of art to enlighten humanity (the letters were written during 1794 - when the French Revolution was still in full swing) is highly original. Definitely a recommendation!

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

If only we could be as free or as mentally beautiful as Schiller envisioned. Best read before you turn 20, at which point the world he railed loudly against takes over.

Schiller is a much overlooked intellectual scholar outside of Germany. Along with Lessing, Goethe, and some lesser influential renaissance men, Schiller embodies Aufklarung humanism like few others. His plays are too preachy and his poems can never be found translated by decent individuals, but in the essays, his optimism is almost transforming.

Also check out his essays "On the Sublime", "On the Tragic", and his lengthy history of the Thirty Years War.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must must must read on the nature of beauty

[Shaghayegh.l3 · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب با زبان الکن و گرفته‌ای می‌خواد بگه که زیبایی انسان رو به تعادل می‌رسونه؛ آدم‌های حسی رو به اندیشیدن هدایت می‌کنه و انسانی که تماماً در محاصره‌ی عقل و فهمه رو به دنیای حسی برمی‌گردونه، و غایتی برای تکامل انسانه. توی هر بخش قدم کوتاهی به جلو برمی‌داره درحالی‌که مسیرش تا آخر راه پیداست و همین کمی آدم رو خسته می‌کنه، اما بخشی که مترجم ابتدای کتاب و تحت عنوان مقدمه آورده، چکیده‌ی کاملی از چیزیه که قراره گفته بشه و به‌نوعی آشنایی با پیچیدگی‌های ذهن شیلر به زبان ساده‌ست و کمک خیلی زیادی به فهم متن می‌کنه. به‌طور کلی اما کتاب سخت‌خوانیه و ترجیح می‌دادم جزو کتاب‌هایی بود که از کتابخونه قرض می‌گرفتم تا اینکه توی قفسه‌ی خودم باشه.

[Mesoscope · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay in 27 letters represents the author's primary philosophical statement, and an entire generation of post-Kantian idealists and early Romantics were heavily influenced by its arguments establishing the cultural, psychological, and, if I may say, soteriological function of art. It is also essential reading for students of Hegel, whose Phenomenology was profoundly influenced by its ideas, method, and terminology.

It is also an awkward and inelegant work, one which shows Schiller to have a poor command of philosophical argumentation. Brilliant insights and calls to action are crowded side-by-side with long, wearying passages that attempt to systematize his thoughts in a way their provisional character cannot support. His ideas are brilliant but underdeveloped, and I think even the most sympathetic modern reader will hesitate to agree that beauty can perform the heavy lifting Schiller requires of it. This is an important aspect of the work that is seldom acknowledged by its critics, and I will return to it later.

In his outstanding study Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams interprets this essay as belonging to a genre of works presenting a general history of the evolution of humanity's moral, cultural, and intellectual capacities, which also includes Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind and Kant's Conjectural Origin of the History of Man.

Abrams argues that the primary task of the age in which Schiller wrote was to recover the core insights of the religious and spiritual legacy of European thought and to naturalize it - to recast its mystical and supernatural elements in psychological and philosophical terms. He sees Schiller's core argument as essentially recapitulating the Christian concept of the felix culpa or fortunate fall in secular form. This refers to the idea that humanity's fall in the Garden should be viewed as a blessing, since it prepared the way for our redemption by Christ, which brought us nearer to God. Similarly, Schiller will argue that our fall from innocence will be ultimately redeemed through a higher synthesis of faculties that he interprets as aesthetic in character.

Schiller sees man's original state of nature in explicitly prelapsarian terms. Like Rousseau, he believes that before culture divides humanity's consciousness into differentiated powers that may be developed in different degrees, we existed in a naive and simple state of unity, living unreflectively as a part of nature and compelled to act according to our instincts and natural impulses. Once we developed our intellectual capacities, we were "expelled from the Garden" as it were, alienated from that pre-reflective simplicity. This alienation caused a kind of psychic wound rooted ultimately in the differentiation of our conscious life into different, disjunct domains, such as nature versus culture. In his analysis of this essay, Carl Jung compares this state of fragmentation to the wound of the grail king Amfortas, which cannot be healed by anything less than divine grace.

Schiller divides human experience into two complementary domains: the timeless domain of form and idea, and the temporal world of the finite, transitory objects of sensual experience. I would call this a form of the more general distinction between synchronic and diachronic modes of experience. Or, in Abram's frame, we might characterize this as a secularization of the ancient divide between the material and the spiritual, between body and soul.

In Schiller's view, the human being is likewise divided into a timeless dimension that he calls our personality, which he regards as ensuring the persistence of our character over time, and a temporal dimension that he calls our condition [Zustand], which includes all changing aspects of the self that belong to the temporal world. He awkwardly attempts to link this underdeveloped division to various ideas developed by Kant and Fichte, such as by arguing that our capacity to generate moral laws comes from the strictly timeless dimension of the personality, in obvious deference to Kant's deontology.

Schiller argues that the two aspects of our experience have a corresponding "drive": the "material drive" [Sachtrieb], by which we sensuously engage with the material world, and the "form drive" [Formtrieb] by which we seek to impose a static, lawful regularity on the dynamic flux of our experience. He sees this as a fundamental disjunction in the human psyche occasioned by the rise of abstract reflection, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between these two modes, thereby alienating the rational person from their sensual side.

In a manner that obviously attracted the attention of young Hegel, Schiller argued that there must be a third faculty by which these two disjunct tendencies can be synthesized. He even uses the term "aufheben," or sublimation, to describe the process by which these dichotomous terms can be simultaneously negated and preserved as the system moves up to a higher logical level. This concept became a core part of Hegel's dialectical terminology.

Later in the work, he attempts to reconstruct the general structure of humanity's historical evolution through various modalities of experience. In this context, he introduces another term that will become central in Hegel’s Phenomenology: the idea of moments [Momente] of cultural evolution. This term emphasizes the ambiguity between chronological and logical priority. For example, when he says that the rational mode is a moment that necessarily precede the aesthetic mode, it is intentionally ambiguous if he means that there is a literal historical sequence that must be followed, or if rationality as such is necessarily prior to the aesthetic mode in a logical sense, and is somehow subsumed by it. This is an interesting and suggestive flattening of ideas, but it does not exactly serve the cause of clarity.

The synthesizing drive that Schiller believes unites the other two is the play drive [Spieltrieb], and in what becomes one of the most famous aspects of this essay, Schiller sets about to rehabilitate our notion of play. He understands the idea in its most expansive sense, as a immediately-gratifying condition of life resulting from excess and overflow, in which individuals are free to create, not mechanically compelled by instinct or by formal law, as we would in the state of nature or in a mode of mere rational reflection, but in a higher mode that encompasses both states of being.

Each of these drives has a corresponding object: the object of the Sachtrieb is life, the object of the Formtrieb is the abstract concept or law, and the object of the Spieltrieb is beauty.

Beauty, in conjunction with the human capacity to play, becomes a synthesizing (i.e., redemptive) power that reunites the shards of our being in a way that elevates our nature. It becomes a force by which we are positively motivated by the attractive power of beauty and move toward it according to our will, not compelled by our appetites or the force of a moral command. In this sense, Schiller binds the idea of beauty to the idea of freedom, and concludes the work by arguing that truly free modes of human interaction are made possible by beauty and play:

"The aesthetic formative impulse establishes insensibly a third joyous empire of play and of appearance, between the formidable realm of powers and the sacred realm of law — an empire wherein man is released from the binds of circumstance, and is freed, both physically and morally, from all that can be called constraint."

On one level, this essay is a social argument for the values of beauty and play, seeking to establish their importance in the grand scheme of human endeavor. In one of its most frequently-cited lines, Schiller tells us that man is always most nearly himself when he plays.

Beauty should generally be understood as a powerful response to a beautiful work of fine art or person. For Schiller, a deep experience of beauty is a profound and transformative experience that would seem to be modeled on the beatific vision. it is a moment when time and space seems to fall away, when ultimate value is directly communicated to the receptive psyche. Drawing from James Joyce, Joseph Campbell called this kind of experience as one of "aesthetic arrest."

In this sense, it's easy to tie Schiller's core argument to Abrams's reading of the work as essentially a secularization of various millennialist and soteriological arguments that are ready-to-hand. Both the individual divided consciousness and the temporal world are redeemed by the aesthetic insight, and art becomes the new vehicle of salvation. This argument was profoundly influential on the Romantics and indeed, on all of nineteenth-century German thought. Schiller was not the first or only person to characterize art as the new sacrament, as the new and primary sphere of ultimate value for humanity, but he was certainly one of the most important and influential.

And, for Hegel and a generation of early Romantics, Schiller's association of all this with a political concept of freedom inspired by Rousseau and by the early promise of the French Revolution would be no less influential. Schiller's personal concern for freedom stems from his experience growing up in the hereditary duchy of Württemberg, where the duke wielded absolute power. He spent long, miserable years in an oppressive military academy and then served as an army doctor and, after the dramatic success of his first play Die Räuber, he was imprisoned by the duke and forbidden to write further plays. He eventually illegally fled the duchy and resettled in Jena, near Weimar.

So it must be remembered that for Schiller, “freedom” was not a romantic notion or a mere political slogan, and one can easily understand why he associated it with both an overflowing abundance of life and with artistic creativity.

When you lay out the argument like this, it is easy to see why it was so influential and important. However, as I alluded to above, this work is terribly written. Goethe himself complained to Eckermann that "The more [the Germans] give themselves up to certain philosophical schools, the worse they write ... in this sense, Schiller's style is at its most magnificent and effective whenever he doesn't philosophize...."

["Je näher [die Deutschen] sich gewissen philosophischen Schulen hingegeben, desto schlechter schreiben sie.... So ist Schillers Styl am prächtigsten und wirksamsten, sobald er nicht philosophiert...."]

As a philosopher, Schiller was strictly an amateur, and he probably would have been well advised to present his ideas as a philosophical essay in the manner of Herder rather than attempting to ape the systematicity of Kant and Fichte. We can accept the general idea of dividing human experience into a temporal and atemporal dimension, for example, without believing that there is really something "eternal" that shapes human personality, or worse, that such a notion is necessary to account for the persistence of the human personality over time. This argument is based on Fichte's Ich-philosophy but receives no explanation or support, and in Schiller's hands it reads like something a sophomore philosophy major would claim. Does the table also possess an eternal personality, since it remains a table?

As a simplified construction, there is nothing wrong with speaking in this way, but again and again, Schiller treats these constructs like they can be rigorously elaborated, and it does nothing more than emphasize their inadequacy. The essay is crowded with many such arguments, passages that I came to call "garbage talk" in my marginal notes, such as the following example from the twenty-fifth letter:

"In our satisfaction at cognitions we distinguish without trouble the passage from activity to passivity, and actually observe that the first is over, when the latter appears. On the contrary, in our delight at beauty no such succession between activity and passivity can be distinguished, and reflection is here so thoroughly blended with feeling, that we think the form is directly perceivable. Beauty then is indeed object for us, since reflection is the condition by which we perceive it; but at the same time it is a condition of our subject, because feeling is the condition by which we have a conception of it."

This is simply a word salad of vague and underdetermined concepts.

Most secondary summaries of this text suggest it possesses a strength of argument that it altogether lacks. I believe some commentators don't wish to call out its inadequacies because they fear it is their own lack of familiarity with philosophy that makes it so difficult. But the problem is Schiller, not them, and anyone who compares five pages of this essay with five pages from Schopenhauer will immediately see what I mean.

So let it be said, this text is badly written. It is overly florid and verbose, and the argument is segmented and scattered in ways that make it laborious to track. M. H. Abrams charitably called it "surprisingly intricate." It is also an extremely important work in the history of ideas, and an absolutely key reference for understanding early Romantic and Hegelian philosophy.

Note: I completely rewrote this review in 2024 after a close re-reading.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friedrich Schiller wrote Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in 1793 for his friend the Danish Prince Friedrich Christian who had provided him with a stipend to help him through an illness. In 1795 the letters were published and the provide a worthwhile consideration of the nature of Aesthetics for us still today. The collection of twenty seven letters is not an easy read but it is worth persevereing to gain the insights of this great poet and playwright, friend of Goethe and inspiration for Beethoven and many artists, particularly in the Romantic era.

The book touches upon a broad range of topics, some of which you do not normally associate with aesthetics. However the letters do consider the nature of Beauty and its relationship to art and man. For Schiller beauty seems to arise as a synthesis between opposing principles "whose highest ideal is to be sought in the most perfect possible union and equilibrium of reality and form"(Letter XVI, p 81). Schiller also discusses the nature of the ideal man and how the impulse for play interacts with man's nature, especially his rational and sensuous aspects which form a juxtaposition within him. This juxtaposition is discussed at length with a synthesis described in terms that suggest a transcendence that culminates in our very humanity (Letters 18-20). Man and his nature is important to Schiller as his reason, but "The first appearance of reason in Man is not yet the beginning of his humanity. The latter is not decided until he is free," (Letter XXIV, p 115).

Through discussion of the work of art and the fine arts Schiller brings us closer to a conception of what art means to man and how important "Homo Ludens" is as a conception of man. Schiller admired classical Greece and its art and saw the role of history and freedom important in the discussion of the nature of art. Above all both as a poet and a thinker Schiller held the ideal of freedom to be sacrosanct. According to Schiller, freedom is attained when the sensual and rational in man are fully integrated but his aesthetic disposition is seen as coming from Nature. These letters provide a rich vein of ideas from which the thoughtful and attentive reader may find inspiration in consideration of the aesthetics and the nature of the work of art.

[شمس · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some quick thoughts; not a final review . . .
__________

"I love art and everything related to it above all else, and I admit that my inclination is to favour it before any other occupation of the mind. But it is not here what art is to me, but rather how it relates to the human spirit as a whole . . ."

It took me two, or three (maybe more) times as long to finish this than I had expected, because of the amount of arresting points that I came across and had to note down . . .
__________
I think I will carry what is contained in both Schiller's Letters, and Seneca's Letters, with me every day, for the rest of my life. They have both introduced some new notions and ideas with which I agree wholeheartedly, but they have both also clarified and expanded upon certain ideas, feelings, and views, that I already had.

I'll promise myself now: I will, one day, go through both Seneca's and Schiller's letters, one by one, clarifying in each what each author is saying, and how this relates to my beliefs, outlooks, and views . . .
__________
This Penguin edition (which I only discovered after reading, was first published in 2016; thanks Penguin!) contains Schiller's Letters which constitute On the Aesthetic Education of Man, but equally importantly, also contain, for the first time in an English translation, his Letters to Prince Frederick Christian von Augustenburg.
_____
The translation by Keith Tribe was excellent. I quickly read some reviews of this and noticed some people saying that they found it hard to understand what Schiller was saying. I suspect this may have been to the translation they were reading, because this more modern one is excellent. Any trouble with understanding will not be due to the translation.

Schiller is not too hard to understand, and no prior reading of Kant, or Burke, for example, is required to understand his ideas and concepts.
_____
The Prince was a sponsor of Schiller, allowing him "three of the intellectually most intense years of his life. He dedicated himself to a close study of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, especially the aesthetic theory in the Critique of Judgement of 1790."

For the sake of brevity, I'm not going to comment on what Schiller touches upon right now, but I will say that he does not view asesthetics and the cultivation of taste as any kind of panacea of the first order, but as: a complement to morality; a substitute for true virtue, and some other things which I will not go into here.

I am not doing a full review here, so for now, please read some of the quotes I have included below. By doing so, you should easily see that his work stretches beyond purely theoretical aesthetics and the cultivation of taste, but more into the application. Do not read them all (unless you want to), but use them as an example of some of the views and ideas that are Schiller touches upon. I have not been exhaustive with the selection, but included some more extended passages which contain some of Schiller's more important and central arguments.

(Bolded passages below are ones that I personally find particularly insightful, perceptive &c. I apologise for any spelling errors, I was typing some of the longer passages in some haste . . .)
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Also, something you should bear in mind:

"To be sure, On the Aesthetic Education of Man is an ything but a rounded academic tract on asethetics and politics, leaving as it does many questions unanswered. How exactly would aesthetic education be implemented? What is the relation between the harmony-based model of liquifying beauty and the dynamic model of energetic beauty? But it must be remembered that the text is basically a fragment, a part of a larger, unfinished project. It shares this fate with some of the most important works in eighteenth-century thought, such as Rousseau's Social Contract" —From the Introduction

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—Our reputation for education and refinement, which we rightly value by comparison with all other merely natural humanity, is pulled up short by the natural humanity of the Greeks, for they freely embraced all the natural delights of art and worthiness of wisdom, though without being seduced by then as we have to our age; they are also our rivals, even our models, in respect of those very advantages in which we seek consolation and reassurance for our unnatural manners. At once complete in form and substance, at once philosophical and creative, at once gentle and energetic, the Greeks united the youth of imagination with the manhood of reason in a glorious humanity.

. . . How different are we moderns! The image of the human species in each of us has been enlarged, shattered and scattered as shards, not in proportioned admixtures; so that one has to go from one individual to another to reconstitute the totality of the species.

. . .Which modern man is prepared to challenge and one Athenian to debate the prize of humanity?

. . .How did an individual Greek come to be representative of his era, and why does no modern man claim this distinction? Because the first was formed as a unity by nature, and the second by an intellect that divided and subdivided.

—If the commonweal makes office the measure of man, if it prizes in one citizen only his memory, in another only mathematical understanding, in a third only a mechanical skill; if it is here indifferent to character and only interested in particular knowledge, but there by contrast a sense of order and lawful conduct is thought enough compensation for the most occult thinking - if at the same time these individual skills are to be pushed to such a degree of intensity as the subject allows in extension - should we be surprised that all other faculties of the mind are neglected, so that the one single faculty prized above all others should be exclusively rewarded? We do know that the powerful genius does not take the limits of his occupation to be the limits of his activity, but the mediocre talent uses up the entirety of his meagre powers in pursuing the occupation that has fallen to him; and anyone who has time left over for his own pursuits once his occupational duties are fulfilled must already be commonly gifted. Moreover, the state seldom thinks it any recommendation when powers exceed tasks; nor if the higher intellectual needs of the man of genius compete with the demands of office.

—Greek states resembled a colony of polyps, for within themselves individuals enjoyed an independent life, although in times of necessity they could form into a whole; this new gave way to a clockwork mechanism, the joining together of an infinite number of lifeless parts to create a new mechanically driven whole. State and Church, laws and manners, means from end, effort from reward. Eternally shackled to one small fragment of the whole, man imagined himself to be a fragment, in his ear the constant and monotonous noise of the wheel that he turned; never capable of developing the harmony of his being, and instead marking the humanity in his nature, he simply became the impress of his occupation, his particular knowledge.

—Not for nothing does the ancient myth have the goddess of wisdom emerging fully armed from Jupiter's head; for her very first action is that of a warrior. Even at her birth she must enter a bitter struggle with senses that do not wish to be torn from sweet repose. .

The more numerous part of mankind is too tired and exhausted from its struggle with need to gird itself up for a new and more intense struggle against error. Happy to avoid the troublesome effort of thinking, they gladly leave the control of their concepts to others; and if it so happens that they rouse themselves to higher needs, they seize with greedy credulity upon the formulations that state and priesthood have prepared for them in anticipation.

Such people prefer the twilight of obscure belief, in which one can feel more alive and shape the imagination in whatever way one likes, to the ways of truth that chase away the comforting delusions of their dreams. These illusions, which the malevolent light of knowledge threatens to scatter, are the basis of all their happiness; how can they be expected to pay so much for a truth that begins by robbing them of all they hold so dear? To love wisdom, they would already have to be wise, which itself is a truth already felt by those who gave philosophy its name.

Culture of the capacity for feeling is the more urgent need at this time, not merely because it will enable better insight into life, but because it prompts the improvement of such insight itself.

—Inclination can only say: that suits your individuality and your present need, but your individuality and your present need will be swept away with change, and what you today fiercely desire will in time behind the object of your disgust. If, however, moral feeling says: that shall be, then it decides for ever and eternity - if you admit truth because it is truth, and practice justice because it is just, then you have made over single case the rule for all cases, and treated one moment of your life as eternity.

—The more aspects there are to man's receptivity, the more flexible it is and the greater the number of aspects presented to phenomena, so the greater the amount of the world that man can grasp, the more faculties he develops within himself. The more power and depth the personality gains, the more freedom that reason gains, so the more world does man comprehend, so the more form he creates outside of himself.

His culture would therefore consist of: firstly, bringing about the most varied contact with the world for the receptive faculty, while intensifying as far as possible passivity in feeling; secondly, securing for the determining faculty the greatest independence from the receptive faculty, developing reason to the greatest possibly degree of activity. Where both qualities are united, man will combine the most abundant existence with the greatest autonomy and liberty and, rather than losing himself in the world, instead draw into himself the sheer infinity of its phenomena and subordinate it to the unity of his reason.

—One cannot therefore say that those who regard the aesthetic condition as the most fruitful in respect of knowledge and morality are entirely wrong. They are in fact completely right, for a disposition of the soul that comprehends all of humanity just necessarily and potentially also include within it every individual expression; a disposition of the soul that removes all limits from the entirety of human nature must also necessarily remove these limits from every single expression of the same.

Every other operation confers upon the soul a special skill, but for doing so sets a particular limit; only the aesthetic leads to the state of unlimitedness . . . only the aesthetic is a totality in itself, uniting in itself all the conditions of its origin and of its persistence. Only here do we feel ourselves torn from time . . .

—Endorsing appearance of the first kind cannot harm truth, since one is never in danger of taking appearance for truth, which is in fact the only thing that can be harmful to truth; to despise appearance means to despise all fine art, for it is in its essence appearance. The enthusiasm of intellect for reality can sometimes lead to such a degree of intolerance that the whole art of beautiful appearance is dismissed out of hand, just because it is appearance; but this happens to the intellect only if it recalls the affinity mentioned above.

—The answer to the question 'To what extent may appearance exist in the moral world?' is simply this: to the extent that it is aesthetic appearance, i.e. appearance that neither seeks to represent reality, nor needs to be represented by it. Aesthetic appearance can never endanger the truth of morals, where one finds otherwise, it will be demonstrated without any difficulty that the appearance was not aesthetic.

—However since he now also includes outer form in his enjoyment, taking note of the form of things that satisfy his appetites, he goes beyond time itself, having not merely enhanced his enjoyment in extent and degree, but also ennobled the way in which he gains such enjoyment.

—One had advanced so far with theoretical culture that the most sacred pillars of superstition were rocked, and the throne of thousand-year-old prejudice began to shake. Nothing was wanting save the signal for the great transformation.

—Perhaps you may object, most serene Prince, that we have a circular argument here: that the character of a citizen depends just as much upon a constitution as that constitution depends on the citizen's character. I admit that, and so claim that, if we wish to break out of this circularity, we must either think of means of assisting the state without involving character, or deal with the character without involving the state. The first contains a contradiction, for no constitution can be conceived that is independent of the disposition of the citizen. However, perhaps there is something to the second idea, so that sources independent of the state might be made capable of refining ways of thought, but which sources for all their faults uphold the state in a pure and open manner.

—But even if he is permitted to adhere to the spirit of the century, he should not take direction from it. The guiding laws of art do not take their form from a changing and often quite degenerated contemporary taste, but are founded in the necessity and eternity of human nature, in the original laws of the spirit. The pure source of beauty streams down from the divine part of our being, from the eternally pure ether of ideal mankind, uninfected by the spirit of the age that seethes in the dark eddies far below. It is for this reason that art can, in the midst of a barbaric and unworthy century, remain pure like a goddess, so long as its higher origin is remembered, and it does not itself become a slave to base intentions and needs. It is in this way that the few remnants of the Greek spirit wander through the night of our Nordic age, and the electric shock of this spirit arouses some related souls to a sense of their greatness.

—In the same way that one can say that a person can receive freedom from another, even though freedom consists in man being relieved of any need to conduct himself in accordance with others, so one can just as well say that taste provides assistance to virtue, even though virtue expressly implies that it requires no external assistance.

—Morality can therefore be furthered in two ways, just like it can be obstructed in two ways. Either one has to strengthen the part played by reason and the strength of good will so that no temptation can overwhelm them; or the power of temptation must be broken, so that a weaker reason and a weaker good will might still have the advantage.

Raw and uncouth souls lack both moral and aesthetic education, allow pure appetite to dictate to them, behaving merely as their desire leads them. Moral souls who lack aesthetic education allow reason to dictate to them, and it is only through respect for their duty that they triumph over temptation. In aesthetically refined souls there is a further item that quite often replaces virtue where it is lacking, and aids it where it is already present. This item is taste.

Taste can therefore be seen as the first weapon used by an aesthetic soul in its struggle against raw nature, driving back the assault before it becomes necessary for reason to intervene as a legislator, and pronounce judgement.

—I have not here placed religion and taste together in one class unintentionally, for both have the merit of being a surrogate for true virtue, securing the regularity of actions where there is no hope of the obligation of conviction.

—A mixed society would be very poorly maintained on the basis of a moral world if one only flattered the senses with pleasant stimuli. For, even taking into account the vacuity of such provision, one could never be sure that the private taste of one individual member of society would not find repellent that which gave pleasure to another; and assuming that this would be resolved for everyone through sheer variety, it could not be said that the one shared the pleasure of the other, but that each would enjoy things for himself, and bury his feelings within.
But this society would not be much better satisfied if one supplied it with the profound truths of mathematics, physics, or diplomacy, for interest in these matters rays upon a particular understanding that cannot be expected from every person. The merely sensuous man and the man of specialised learning are thus both unsuitable subjects for conversation, because both equally lack the ability of generalising their private feelings, and making the general interest their own.

[Christina Kalesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schiller har vidst fat i den lange ende.. Her kommer et herligt quote, som samler meget af det jeg tager med mig fra brevene:

“De græske staters polypnatur, der tillod ethvert individ at leve et uafhængigt liv og om nødvendighed at blive helheden selv, afløstes af et kunstfærdigt urværk, i hvilket mange, men livløse dele stykkes sammen til et mekanisk fungerende hele […] Mennesket som i al evighed er lænket til et enkelt lille brudstykke af det hele, udvikler kun sig selv som brudstykke; da det evindeligt kun har den ensformige støj fra det hjul, der driver det, i øret, udvikler det aldrig sit væsens harmoni, og i stedet for at lade mennesket komme til udtryk i sin natur, bliver det til et blot og bart aftryk af sin virksomhed, af sin videnskab. […] Det døde bogstav træder i stedet for den levende forstand, og en trænet hukommelse bliver en sikrere fører end geni og følelse.” (37)


Selvom hans forherligelse af antikkens Grækenland er weird, er det alligevel kæmpe optur at læse disse breve. Man kan jo læse både Marxistisk teori, eksistentialisme, Sontag, Bergson ind i det her.. og så er det jo herligt at læse en romantiker som i det syvogtyvende og sidste brev henvender sig til mennesket der vil noget andet end det, der er; nemlig lighed <3 Han er jo simpelthen fortaler for det utopiske potentiale i kunsten.

Subjekterne er til for staten (begrebet “nytte” bliver brugt her), ikke omvendt. Han vil minde os om at vi ikke kun er statsborgere, men også tidsborgere. Uden at forlade fænomenernes verden (formen) kan vi med æstetikken for en kort stund træde ind i ideernes. Vi er “frarøvet menneskelighed” - “fremmedgjorte” Mao. - og udviklingen af følelsen må derfor være tidens mest påtrængende opgave, mener han. “Ikke fordi den bliver et middel til at gøre den forbedrede indsigt virksom for livet, men også fordi den tilskynder til at forbedre indsigten.” BUM!

[Christine Cordula Dantas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very deep analysis on aesthetics, full of insights, but makes a difficult reading for the current generations. Yet, I enjoyed this book as far as I could follow. I should return to various passages, which I have marked enthusiastically. Excellent text.

[Tam Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

đọc cho lớp philosophy. nói chung cũng được. Mình đọc quyển này rồi xem phim American Beauty. Không hiểu phim này liên quan gì đến cái quyển sách sau khi xem phim xong hai lần. Nhưng ý mà Schiller muốn nói về Education rất cách mạng. Lý trí không thể đưa chúng ta đến tự do, cảm xúc lại đưa ta trở về với bản năng. Cả hai cái nếu tồn tại độc lập thì không thể hài hòa được. Để tiến tới tự do, con người phải học cách cảm nhận về cái đẹp, và từ đó con người mới có cảm giác và lý trí để hành động theo luân lý. Thế nên những người làm nghệ thuật theo ông ta đến gần với thực tại nhất, được tự do nhất.

[Mohammad Ali Shamekhi]

حدود 50 صفحشو خوندم - یعنی شش نامه. حس خاصی برای ادامه دادنش نداشتم اما امیدوارم بعدا بخونمش تموم شه، از شرش راحت شم! - البته بد برداشت نشه اصلا هیچ ضرورتی برای خواندنش ندارم

کلا با نوشتار آلمانی های اون دوران حال نمی کنم - هم دشوار نویسی و هم اطناب و فضل فروشی. اینجا هم کلیت حرف شیلر جالبه - اینکه باید بین حس و عقل، بین ثبات و تغییر، بین ضرورت و آزادی، بین شهروند و دولت و ... جمع کرد و آن جمع در واقع مقام انسانی است ( امری فراسوی این و آن ). اما انقدر حرافی می کند شیلر که اگر دقت کنی می بینی عملا افقی برای حل مسأله باز نکرده. صرفا دائم بر روی این عنصر فراسوی تضاد بودن تأکید می کنه

اگر روزی خواندمش این توضیحات را درست و کامل می نویسم

[Arthur Dal Ponte Santana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muito se fala sobre o quanto a filosofia hegeliana foi um desenvolvimento do pensamento kantiano, desenvolvimento esse que abordava novas questões, além de modificar a resposta a algumas questões antigas. Eu, nas minhas rasas leituras de Hegel, nunca fui capaz de perceber isso muito bem. Schiller, como um "kantiano" muitíssimo aplicado, me ajudou a compreender a ponte entre o pensamento de Kant e Hegel de uma maneira mais natural, já que seu pensamento bebe muito de Kant, mas desemboca em características que tomarão mais forma dentro da exposição hegeliana. A construção do pensamento de Schiller é interessante e esse texto é um "must-read" para qualquer estudante de estética.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mir haben Schillers Briefe eigentlich sehr gut gefallen. Allerdings hat sich die Thematik sehr in die Länge gezogen und vieles hat sich wiederholt. Ich glaube, Schiller im wesentlichen erfasst zu haben, auch wenn die Sprache und Wortverwendung nicht mehr zu hundert Prozent der unsrigen entspricht und dann und wann schwierig zu verstehen waren. Die Briefe lassen sich mit etwas Hintergrundwissen aber deutlich besser lesen, z.b der französischen Revolution und auch ein bisschen Wissen zu Kant schadet nicht. Besonders gefallen haben mir die Ausführungen zum Spieltrieb und insgesamt bin ich positiv beeindruckt von Schillers Erläuterungen diverser vertrackter menschlicher Zusammenhänge.

[Anmol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Live with your century, but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise.

Schiller's Letters have all the making of a five-star classic: the only problem is that much of it went over my head. This has to be one of the toughest books I have read over the past few years, abstract in the extreme, using inconsistent philosophical terms, but making points that I can understand are exhilarating (if only I could scratch below their surface). The prose can be quite fantastic(al) with passages of tremendous beauty jam-packed in between obscure sentences of which I can make little sense.

Despite this book being little over a hundred pages, I believe that this warrants a much, much more closer reading than what I have given it in a few sessions over the last month (the difficulty of this text is also reflected in the irregularity, and indeed, a complete halt in my daily reading that it has brought about). 

Schiller's Eighteenth Letter begins with a sentence that, in my view, is the central thesis (if there is one) of this work:

Through Beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; through Beauty the spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to sense.

In his artistic critique of the materialistic utilitarianism of industrialisation, Schiller is quite similar to both Sri Aurobindo and Gandhi (and I suspect, but cannot confirm, that he was an influence on the former):

...today Necessity is master, and bends a degraded humanity beneath its tyrannous yoke. Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance...the very spirit of philosophical enquiry seizes one province after another from the imagination, and the frontiers of Art are contracted as the boundaries of science are enlarged.

I can always appreciate these antimodern passages based on an appreciation of the aesthetic. But it is Schiller's philosophy, with its curious amalgamation of Fichte (his primary influence), Kant, and Rousseau that I find difficult to make sense. Perhaps the answer lies in reading Schiller himself as a work of art - an artist's rendition of philosophy - and not as a serious/rigorous work of philosophy in itself. 

I want to stress further on the similarities with Sri Aurobindo's The Human Cycle. Both Schiller and Sri Aurobindo focus on the need to balance unity and multiplicity - respectively the spiritual foundations for harmony and freedom - both in our individual and political existence.

There is much more to say here, but Schiller's work is inviting, and as a work of art, must be seen in the eyes of the beholder. 

...lust can be robbery, but love must be a gift.

[Ludmila · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's very dense and abstract, but his main thesis that the ideal moral State cannot be created before the moral improvement of humanity is important for today. He proposes that humanity is made moral through Beauty, through the aesthetic impulse, which synthesizes the two parts of Man, the formal impulse and the sensuous impulse.

[Walter Schutjens · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, here are some notes I took to synthesize its affect. The ideal outcome of an aesthetic education, the ‘beautiful soul’, was first described and consequently popularized by the novelist C.M. Wieland in what is considered the first Bildungsroman . Schiller in this 1794 work 'On the Aesthetic Education of Man' develops this concept by giving it a new philosophical and political ground. He emphasizes his conception of its actual possibility and necessary development as the logical consequence of Kant’s Critical system especially its final work The Critique of the Power of Judgement, whilst maintaining the concepts philhellenic roots. Schiller’s innovative philosophical ideas are not limited to metaphysics but span across works on history, politics and especially aesthetics; this gives him a wholly new conception of freedom which is strongly related to what he terms ‘aesthetic education’ or otherwise the process of Bildung. I think Schiller wants to ground the necessity of an aesthetic education transcendentally in the demands of reason which seeks a holistic unity between the competing drives of the human psyche; the possibility of this, which is equally for Schiller the possibility of freedom, lies in the aesthetic mediation of the drives through their 'free play' this being stimulated by a public process of Bildung.

Necessity of Bildung

The methodology Schiller employs in arguing for the necessity of the possibility of an ‘aesthetic education’ is grounded in his reaction against previous doctrines which concern the aesthetic. He neatly summarizes this reaction in Letter XVIII of the AEoM stating ‘All the disputes about the concept of beauty (…) have no other source than this, either the investigation did not start with a sufficiently strict distinction, or it was not carried through to a pure and complete synthesis’ , the first complaint referring to the ‘intuitive aesthetics’ championed by sentimentalists and the second to the strictly formal rationalism of philosophers such as Kant. It is clear however Schiller did not seek to overcome these positions but instead integrate them into a philosophical whole that could comprehend the formal structure of the beautiful without losing sight of the truth of its content given in intuition. In a footnote to the same section, he allies the task of the AEoM with that of ‘reason’ tracking its historical development through thinkers with which he engages, stating: ‘Nature (sense and intuition) always unites, Intellect always divides; but Reason unites once more’ . This movement is akin to how Schiller understands history; the unity and wholeness found in the Greeks and reflected in the naturalist poetry of Goethe, the divide brought by the intellect reflected in the philosophy of Kant and the Terror of the French Revolution, and then finally his task or that of reason, the development of a second unity which provides a higher intellectual understanding of an original holism.

Schiller therefore embraces the enlightenment ideal concerning reason’s ability to demand and strive towards a holism, and thereby grounds the necessity of its possibility transcendentally following the metaphysical conclusions of Kant’s CIII. He still overcomes this position however in the AEoM by providing the grounds for the objective reality of freedom achieved in this unity, outlining a condition of being in beauty that sublates both reason and nature. So, although the demand is made by reason, its reality is found in beauty. Equally, Schiller seeks to ground his philosophical conclusions in reason but strives towards holism through the beauty of his plays. Schiller hereby returns to Shaftesbury’s original conception of art as identifying the ‘truth’ of its content, something strictly disallowed by Kant’s subjectivist turn in metaphysics. What he does maintain from Kant, something first developed by Baumgarten , is aesthetics wide range of application in understanding the unification of reason and nature, transcending its mere importance in art. This is crucial to Schillers notion of the ‘aesthetic education’ allowing for him to conceive of its practice widely , locating the necessity for it, besides metaphysics, in political history; both are developed here.

Metaphysical Necessity

Schiller’s metaphysics is a result of his attempt to maintain the formal aspects of Kant’s Critical system, while simultaneously seeking to overcome its subjectivism; or otherwise, the state of ‘unlimited determinability’ that lacks all content which he claims the Kantian subject paradoxically exists in. Kant claims that when the faculty of judgement transitions between nature and morality to make an aesthetic judgement, each respective domain remains wholly self-sufficient and independently valid. Schiller introduces Reinhold’s conception of ‘drives’ to highlight the paradoxicality of this position, refiguring Kant’s domain of reason and sensibility to ‘form’ and ‘sense’ he claims ‘each of these two primary drives (…) strives inevitably, according to its nature, to satisfaction’ , the main point being that these drives have different ends. He thereby reconceives Kant’s dualism as unnecessarily limiting humanity in its moral endeavours as it will inevitably remain in conflict with itself. This is not simply a moral critique trying to work on the readers sense of pathos, Schiller argues for his proof of the ‘possibility of the sublimest humanity’ by grounding its necessity transcendentally in the demands of reason as a self-organizing and harmonizing force in nature. Schiller locates this unity in the ‘enjoyment of beauty’ which he claims gives rise to a ‘an actual union and interchange between matter and form’ brought about by the ‘play drive’. He therefore makes a transcendental deduction in the way Kant argued for the principle of causality, applying the methodology to argue for the possibility of a generalization of the experience of beauty making it applicable in the practical sphere.

Schiller does not venture to provide an actual metaphysical ground for the ‘play drive’, in his equivocation of it with freedom he intends a state which is free of all determination both from the faculty of reason and of nature . By integrating both in the play drive by their mutual delimitation Schiller maintains the universalism of their coinciding but independent validity. This state of ‘aesthetic determinability’ Schiller claims is transcendentally necessary for reason justifying its reality. Schiller thus reconceives Kant’s understanding of freedom as the capacity for the will to exercise noumenal causality by following the formal structure of the moral law. Instead, freedom is only achieved in a state of objective being or a holism which subsumes Kant’s equivocation of it with duty, maintaining it, but raising it to a higher level that additionally integrates the sense drive. It is here that we can see Schiller’s strong association with the naturalized ethics of the Greeks, the ‘beautiful soul’ objectifying virtue to the extent that it synthesizes inclination and duty wholly, acting with ‘such purity and perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one’ .

Virtue is thereby once again brought on par with the Kantian notion of duty and Schiller claims to have overcome what he saw as the limitations of the formal rationalists who ‘limit the infinity of nature according to the laws of the discursive understanding’ . The question thus becomes if Schiller blatantly overstretched these laws to prove the necessity of the possibility of a successful aesthetic education. This necessity is however difficult to prove, it would mean that it is possible to act as he puts it in his essay On Grace and Dignity ‘unintentionally when intentional movements are carried out’ , or equally to allow for the ‘infinite being realized in the finite’ . To attribute an inherent purposiveness to an object would ignore the merely regulative role Kant claimed reflective judgements play. This, as demonstrated by D. Pugh, relegates Schiller in his conception of teleology closer to a form of Neo-Platonism and leads Pugh to question if Schiller was at all interested in Kant’s ‘reformulation of the traditional problems of metaphysics as a new scientific metaphysics of experience’ .

Schiller in demonstrating the necessity of the possibility of an aesthetic education seems to sidestep this problem however, in part due to the Platonistic aspect of his thought . As pointed out by Schaper, there are key methodological differences here between Kant and Schiller; whereas Kant sought to identify the mode in which beauty is experienced, Schiller considered this as secondary and first sought the ideal form of the cognition of beauty: aesthetic determination . According to Schaper, Schiller here brings out ‘suppressed tendencies’ of Platonistic thought within Kant who merely conceptualized the possibility of the reality of the intellectus archetypus but stopped there. Schiller oversteps the principles of Kants transcendental idealism by bringing out the ontologically ‘real in itself’ to be set against Kant’s subjectivism and played out these ideas in ‘a key in which Kant never meant his music to be played’ . It was perhaps a key fitting to Schiller’s own artistic ends however, for he did radically diverge from Plato by setting the ends of art at the service of Kant’s Enlightenment project, providing in his AEoM what Beiser terms ‘the poet’s reply to Plato’s Republic’ . The mere exhibition of these ends as the ideal form of a whole or a moral totality could thus in a Platonistic manner act as the axiomatic proof of the intelligibility of the ‘third character’ as there is no higher form it can be derived from. This conclusion runs parallel to a methodology he proclaims in the first letter of his AEoM where he states ‘Concerning those idea which prevail in the Kantian system (…) only the philosophers are at variance; the reast of mankind (…) have always agreed’ , appealing here to common sense and affirming his belief in the return of reason to intuition in its final pronouncements. This interpretation of Schillers capacity to provide an adequate metaphysical foundation to prove the necessity of an aesthetic education, although lenient, at least situates him accurately historically as engaging critically with thinkers that outline the major obstacles found in both reason and nature for the creation of a political state of freedom.

Political Necessity

By elevating the concept of virtue to the same level of duty Schiller makes the appearance of freedom itself sensible, this occurs both on the individual and species level in terms of a ‘beautiful soul’ and the ‘aesthetic state’ respectively. Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’ is thus transposed by Schiller into a ‘kingdom of taste’ and just as its achievement is for Kant conceived of as the highest good, Schiller claims his ends of social holism are ‘the most perfect of all works of art, the building up of true political freedom’ . Schiller’s objectification of freedom as a state of being as opposed to Kant’s mere subjective formalist conception allows him to put more emphasis on the importance of the reality of political progress throughout history. This has as consequence that Schiller can demonstrate the necessity of an aesthetic education equally in his politics and his metaphysics as both are able to demonstrate reasons self-determined movement towards freedom.

To illustrate Schiller’s method in doing this it is possible to put him in dialogue with another Greek philosopher who theorized about the state, namely Aristotle, who in his Nicomachean Ethics investigated the relation between insight and ethics. Schiller was sympathetic to German conservative sentiment that the main motivator of action was desire as opposed to reason , as such humanity could theoretically have the proper insight into ethics but fail to realise these insights in practice; in Aristotle’s terms Schiller sought thus to overcome akrasia or weakness of will. This amounts for Schiller to a conflict embedded in our moral psychology between the same form and sense drive described in section 1.1. His realistic interpretation of teleology demands a necessary reconciliation of this conflict, one which can be understood retrospectively through historiography, he states in his 1789 lecture ‘all the past events of the world; the whole history of the world at least would be needed to explain this very moment’ . He proceeds to do this; polemicizing about both the domination of man by nature in his early existence and in turn the tyranny imposed on nature by reason during the French revolution. His divergence from Kant is seen in the latter claim and outlined in his 1795 Letters , instead of seeking an emancipation from nature through the diffusion of reason Schiller aims for a holistic reconciliation of nature achieved through an aesthetic education. Returning to the first problem of akrasia, Schiller believes human desires (sense) can be cultivated through education to align themselves with the ends of reason (form) through the play drive which de facto does not privilege either drive but allows for their mutual determination.

It is important to note that although Schiller thought that an aesthetic education was necessary for the realization of an ethical state of freedom, it was not wholly sufficient. This is to deter accusations of Schiller’s AEoM being an apolitical tract that merely espouses an aesthetic humanism that runs contra to the revolutionary spirit of his early plays . He states midway through the AeoM that we ‘cannot point to a single instance of a high degree (…) of aesthetic culture going hand in hand with political freedom and civic virtue’ , Bildung is indeed an end for Schiller to the extent that it is necessary, but it is equally a means. This does not preclude the fact that there can be other means necessary to achieve this end, not excluding real political reform that is democratically decided upon in a liberal republican state. Schiller in his 1793 letters to the duke Augustenberg is for example aware of the limitations of a class society for providing a universal Bildung to a nation, he does not go as far as provide an economic solution, however he diagnoses it as a further consequence of the imbalance between drives. As pointed out by Beiser Schiller thought the limitation of culture to the upper classes led to indulgence and decadence, and the limited culture provided to the lower classes to vulgarism and immorality. Just as in his metaphysics Schiller sought to affect a mutual delimitation of these two drives to lead to a ‘beautiful soul’, in his politics it is a mutual delimitation of classes that leads to a liberal republican ‘aesthetic state’.

Possibility of Bildung

A condition of minimal plausibility of any ethical theory according to Kant is that its necessity entails its possibility, or otherwise ‘ought implies can’ . Thus, if one has a moral obligation to do something it must also be achievable in the natural world. Schiller maintains the basic formula of Kant’s categorical imperative, and thus has in his mind proven the possibility of an ‘aesthetic education’. He has however reconfigured the imperative to not only apply to moral but also aesthetic obligation. This means that besides the form and sense drive outlined in section 1 there must also exist a real play drive that is resultant of the state of free play; one that is capable of a practical-self-consciousness that establishes for the subject a relation to the super-sensible to justify its telos. That reason demands such a play drive has been demonstrated in section one, the task however lies also in proving the possibility of it as a result of a synthesis or reconciliation between the form and sense drive.

For Schiller this reconciliation is equivalent to the mutual delimitation of psychological drives, the will is truly free because it is not strictly determined by either the form or the sense drive. What results is a state of ‘play’ or suspension between these two drives that is motivated by an understanding of their fundamental relation, an understanding supplied and trained by Bildung. This has as consequence that in the ‘aesthetic state’ the prevalent ‘aesthetic consciousness’ does not necessarily realise our full humanity but merely secures its possibility by creating certain conditions. Here Schiller makes an essential distinction, stating that through Bildung ‘that which endures is his person, that which changes, his condition’ . This reaffirms Schiller’s commitment to the production of an expressively social holism, whereas the Kantian subject can attain freedom individually according to the moral law, for Schiller it is a collective condition or state of being attained in a society. This also allows him to dodge the accusation that humanity rises to the status of an intellectus archetypus, this because every ‘determinate existence, has its origins in time’ we thus remain temporally determined although the ‘pure Intelligence within us is eternal’ . Schiller hereby equates the possibility of an aesthetic education with the possibility of momentarily sharing in the eternal consciousness of God.

The transcendental ground that Schiller supplies for the necessity of an aesthetic education thus equally determines its possibility, although, due to its revision of Kant’s metaphysical dualism this possibility has for Schiller radical moral and political consequence’s which he seeks to embrace in his artistic output. The necessary synthesis of the psychological drives through their mutual delimitation leads to a state whereby the subject is wholly aesthetically determined, this leading to the objectification of virtue in the individual or what Schiller terms the ‘beautiful soul’. Its possibility lies in a public process of Bildung that seeks to cultivate man’s natural desires. This process, although not wholly sufficient is both a means and an end in the historical development towards Schillers conception

[Pablo Del · Rating 5 out of 5]

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) fue poeta, dramaturgo historiador y una de las eximias figuras del idealismo alemán. En sus ‘Cartas estéticas sobre la educación estética de la humanidad’ (1793-1795) expone un camino para alcanzar la libertad individual que no atente tampoco contra el orden social.

Confeso heredero de las ideas kantianas, Schiller ya desde el inicio de sus cartas apuesta por el desarrollo y futuro de la humanidad otorgando a la cultura estética —y por ende al arte aunque va más allá— un papel crucial para alcanzar la libertad del individuo y hacerle a su vez social, es decir se podría alcanzar un verdadero Estado orgánico ideal basado en la libertad racional. Y es que cuando Fiedrich Schiller redactó sus cartas la Revolución Francesa, en un primer momento acogida con entusiasmo, atravesaba su periodo más sangriento: el llamado Régimen del Terror (1793-1794), capítulo histórico este que no resulta baladí para entender parte del porqué Schiller propugna «para solucionar el problema político en la práctica es necesario tomar la vía estética, porque el camino de la belleza conduce a la libertad» (c. 2, p. 11), pues de lo contrario, y como sucedía ya en Francia, la ley de la mayoría podría convertirse en tiranía y con ello suprimir la singularidad del individuo (c. 6, p. 36).

Pues bien, y sintetizando mucho, para Schiller hay dos cualidades fundamentales en el ser humano: los impulsos sensibles relacionados con el estado natural o físico, y los impulsos formales que atañen al entendimiento, la voluntad, y que conducen a la determinación racional y las leyes. Para el filósofo la clave para conseguir el estado del hombre ideal, es decir el libre, está en cómo se realiza el paso del estado físico al formal y para ello «ambos impulsos necesitan limitación; el sensible, para no traspasar el ámbito de la legislación; el formal, para no invadir el campo de la sensibilidad» (c. 13, p. 68). Así pues será con la armonía de ambos, y mediante el impulso del juego, entendido este como esa autonomía de la realidad de la actividad contemplativa y creadora que tiende a recrearse en la apariencia (c. 26, P. 136), como se podría alcanzar tal armonía llamada «belleza ideal» (c. 16, p. 84).

Por tanto el entendimiento y la sensibilidad unidas bajo ese tercer y nuevo impulso, el del juego, serviría al hombre en su actividad como flujo por el cual conducir de forma adecuada la sensibilidad hacia la razón. De tal suerte cabe entender así cómo el Arte podría completar la vida humana y cooperar en la evolución moral, porque la contemplación y la reflexión de las cualidades estéticas de las cosas así como la creación artística son una manera de adiestrar el intelecto y de hallar la armonía (la belleza).

En definitiva, con todo ello, con esa educación «el hombre estéticamente formado podrá enunciar siempre que quiera juicios de valor universal y realizar actos dotados de valor universal» (c. 23, p.115).

[Emmanuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me this was an introduction to Herr Schiller's philosophical work and I'm delighted to admit that liked it a lot. As an essay on aesthetics I find it to be an accurate sample of what an aesthetic work reads like. These are rather beautiful and uplifting ideas written here and recommend the book to everybody.

[Jamey · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was a kid, I loved the crap out of this book (in a translation by, I think it was... Bruno Snell).

[Youssef Khouili · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always wonder why aesthetics and beauty give us the tendency to give up all reality and reason and we sacrifice truth to gain an attractive facade. What is it in the beauty that makes us irrational and we tend to be biased to it blindly? I was a victim of the halo effect and still to a certain degree when I always thought beauty equals all goodness and perfection without making any rational judgment.

it was a good read about aesthetics and beauty and I will reread it whenever I get the chance, highly recommended.

[Archie Hamerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

How terrific it is to read someone like Schiller and have him affirm everything you’ve ever thought about why your own aesthetic taste is unimpeachable. Vindication!

[Jóhanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Áhugaverð og tengist að mörgu leyti skrifum Antonins Artauds um tengsl lífs og listar, nema gengið er út frá öðrum kenningum.
Hann fer svolítið langt á köflum þannig að ég fylgdi ekki alltaf allan tímann, en oft náði hann mér alveg.
Setningar eins og þessar:

"Nei, ég mun varast að misbjóða frjálsum anda yðar.",
"Lifðu með þinni eigin öld, en vertu ekki afkvæmi hennar.",
"... umkringdu (samferðamenn þína) með táknum fullkomnunarinnar, þar til sýndin sigrar veruleikann og listin náttúruna.",
"... og sá sem aldrei áræðir að fara út fyrir landamæri hins raunverulega, hann muna aldrei hreppa sigurlaun sannleikans.",
"... heimurinn er útfærsla í tímanum, breyting, ...",
"Til þess að geta dregið upp mynd af einhverju í rúmi, verðum við að takmarka hið óendanlega rúm; til þess að geta ímyndað okkur breytingu í tíma verðum við að búta niður tímann sem heild. ... ef ekki væri eitthvað til staðar sem væri verið að útiloka frá, ef neitunin sem skilyrðislaus hugsunarathöfn vísaði ekki til einhvers raunveruleika... en án altæks rúms gætum við aldrei ákvarðar nokkurn stað yfirleitt. ... en án óendanlegs tíma gætum við aldrei numið augnablikið.",
"... við nálgumst heildina í gegnum einstaka hluta hennar, og hið ótakmarkaða einungis í gegnum takmarkanirnar.",
"Vogaskálarnar eru í jafnvægi þegar þær eru tómar; þær eru líka í jafnvægi þegar jafn þungt er í báðum.",
"... hugsunin þarfnast líkama...",
"Fegurðin ein færir heiminum sælu, og sérhver vera gleymir takmörkunum sínum svo lengi sem hún er undir töfravaldi hennar." og
"Í ríki smekkvísinnar verður jafnvel hinn mesti snillingur að afsala sér hátign sinni og stíga í auðmýkt niður af stalli sínum til þess að hugsa aftur eins og lítið barn."

þessar setningar eiga sér enn stað í huganum.

[Leo Espluga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro magnífico, se pone denso en algunos momentos pero en otros tiene ideas geniales.
El ideal de belleza y el sentido de lo estético en nuestrasociedad me parece más que apropiado. Hoy en día necesario.
La importancia de más allá de tener una vida útil, funcional y progresar como sociedad. Tener una sociedad con individuos con vidas significantes, camino que se adquiere con la cultura estética sin duda.

[Anthony Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic argument for the importance of the arts not only in the balancing and ideal functioning of the individual but for society as a whole. Schiller warns against an infatuation with the "quantifiable" disciplines at the expense of an appreciation for art. In our modern era of STEM obsession and general disunity, I think this book is as timely as ever.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why did I just read this and what did I just read?

[Peter J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I think Schiller intelligent, I had a hard time following him in this work. I would think it was just me, but I have digested the likes of Descartes and Hegel, who are both far more clear.