On The Aesthetic Education of Man

The Letters on Aesthetic Education offer an interpretation of the development of the individual and the parallel development of Western civilization. These interpretations focus on the conditions that allow for mental health in a human individual and society and especially demonstrate the crucial role of artistic experience in healthy human development. Friedrich Schiller was influenced by his contemporary Immanuel Kant and goes on to explore the implications that emerge from our understanding of the sublime in relation to culture, society and our own edification. His 'letters' are insightful of a man who wants his readers to make a difference to the ennoblement of life rather than descend to the easy pursuit of the superficialities that are just as obvious in our lives today. Basically, Schiller took Kantian idealism and crossed it with a popular format because they are written as "letters". Unlike Kant, you can actually read Schiller, since this book is only 140 pages long. The reason for this book is still relevant is that Kantian idealism underlay most popular manifestations of Romanticism but most people who consider themselves as "Romantics" literally have no idea what Kantian idealism means. Of course myself included. Thus, by reading this one 140 page book, you can kind of get a handle on the relationship and gain a better understanding of artists who are influenced by this time period.

On The Aesthetic Education Of Man is a philosophical enquiry into the source of art and beauty describing how art and beauty are related to human freedom. According to Schiller, freedom is attained when the sensual drive and rational drive are fully integrated and when the individual can allow both drives to be fully expressed, without being constrained by them. In the fourth letter, Schiller claims that if man is to attain the state of reason and still preserve his freedom, “this can be brought about through both these motive forces, inclination and duty, producing completely identical results in the world of phenomena; through the content of his volition remaining the same whatever the difference in form; that is to say, through impulse being sufficiently in harmony with reason to qualify as universal legislator”.

Schiller offers us On the Aesthetic Education of Man as an aesthetic object and with that places his work in a strange position. Yet, as much as Schiller would like us to perceive his work as an aesthetic object, we wouldn’t be justified in doing so. In the very last letter, Schiller undermines his own argument about the ‘innocence’ of the aesthetic object, reducing the aesthetic to notions of refinement and decorum thereby disclosing the illusory freedom it offers. Schiller assumed that beauty is an aesthetic unity of thought and feeling, of contemplation and sensation of reason and intuition of activity and passivity of form and matter. In Schiller’s philosophy, the state of true aesthetic freedom is achieved by the "play drive" which mediates between the "material drive" and the "formal drive" which is allowing both sides of human nature to be fully developed and unified.

Schiller’s focus on freedom in his definition of the aesthetic already hints at the tendency of his aesthetic to slip into the sublime insofar as freedom is typically associated with the sublime rather than with the beautiful object. According to this interpretation, Schiller was deeply affected by the consequences of the French Revolution and accepted Goethe’s belief that the poet ought to remain a stranger to his age, that art need not fulfil a moral function. Although Schiller claims that semblance is independent from truth and does not threaten it, he fails to dissociate the two completely. Thus, although Schiller would like us to believe that his only motive for making the aesthetic autonomous is to reveal its transcendental ground, we might ask whether his real motive might not be a certain disappointment.

In Schiller's aesthetic philosophy, human nature consists of two realms of being that which persists and that which changes. Schiller says that the unchanging self is not determined by time but that time is determined by the unchanging self. Every human being is a person who is situated in a particular situation. According to Schiller, aesthetic education can produce not only an increased level of awareness or receptivity to the world but can also produce an increased intensity in the determining activity of the intellect.

Schiller tries to identify the aesthetic as precisely as we saw, he cannot preserve its purity and self-sufficiency and keeps overstepping the boundary that is supposed to separate it from the realm of form and reason. Schiller is as concerned with asserting man’s dignity (freedom) as Newman for whom the defence of that dignity is the ultimate subject matter of art. Similarly, if as Schiller suggests, the aesthetic is already given in us as a part of our nature, how can we deceive ourselves that aesthetic education is necessary, given that this education requires us to fragment our nature?