On Schiller's "Aesthetic Education"

Abstract: I provide a reading/interpretation of Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, along with a brief critique of Schiller’s aesthetic-political project.

Schiller begins by adumbrating the means through which a naturally split subject may find reconciliation through the harmony of his/her dual nature. For Kant, this is the split between the noumenal and phenomenal; for Schiller, who is explicit in his appropriation and amendment of Kant’s doctrine, it is a split between the rationalizing and feeling/sensing drives. I want to here examine the nature of Schiller’s political program in light of the aesthetic theory he puts forth. In particular, I will raise a series of lingering questions concerning three main areas of Schiller’s thought: a) the “freedom” inaugurated by the play drive, and how this freedom forms the basis of a political regime; b) the intermediary nature of the aesthetic state (proceeding from the sensuous, preceding the moral); and c) the legitimating role of the binary between reason and the senses. I will first offer a summary of Schiller’s work and then move to two overarching criticisms I have.

Schiller introduces his use of the play drive amidst a much greater political and historical critique. I think Josef Chytry is right to point toward the impact of the French Revolution on Schiller’s thought—and in particular, his rejection of the revolutionaries’ attempt to refound the socio-political order through the means of violence they introduced through, say, the Terror.[1] However, Schiller’s turn to art as an alternative mode of political transformation points to Schiller’s critique of modernity in general. This critique mainly occurs between the Fifth and Sixth Letters, and seems less restricted to the French context than it is applicable to the conditions of a highly-rationalized, specialized and divided civilization.[2] Schiller’s account of modernity’s “aesthetic” condition is quite telling here: “Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.”[3]

Anticipating Marx’s critique of specialized labor and alienation, Schiller paints the portrait of his own age as bleak, starkly mechanical, and deeply inhuman. Above all, what the modern age has negated is the possibility of bringing unity back to man’s inner being, particularly in the naturalized split between what Schiller calls his “sensuous” and “formal/rational” drives. The sensuous drive is derived from man’s natural physicality: it is the “feeling” of “life,” in the purest sense of the term, the engagement of his senses through the unique multiplicity of natural phenomena and the feeling of being “swept along by the flux of time.”[4] The rational/formal drive, in contrast, proceeds from the “absolute existence of man…from his rational nature,” from his intellectual capacity to bring conceptual generality to multiplicity, to carve out permanence amidst impermanence, and to bring some type of harmony and tranquility to the unending flux.[5] While these two drives develop sequentially, with man moving from the sensuous into the rational, it is the ultimate favoring of one drive over another that, for Schiller, signals the inherent disunity of man’s inner being.

Thus, while Schiller argues that “Personality must keep the sensuous drive within its proper bounds, and receptivity, or Nature, must do the same with the formal drive,”[6] it is clear that modern material conditions (which Schiller is want to say much about) have grossly favored the rational at the expense of the sensuous, creating a context in which the “development of man’s capacity for feeling is…the more urgent need of our age…”[7] since “…the State remains for ever a stranger to its citizens since at no point does it ever make contact with their feeling.”[8] The “wholeness of character,”[9] or the harmonization of the sensuous and rational, toward which Schiller strives can only be achieved through a balancing and combining of the separate elements of man’s nature—as soon as one predominates, man either becomes a “savage” (the domination of the sensuous) or a “barbarian” (the domination of the rational), respectively rejecting either the precepts of civilization or the relevance of nature.[10]

In order to navigate between the sensing and rationalizing instincts, Schiller introduces his play drive at the climax of the Fourteenth Letter, and associates it exclusively with the “aesthetic”—and in particular with his notion of the beautiful. Schiller defines the play drive as “That drive…in which both the others [sense-drive, form-drive] work in concert…the play-drive, therefore, would be directed towards annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity.”[11] I think Chytry is right to point to a brief confusion here—that is, whether the play drive is inaugurated by the “working in concert” of the two other drives, or whether it inaugurates that concert[12]—but the point remains: the restoration of man’s unity can only come through art, and in particular through the apprehension and comprehension of the beautiful, since “…it must be open to us to restore by means of a higher Art the totality of our nature which the arts themselves have destroyed.”[13]

This restoration by a “higher Art” is predicated upon a universality of the beautiful, and a necessary relation between the beautiful and the act of play.[14] What the beautiful accomplishes is a “releasing” and “tensing” of the two primary drives; it brings the desire to be determined (the sensuous) in line with the desire to determine (the rational); it produces a “supreme agitation” concurrent with an “utter repose,” and is full of “wonder”[15]; it intermixes without reducing the compulsion of nature with the compulsion of reason; it brings life to form, and form to life, such that “living form” emerges[16]; and finally, it inaugurates a movement toward inner human unity, the emergence of “freedom”[17] and to the possibility of dignity.[18] Freedom, in Schiller’s sense of the word, and as Chytry observes, is a condition of “self-determination”[19]—it is the capacity of individuals to furnish, by means of a felt sympathy with the multiplicity of reality and a rational compulsion to synthesize and generalize, a universal law of their own accord, to distance themselves from nature and therefore to set in motion the processes to master it.[20] It is further the ultimate and ideal role of “culture” and an “aesthetic education” to help foster and preserve the space of beauty in civilization, a refoundational space of restoration that leads back to a place of indeterminacy from which man’s creativity may spring anew,[21] and which, in turn, engenders an entire system of tastes, manners, and “Graces”[22] that revolve around the state like a halo, stabilizing and diffusing freedom as such.

Schiller packages his notion of the aesthetic/the beautiful/the play drive (and here, a question: what is the difference between the three, if any?) in a greater historical-teleological theory of both individual and civilizational development, whereby man moves from the physical state to the aesthetic state and finally into the moral state, or state of freedom.[23] As Schiller argues, “Man in his physical state merely suffers the dominion of nature; he emancipates himself from this dominion in the aesthetic state, and he acquires mastery over it in the moral,”[24] and further “…it is only out of the aesthetic, not out of the physical, state that the moral can develop.”[25] It is important to note that the play-drive/esthetic state is different than the moral state, although it is what makes the moral state possible.

Much more could be said on the details of Schiller’s thought and their interconnectivity, but I will refrain from exploring those aspects in order to move into some of the questions/criticism’s the Aesthetic Education left me with.

First, I have questions regarding the nature of the play-drive and its capacity to inaugurate freedom. My principle concern is this: that the type of freedom Schiller foresees seems necessarily both devoid of any specific moral content of its own while also buttressed by a pluralist ethos of political belonging. It purports to bend neither toward this or that ideological pole, but does so, and in so doing cannot prevent abuses of freedom conducted in the realization of a different imagined horizon. Though Schiller is rather inexplicit as to the embodied, material nature of the political institutions that would sustain his ideal state, he clearly prefers loose constitutional arrangements that promote the type of self-determining law-giving he takes as freedom, and which respects the multiplicity of freedoms constitutive of a diverse population. And so, Schiller argues that “…a political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to achieve unity only by suppressing variety. The State should not only respect the objective and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honour their subjective and specific character…”[26] Or, as Chytry observes, “According to Schiller’s reasoning, if individuals learn to regard natural objects for their sakes, they will in turn recognize other individuals for their own sakes.”[27]

It would seem that freedom, for Schiller, has a fairly defined content, one that is both empathically appreciative of uniqueness and variety and is rationally distanced, capable of also tracing more general contours of what it means to be “beautiful” or “human.” It is a freedom quite different than the forms of aesthetic judgment and persuasive communicability that Chytry identifies at first with Homer and the Phaeacian model,[28] next with Athenian theater and public communication, then with the Florentine Republicans and finally with figures like Shaftebury, but it is a freedom that shares in a certain “liberal” (as Schiller calls it in the Seventh Letter) set of principles and frameworks. And yet, Schiller is insistent that his play-drive/concept of beauty leads only to the threshold of freedom, without dictating its nature or content: “…nothing is more at variance with the concept of beauty than the notion of giving the psyche any definite bias,”[29] Schiller says in the Twenty-Second Letter, and elaborates in the Twenty Third[30] and Twenty Fifth.[31] Beauty leads to freedom but does not determine how freedom should act: what, then, ensures that it will acquire a certain “liberal” character? Why does the sense of potential mastery the beautiful create necessarily lead in this direction? Why can’t the trajectory look something like: from the physical state to the aesthetic state and then to the totalitarian state?

Much hinges on the concept of “aesthetic semblance” and the rights of the “poet” to determine political change.[32] As to the right of the poet, Schiller argues that “…it is in the world of semblance alone that he possesses this sovereign right, in the insubstantial realm of the imagination; and he possesses it there only as long as he scrupulously refrains from predicating real existence of it in theory, and as long as he renounces all idea of imparting real existence through it in practice. From this you see that the poet transgresses his proper limits, alike when he attributes existence to his ideal world, as when he aims at bringing about some determinate existence by means of it.”[33] The use of semblance in a deceptive, manipulative or instrumental manner seems off the table for Schiller entirely: it is a matter of definition. Either one is a legitimate poet, capable of producing the type of art that reflects and augments the sphere of freedom in the inner being of others, or one is not a poet at all; similarly, societies that harbor aesthetic semblance are by definition unplagued by instrumentalism, while societies that harbor instrumentalism have by definition yet to acquire the “truth” of aesthetic semblance.[34] Chytry extends this reading: “…among the political values of the aesthetic dimension is its capacity to counter the dominative tendencies in humans which the Platonists and romantics actually encourage. For to gain individual totality through the aesthetic sensibility, to win self-esteem, is both to lose one’s desire to dominate others and to increase one’s determination to resist those who would endanger the freedom of others.”[35]

But why this is the case—why aesthetic sensibility necessarily leads to a principle of dignity predicated on an empathy and respect of others, is lost on me. Barring the definitional restraints Schiller imposes, why can’t the sense of freedom art engenders just as easily lead to forms of positive mastery (the kind that Isaiah Berlin feared), or frameworks that see the state itself as a work of art, not in Schiller’s manner, but closer to Burkhardt’s analysis of renaissance politics? Here we can imagine the development and application of “universal” laws, but laws which contrast deeply with Schiller or Kant’s envisioned self-determination—that is, Platonic-like laws that act on behalf not of man, but “beauty” itself. What unborn genocides could man yet accomplish in his attempt to refashion the world not into a “good” thing, a “just” thing, or an “equal” thing, but something he considers “beautiful”? the very universality of the beautiful is what cramps Schiller’s political theory, namely in his creation of a “political” devoid of any actual politics, where more subjective claims to mastery-through-the-beautiful compete in perhaps incommensurate modes of apprehension and comprehension. Schiller’s pluralism is thus a thin one, wanting to maintain a diversity within a narrowed border of what is “objectively” deemed the “beautiful.”

To leave the case of a freedom that seeks to dominate off the table as a matter of definition seems to grossly sidestep the reality of political life itself, and seems to equate Schiller’s “ideal” community with something closer to a utopia than a practicable “liberal” institutional arrangement. To further say that, well, man just isn’t at the proper stage of development if he is still seeking a freedom to dominate—this, too, seems like a theoretical cop-out, and sidesteps the problematic relationship between the state, the law, and the poet seeking change. As Schiller notes early on, “All improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from the ennobling of character—but how under the influence of a barbarous constitution is character ever to become ennobled? To this end we should, presumably, have to seek out some instrument not provided by the State, and to open up living springs which, whatever the political corruption, would remain clear and pure.”[36] Further, Schiller argues that “The statesman-artist must approach his material with a quite different kind of respect from that which the maker of Beauty feigns towards his. The consideration he must accord to its uniqueness and individuality is not merely subjective, and aimed at creating an illusion for the senses, but objective and directed to its innermost being.”[37]

That the “statesman-artist” thus looks to aesthetic resources outside the state (and presumably the law) in order to “open up living springs” that operate on the subaltern sensibilities of citizens, all the while careful to acknowledge how modes of semblance effect their “innermost beings”—this is a wildly optimistic view of the lawgiver, something of modern Lycurgus or Solon, a quasi-godhead that manifests rarely in reality. But even the station of the statesmen-artist is questionable, as it is unclear whether it is through natural means alone that the aesthetic can do its work in leading man from the physical to the moral, and what role aesthetic semblance, as a process of creative production, plays in either creating the grounds of freedom or maintaining them.[38] It strikes me that Schiller’s envisioned role for the artist, how to adjudicate separate consequences of the beautiful, and how to ensure limitations on art-inaugurated freedom all collude in confusion, and produce a dramatically hopeful take on the universality of artistic reception and the subsequent production of the moral state, buttressed as it is by universal law. What happens when one finds in the beautiful a will to dominate while another finds in it the freedom Schiller wants—is this merely to say that this isn’t the beautiful at all, since its consequential reception is so different? Again, to simply relegate the production of a dominating mastery to “bad art” or to being something other than art entirely seems to miss not the artistic basis of the political, but, importantly, the political basis of the artistic.

Second, I want to make brief mention of the stabilizing role that the division between the reason and the senses plays in Schiller’s thought. If we move with the pragmatists, for instance, and collapse this division as a philosophical straw-man, then what happens to Schiller’s regime if we replace the operative division in man not between these two drives, but, say, between his status as individual and species-member, or between his status as means and his identity as an end-in-himself? Have the conditions of late capitalism produced a new framework for understanding the disunity of the self—and how might redefining it as such impact the role of aesthetics in shaping dispositions? In this sense, the role of the aesthetic moves from a metaphysical registrar that seeks to bridge the noumenal and phenomenal toward a far more materialist politics, seeking rather to ameliorate things like poverty and inequality. While “dignity” is still the theoretical payoff, its character assumes a far more “embodied” nature, a nature actually contextualized in the material conditions of statist industrialism—conditions that Schiller is virtually silent toward. My point is only to call into question the centralizing binary of disunity, and ask whether substituting separate contradictions to which the play-drive responds would seriously alter the political and aesthetic dimensions of an aesthetic state. My feeling here is that it would, but I will leave this to further consideration.

[1] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State, pp.76-77

[2] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter, pp. 33-34: “…once the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance….with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities.” See also Fifth Letter, pp. 25-29

[3] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter, p. 35

[4] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twelfth Letter, p. 79

[5] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twelfth Letter, p. 81

[6] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Thirteen Letter, p. 93

[7] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Seventh Letter, p. 53

[8] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter, p. 37

[9] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter, p. 23: “But man can be at odds with himself in two ways: either as savage, when feeling predominates over principle; or as barbarian, when principle destroys feeling. The savage despises Civilization, and acknowledges Nature as his sovereign mistress. The barbarian derides and dishonours Nature, but, more contemptible than the savage, as often as not continues to be the slave of his slave. The man of Culture makes a friend of Nature, and honours her freedom whilst curbing only her caprice.”

[10] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter, p. 21

[11] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourteenth Letter, p. 97

[12] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State, p. 82

[13] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter, p. 43; see also Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Ninth Letter, p. 57: “Humanity has lost its dignity; but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone. Truth lives on in the illusion of Art, and it is from this copy, or after-image, that the original image will once again be restored. Just as the nobility of Art survived the nobility of Nature, so now Art goes before her, a voice rousing from slumber and preparing the shape of things to come.”

[14] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fifteenth Letter, p. 107: “With beauty man shall only play, and it is with beauty only that he shall play,” and “he is only fully a human being when he plays”

[15] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fifteenth Letter, p. 109

[16] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fifteenth Letter, p. 101

[17] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Second Letter, p. 9: “…if man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”

[18] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-First Letter, p. 147: “…for beauty produces no particular result whatsoever, neither for the understanding nor for the will. It accomplishes no particular purpose, neither intellectual nor moral; it discovers no individual truth, helps us to perform no individual duty, and is, in short, as unfitted to provide a firm basis for character as to enlighten the understanding. By means of aesthetic culture, therefore, the personal worth of a man, or his dignity, inasmuch as this can depend solely upon himself, remains completely indeterminate; and nothing more is achieved by it than that he is henceforth enabled by the grace of nature to make of himself what he will—that the freedom to be what he ought to be is completely restored to him.”

[19] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State, p. 80: “Freedom Schiller equates with self-determination; self-determination of reason constitutes morality, self-determination of the senses constitutes beauty. Reason, in other words, rules in the former, Nature in the latter.”

[20] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Fifth Letter, p. 183: “Contemplation (or reflection) is the first liberal relation which man establishes with the universe around him.”

[21] For a statement on the role of “culture,” see Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Thirteenth Letter, p. 87: “To watch over these, and secure for each of these two drives its proper frontiers, is the task of culture, which is, therefore, in duty bound to do justice to both drives equally: not simply to maintain the rational against the sensuous, but the sensuous against the rational.” For a statement on the role of “education,” see Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Thirteen Letter, p. 87: “His education will therefore consist, firstly, in procuring for the receptive faculty the most manifold contacts with the world, and, within the purview of feeling, intensifying passivity to the utmost; secondly, in securing for the determining faculty the highest degree of independence from the receptive, and, within the purview of reason, intensifying activity to the utmost.” Or Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixteenth Letter, p. 113: “To make Beauty out of a multiplicity of beautiful objects is the task of aesthetic education.”

[22] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Tenth Letter, p. 65

[23] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Fourth Letter, p. 171: “We can…distinguish three different moments or stages of development through which both the individual and the species as a whole must pass, inevitably and in a definite order, if they are to complete the full cycle of their destiny.”

[24] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Fourth Letter, p. 171

[25] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Third Letter, p. 165

[26] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter, p. 19; see also Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter, p. 19: “Because the State serves to represent that ideal and objective humanity which exists in the heart of each of its citizens, it will have to observe toward those citizens the same relationship as each has to himself, and will be able to honour their subjective humanity only to the extent that this has been ennobled in the direction of objective humanity.” See also Schiller’s depiction of a civilization in which the aesthetic semblance is dominant; Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Sixth Letter, p. 199: “There we shall see actual life governed by the ideal, honour triumphant over possessions, thought over enjoyment, dreams of immortality over existence. There public opinion will be the only thing to be feared, and an olive wreath bestow greater honour than a purple robe.”

[27] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State, p. 85

[28] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State, p. xxxix

[29] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Second Letter, p. 157

[30] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Third Letter, p. 161: “…beauty can produce no result, neither for the understanding nor for the will; that it does not meddle in the business of either thinking or deciding; that I merely imparts the power to do both, but has no say whatever in the actual use of that power.”

[31] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Fifth Letter, p. 187: “…beauty is indeed form, because we contemplate it; but it is at the same time life, because we feel it. In a word it is at once a state of our being and an activity we perform.”

[32] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State, pp. 94-95

[33] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Sixth Letter, p. 197

[34] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Seventh Letter, p. 205: the truth of aesthetic semblance “will not become universal as long as man is still uncultivated enough to be in a position to misuse it; and should it become universal, this could only be brought about by the kind of culture which would automatically make any misuse of it impossible.”

[35] Josef Chytry, The Aesthetic State, p. 86

[36] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Ninth Letter, p. 55

[37] Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Fourth Letter, p. 21

[38] See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty-Sixth Letter, p. 191: “It [the aesthetic] must be a gift of nature; the favour of fortune alone can unloose the fetters of that first physical stage and lead the savage towards beauty.”