Quick Thoughts: Friedrich Schiller - On the Aesthetic Education of Man
View of Pillnitz Through a Window, Johann Christian Clausen Dohl
Some quick thoughts (and a lot of quotes); 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 . . .”
Portrait of Schiller by Ludovike Simanowiz
It took me two, or three (maybe more) times as long to finish this than I had expected, due to the astounding number of arresting points I came across, and simply 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 both introduced new notions and ideas with which I agree wholeheartedly, but they also clarified and expanded upon certain ideas, feelings, and views, that I already held.
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 . . .
The Penguin edition (which I only discovered after reading, was first published in 2016) contains Schiller's Letters which constitute On the Aesthetic Education of Man, but (equally important), also contain, for the first time in an English translation, his Letters to Prince Frederick Christian von Augustenburg.
The translation by Keith Tribe is excellent. I quickly read some reviews and noticed some people found it hard to understand what Schiller was saying. I suspect this may have been to the translation they were reading, as this more modern one is excellent. Any trouble with understanding will not be due to the translation.
Schiller is not too difficult to apprehend, and no prior reading of Kant, or Burke, for example, is required to understand his ideas and concepts.
Prince Frederick Christian von Augustenburg
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 will not comment in-depth on what Schiller touches upon, but will say that he does not view aesthetics and the cultivation of taste as any kind of panacea of the highest order, but as: a complement to morality, a substitute for true virtue, and other things, which I will not go into here.
This is not a full review, 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 into application. Do not read them all (unless you so desire), 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 which I personally found particularly insightful, perceptive &c. I apologise for any spelling errors, I typed the longer passages in some haste . . .)
Also, something you should bear in mind:
To be sure, On the Aesthetic Education of Man is anything 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
Selected Excerpts
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.
